The Internet connection effect: Why is freelancing an undercurrent? (Translation)
Text / Wang Xinxi
Some data show that in the United States, people who do not go to work in specific places have accounted for one-third of the entire American working population, and are increasing at a rate of 10% every year. This trend is likely to spill over to China in the coming years.
Freelance English is self-employed (self-employed). In general, self-employed people, as the name suggests, are people who do not belong to any organization, that is, people who work for themselves.
Many areas of the world will move from monopoly to openness
Ronald Coase once explained the value of the enterprise: In a completely open labor market, people can sign contracts with each other, sell their own labor, and buy the labor of others.
Judging from this sentence, the realization of this model is in a completely open labor market. In fact, with the development of the current mobile Internet sharing economy platform and various social media platforms, live broadcast platforms, content entrepreneurship platforms, and knowledge sharing payment platforms, the tendency of a fully open market is becoming more and more obvious. It can be seen that the current platform connection effect of the Internet is highlighting the role of more and more individuals in different fields. Platforms gather professional individuals, professional individuals gather fans, and individuals bring their own traffic fans to form brands and produce professional content. Consumers, this model may form an undercurrent.
Jeff Howe, senior editor of Wired magazine, pointed out in his famous "Crowdsourcing" that in the past, in various fields, elites or professionals of different levels occupied the right to speak and make decisions in the industry. However, in the Internet age, everyone can use the openness and sharing features between platforms to control the right to speak, so these people begin to compete for or even deprive the monopoly of traditional professional fields, making this field a crowdsourcing model.
That is to say, businesses in various fields that are monopolized by one group will be relied on by many individuals to export their own professional content and skills in the Internet age, and have huge fans, forming a unique right to speak, and then subverting these traditional organizations. Many fields in this world It will no longer be monopolized or controlled by the original traditional group people.
Some enterprises' demand for talents tends to be short-term, staged and younger
The reason for this is that the current organizational structure from traditional enterprises to emerging Internet technology enterprises, the demand for talents tends to be short-term, staged and younger.
Short-term and phased means that, for example, a mobile Internet start-up company needs a large number of talents in all aspects to quickly advance its market share and obtain high financing when it is in the start-up stage. After it is fully mature and stabilized, the existing large number of human positions will gradually become redundant, so it needs to be eliminated. In addition, in the Internet industry, each field can only accommodate one or two players, and one or two players in the market often merge. At this time, layoffs are also essential.
So we see a wave of layoffs in the Internet industry almost every year. As early as the end of last year, the Beijing Internet industry was shrouded in the shadow of layoffs. Various rumors of layoffs have spread from Didi to companies such as LeTV, Mogujie, and Baofeng Magic Mirror, and this year to companies such as Huawei and Beibei.com.
This staged wave of layoffs corresponds to the current demand for talents by Internet companies: many positions and talent needs are actually phased and short-term, and many wolf-like companies also express that they do not support idlers. The demand for talents is still long-term and continuous.
This kind of short-term, phased and project-based talent needs can also be solved by companies building platforms. The "Open Talent Market" established by IBM is a typical case. The “Open Talent Marketplace” publishes short-term job-style requirements for the company, some jobs are only for internal employees, others are only open to verified freelancers.
For example, a software development project needs talents. The project manager decomposes the project into multiple short-term tasks, puts it into the market to explain the job requirements, selects the candidates, and pushes the relevant work to the open talent market. This part of the selection has passed the verification of external forces. For an efficient solution, for the follow-up development plan, this part of the collaborators will be matched and sold in real time, forming a relatively free but stable cooperative relationship. This model is efficient and fast for enterprises, and also saves management, labor and time costs.
AppMakr, a small company that develops smartphone apps, doesn't have a single full-time employee. Jay Shapiro, the company's co-founder, said a lot of people come here because they have specific skills and work on specific projects, and when the project ends, people go their separate ways. This is a brand-new human resources model, which is not to locate talents by positions, but to gather talents by tasks.
And this model of breaking organizational boundaries and allowing positions to efficiently match external talents may become a development direction for domestic companies in many fields in the future.
China's current environment also has the soil for the survival and development of the sharing economy
According to statistics, the market size of the global sharing economy will reach US$335 billion in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 36%. Industry insiders pointed out that in the next 3-5 years, China's sharing economy will reach the world's first.
This is not without reason. At present, China's Internet is developing faster and faster, with the introduction of various new mobile Internet products, and the rise of various business models. The ability of platforms to connect online and offline across regions is no less than that of the United States. The user's Internet platform is based on the openness of data, reaching both ends of supply and demand, and connecting massive fans and user platforms.
However, offline, domestic regional resources are extremely unbalanced, including talent and employment resources in rural and urban areas, imbalances in demand and supply in first-tier cities and third- and fourth-tier cities, and imbalances in labor, technology, and resources. Yin Weimin, Minister of the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, once pointed out that the overall labor force is still running at a high level. On the one hand, it is difficult to recruit workers and on the other hand, it is difficult to find employment. This is the asymmetry of information and resources.
Coupled with the economic downturn, lack of security, and frequent layoffs, for enterprises, layoffs are more a result of external competitive pressure and the mechanism effect of wolf culture, but for individuals in enterprises, it deepens people's concerns about the future. Anxiety of uncertainty, people need more income models to ensure security.
Rejuvenation and layoffs: Middle-aged professionals leave organisations to become freelancers or trend
On the other hand, we can see that employees in many companies and industries, especially in the technology and Internet industry, generally tend to be younger. The average age of Baidu is roughly 26-27 years old, and the average age of Alibaba and Tencent is about 28 years old. Talents who are old but still not in the middle and senior management of the company or the backbone experts of the company are likely to fall into a dilemma of staying or not staying in the future.
We have seen a glimpse of the recent articles about the "Huawei cleaning up old employees over 34 years old" and the previous article about "Shenzhen two suites facing unemployment in mid-life financial crisis caused family tragedy". From the current technology Internet industry, There is actually a kind of anxiety among old employees. Experienced and capable old employees who are caught in a mid-life crisis may become the norm in the future. Then there may be several ways out. professional.
In the current Internet IT industry, anxiety is everywhere. On the one hand, this anxiety stems from high housing prices, and on the other hand, it exists after the rigidity of career promotion channels, the gap between income and expectations, and the imbalance of internal competition. A kind of unrequited pain, and an uncertain layoff and elimination crisis, people want to change the status quo.
Therefore, there are always many successful professionals who leave the workplace for various reasons. After leaving, they may not always choose to start a business. On the one hand, starting a business in the current economic and market environment means taking huge risks. For some people, giving up Depending on the resources and constraints of an organization, when the group relies on their own resources and talents and experience to integrate resources and release their potential, free people may become another option.
Internet connection effect: Embracing this freer career model in its own right has better antifragility
In the past traditional era, people must be attached to a specific institution or organization to survive, because organizations and institutions are the method of resource allocation, but due to information asymmetry, it is difficult to match talents with enterprise needs to achieve a more efficient state, resulting in The huge surplus of resources and the huge demand cannot be met, which leads to the waste of appropriate resources and talents.
The sharing and connection effects of the Internet platform can just break the geographical restrictions, relying on the way of platform transmission to connect the supply and demand sides. The convergence, opening and connection of the Internet, and the sharing of economic effects will liberate many "free people". For many old employees with rich experience, wonderful experience and excellent technology, free people may mean more possibilities.
A person with "professionalism" value in a certain field can become a sharer of cognitive surplus, sell his knowledge about a certain professional field, gather a certain number of fans, and gain a certain group voice, and it is possible to gain its due profits and returns. Enterprises can use the sharing economy service trading platform, knowledge payment platform, content production platform, etc. to find these professionals to connect with consumers, so that both supply and demand sides can choose more freely, meet the short-term and staged needs in the process of enterprise development, or cooperate with free Professionals establish a more efficient cooperative relationship, break the shackles of existing industries and enterprises, and stimulate organizational innovation vitality with a market model that is almost completely competitive.
We see that most of the current freelancers are clustered in highly professional service industries such as marketing, design, copywriting and training, and are currently spreading to online car-hailing drivers, Airbnb hosts, Instacarter buyers, Taskbabbit experts, live broadcasters Internet celebrities, freelance writers and self-media people or experts and scholars in a certain field of knowledge sharing platforms, investment and financial experts or career planners, illustrators or designers or freelance programmers. At the same time, new and interesting jobs such as personal travel planners are also attracting young people to join the ranks of freelancers. LinkedIn predicts that by 2020, freelancers will make up 43% of the total workforce.
Therefore, at present, people have begun to have the conditions to make a living by their own craftsmanship and talent, and are no longer attached to an institution or organization. Through the Internet content platform, knowledge payment platform or sharing platform, you can flexibly sell time, skills and money, gain income and opportunities to build your own circle of contacts, personal brand and influence.
From Antifragile's point of view: "Some things benefit from shocks, but instead thrive and thrive when exposed to volatility, randomness, chaos and stress, risk and uncertainty" . In the face of an uncertain future, embracing this more liberalized career model in its own right is obviously better antifragile.
It is a profession with a threshold, and the future continuity is still worrying
Unlike the full-employment and on-site office model, freelancers are more like what Luo Fat said: "bring your own information, not installing the system, plug and unplug at any time, and collaborate freely." In this way, in the future, it may drive the organizational structure of enterprises to become more flexible, break through the limitations of geographical, industry or professional factors, and obtain professional talents more flexibly, because more professional external brain wisdom can help enterprises to obtain more professional talents. A lot of high-quality resources even break through a certain inherent bottleneck and short board. This also promotes the reform of the enterprise system to a certain extent and drives the efficiency of economic operation.
In fact, in the final analysis, freelancers themselves are a kind of entrepreneurship, but they are more low-cost and light-modeled. After the development of freelancers, they may also embark on the road of partnership entrepreneurship. The reason why freelancers are said to be a lighter model of entrepreneurship is that freelancers themselves are a person who has gone through the entire industry chain from products to professional capabilities, brand packaging, pricing, brand communication, and product or content sales.
In the final analysis, freelancing is different from entrepreneurship. It is more driven by interest and expertise, professional ability and knowledge, rather than driven by business models. It is a lonely entrepreneurship. It needs to rely more on the core capabilities and resources of individuals in unique fields to build a business model, which determines that it is a market with thresholds. To use a simple saying, that is, if there is no diamond, don't work with porcelain.
But in the final analysis, it is also a profession that can free the producers from the shackles and oppression of the organization and make people feel happy. It requires a high degree of self-discipline to ensure its own long-term freedom and to be responsible for its own profits and losses, so its continuity and future are worrying. The uncertainty of the changing times makes the path chosen by freelancers a thorny road full of hope but with no end in sight. In general, in the future, freelancers will rely more on platforms to create professional captive fans to increase their personal prices, and then seek channels from advertisers and enterprises to monetize their business models. In the era of weakened organizations and prominent individuals, IP will be the workplace Or the direction that freelancers and even entrepreneurs need to consider and the way to go.