When I was a junior at the University of Illinois, I read Charles Handy’s book “The Age of Unreason”. More than any other book I read while in college, I keep returning to this book for what it told me about the future of work. Handy predicted a future where businesses would have a very small core group and a large network of support people working on projects and other part-time work. The mammoth companies with armies of full-time employees would cease to exist.
We are not completely there yet, but we are getting closer. In a recent Entrepreneur magazine article survey, 27 percent of work was outsourced compared to only 6% in 1990. Independent professionals are finding more opportunities to build a career as a project-based professional not tied to a single organization.
The excellent Six Disciplines blog provides another piece of evidence supporting the project professional evolution. A recent study by information technology consulting firm Gartner shows how work is shifting from routine, process-based work to non-routine, “chaotic” work. The study supports Handy’s theories in “The Age of Unreason” by demonstrating how the core people in a business will add the most value by sorting through the chaos of work and working on the tasks that cannot be automated or turned into a consistent process. A key skill from the Gartner study is to learn how to sense emerging patterns and develop planning scenarios to anticipate those patterns. The old ways of predicting the future from the past no longer work. You need people, whether they are in your core group or working as a contract or project professional, to make sense of the data and sense the patterns of future success.
If your job involves routine or process, it may be time to either learn a new skill or learn how to transition your career into a project-based profession.
