The June 13th, 2015 Tech Crunch article, “In the Future, Employees Won’t Exist“, a guest post by Tad Milbourn (@tadmilbourn), was short on hard numbers in the article. Maybe this has been covered elsewhere ad nauseam, but I haven’t seen it, so here goes.
In the comments, Mr. Milbourn added some important figures to make the projections, “Independent workers are growing at 6.2% per year where the general workforce is growing at 3% per year. If that trend continues to hold, not only will 40% of the workforce be independent workers by 2020, but a majority of the workforce will be independent not long after.”
The 30% figure used as the starting point in 2010 for independent contractors is the upper bound of the number range (“roughly 25 – 30 percent) stated in a Intuit 2010 study (PDF) page 20.
I ran the numbers based upon the figures provided and by 2020, 40% of the workforce will be independent and “not long after” by 2027 more than 50% (50.47%) of the workforce will be independent.
Obviously, everyone is aware that things change and therein the problem with projections.
Running these numbers to a ridiculous extreme, the last employee will work sometime between 2049 and 2050.
Original article: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/13/in-the-future-employees-wont-exist/
Intuit Study: http://http-download.intuit.com/http.intuit/CMO/intuit/futureofsmallbusiness/intuit_2020_report.pdf
Related article: http://qz.com/65279/40-of-americas-workforce-will-be-freelancers-by-2020/
Featured image (CC BY 2.0) flickr user Mindaugas Danys – Coworking at Hub Vilnius
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