I had a fight with Kalsoom Lakhani over copying the content of this article on LinkedIn.
Now that I have your attention, four years down the lane this content is still relevant. Outsourcing jobs over the internet to use individuals as cheap labor is called the “Gig Economy”. Any time you still have “employees” reporting to managers, it is not a “complete rethinking” of work. It’s a plain old hierarchy, pure and simple. The Gig Economy, perhaps, long overdue given the use of similar platforms in other industries (e.g., advertising) seems like a natural progression of technology and market forces and we should be excited to participate in its unfolding. The gig economy has the potential to change everything.
The Gig Economy is the peer-to-peer economy used in transactions such as ride-sharing and home-sharing. For an English-speaking native, without a doubt, the easiest job to find abroad is a teaching gig. If you travel to countries where your physical appearances stray from the ‘norm’ of the locals, you also may walk down the street and find yourself approached by multiple people offering you modeling jobs.
There are 3.2 billion people, who are trying to improve their lives through education and will be in no better position trying to compete globally as every one of them must match the lowest salary even if currencies are radically valued or devalued. So the employees where their comparable cost of living costs much less making those in countries where it costs more to live effectively poor.
You might have personal reasons for changing focus. Perhaps doing so will be better for your health or let you work more closely with people you admire or maybe just because it would be more fun. Whatever the reasons for a change, the main key to making the transition is to figure out what you can use from your current practice. Even if the new focus is completely unrelated to your current one, chances are they’ll have systems, procedures, and even colleagues and clients in common. Let’s examine that by pretending that we’re switching between two completely different freelance careers say from magazine writing to horse riding instructor.
The key to wealth is leverage, leverage, you must get paid while your sleeping through systems. We are looking at a race to corner the “Cognitive Market” who will build or invest in the best cognitive learning machine (Augmented Intelligence) to process all this data. In a big corporation, almost everything moves slowly. Isn’t that a big opportunity for nimble SMEs?
