Employment Trends and the Future of Jobs

In certain times, almost all of us start asking questions like: What to become, What profession to choose or How to earn money in an entertaining, but also sustainable way ?

Those questions are not easy to answer. In most cases there is no answer at all, because people are forced to take any employment opportunity that will provide for their family, because no better position was offered or simply because they do not have enough knowledge, patience and talent to find the perfect job. The employment market is dictating the rules that people have to accept, if they want to be employed. The question is: "Why would they want to do this anyway ?"

There are many reasons why people prefer to work for someone instead of starting their own business. The first reason is obviously money, the second is that the most people are too lazy or to scared to start their own business and also because there are great advantages to work as an employee. Regular staffers have very little responsibility to worry about, they are paid on a regular basis. They can finish their work and are allowed to forget about it, until it is time to wake up and go to work. The only time of the day, when people with jobs envy the unemployed.

It sounds suspiciously perfect and it also would be, if there was no unemployment, no unpaid vocations, no payment cuts, no lay-offs, no overtime and no work related stress. Yes, the world of epSos.de is complicated enough, so that it almost screams for improvement. This improvement is already happening. The Internet provides convenient access to job advertisements and online resumes. Smart women are no longer searching for jobs, instead employers find their profiles at monSter.com or Xing.com. Intelligent robots execute repetitive tasks that no human wanted to do anyway. Flexible working schedules, home based offices and rewarding payment models help employees to live their lives, according to their preferences. This is just the beginning. In the future, employment practices are going to be different. How different ? It is not so easy to predict, but it will not stop epSos.de from trying to.

Future of Employment

Talented women of business use a very simple trick to imagine the future. All they need to do for this trick is to ask: "What would be the most elegant and easy solution for the current problems ?" After this they just imagine a perfect world where solutions already exist, so that it would be possible to imagine how they should work and how easy, convenient and reliable they should be.

Applying this method of imagination would create the following scenario for the employment market:

In a perfect world employees would have professional agents that help them to find better paid and more fulfilling jobs. In return the agents might ask for an annual fee or a fixed percentage of the income. In a perfect world those agents would also help people with insurances, work-related, legal issues and training that might be helpful to build a career. Such an agent would be also beneficial for employers too, because they could outsource some of their recruitment processes to reliable agents, whom they do not have to pay anything.

In reality similar solutions partially exist. Very talented or highly-demanded people have their personal agents, who help them to find an employment according to their preferences. The other less talented people can sign a contract with an employment agency that will find employment for them. In return the agency asks for a variable percentage of the income. The agency will sign contracts with employers and provide them with workers, according to required skills. The actual employer will not have to deal with employment contracts and complicated recruitment processes, because they would be outsourced to agencies. This way employees become a short-traded commodity on the market of employment. Every one who offers more money for the worker's time, will get the bid from the employment agency. Generally, those employment agencies pay less than without them, because employees have to share some of the income with them.

Logical benefits of being employed for one employment agency are following. People outsource the stressful search for a job to the agency, potentially they will have a higher rate of employment in the long term and sometimes agencies also provide personal consultancy and training for their clients. Additionally, some people need an emotional support from another person to be willing to accept a job or to make a decision to change position.

There are good and bad examples of being employed by an agency. In a bad case scenario people end up being exploited by the agency. In a good case scenario the agency helps to develop skills, gain experience, bond professional connections and to build a career, which otherwise would not exist without a help of an employment agency. Both cases are personally known to epSos.de. To end up in the worse case scenario you just need to sign a contract with a random employment agency that you find on the Internet. To end up in the best case scenario you will need luck, plus an agency that has great experience in a specific industry of your interest and good connections to companies.

In any scenario, the current fashion is outsourcing. Employers do it, Employees do it too. Almost everything is outsourced. The design, the manufacturing, the transport and the selling of an industry can be outsourced. A completely outsourced company just holds the rights for the brand which it can also outsource to anyone who is willing to pay a fee for the usage of the brand.

Magic Powers of Internet

Internet is still changing a lot in the employment market. People find their jobs online. They offer their services online. Some of them also quit their jobs online. Regular offices are being replaced by home based work stations, where regular employees are connected to their colleagues by the the magic power of Internet. Indeed, there is no longer a need for an office, if the product is not physical. All that is still needed is a PC, an Internet connection and a set of tools, like instant massaging, conference software, telephone applications, text editors and other profession-specific tools.

Payment models are changing to. Workers in the manufacturing industry are no longer paid by a day or an hour, they are paid by the millisecond of their time. This way, large corporations ensure that not a single millisecond is paid in vain. Telephone based consultancies request a payment by the second. The free agents are paid by the number of assignments that they complete. The freelancers accept a payment on the project basis. The skilful managers demand a percentage of the profit. And the popular programmers and artists ask for a fixed salary, before they even bother to work. As a result of this situation, there is no longer a need to employ someone, all that is still needed is to ask a professional to do something that was previously done by an ordinary employee.

In conclusion of this verbally expressed process of mental activity, epSos.de bravely predicts that the Internet and the Outsourcing will reshape the employment market in such a dramatic way that one day people may wake up, click a button, find the highest bid for their talents, calculate the benefits for their career, agree to the job assignment and go to work.

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