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SMEs typically can\u2019t afford nor attract top notch experts with crucial value creating skills to become employees. And no matter how talented your employees are, chances are that many of them are becoming noncompetitive or they lack the skills to take your company to the next level. The half-life of a learned skill used to be about thirty years. Today it is down to about five years.<\/em><\/p>\n However, thanks to the internet, the cost of finding and tracking outside staff has dropped to almost zero and at the same time, the volume and quality of freelancers have gone up dramatically.<\/em><\/p>\n Why SMEs demand skills and competences from outside their core organization<\/strong><\/p>\n The\u00a0increased prevalence of digital technology and artificial intelligence<\/u>\u00a0will lead to new job functions and categories\u2014but also to shortages of people with the skills needed to fill those roles<\/p>\n Automation is replacing jobs; big data and advanced analytics are unlocking vast customer, operational, and employee insights; and increased access to information and ideas is\u00a0blurring the boundaries<\/u>\u00a0of what used to be inside or outside the firm.<\/p>\n The\u00a0digitalization of products and services<\/u>\u00a0is creating an enormous demand for skilled digital talent. Nearly half of US and German companies in a BCG survey cited the lack of qualified employees as the biggest constraint to a full digital transformation.<\/p>\n Companies will need to develop or gain\u00a0access to talent<\/u>\u00a0in rapidly emerging areas such as data analytics, app development, and user experience design. In fact, nearly every organizational role will eventually require the use of sophisticated technology.<\/p>\n Knowledge-intensive companies are already\u00a0contracting out more work to the market<\/u>, partly to save costs and partly to free up their cleverest workers to focus on the things that add the most value. Thus, more and more of the routine parts of knowledge work can be parceled out to individuals, just as they were previously parceled out to companies.<\/p>\n Staff-On-Demand<\/u>\u00a0uses to the full most of the capabilities and advantages that make an attractive business model for SMEs: no need for offices; no full-time contract employees; the clever use of computers to repackage one set of people\u2019s needs into another set of people\u2019s tasks; and an ability to access spare time and spare cognitive capacity across the world.<\/p>\n Pros<\/strong><\/p>\n Cons<\/strong><\/p>\n Challenges<\/strong><\/p>\n Why there is an increasing supply of skills and competencies available to SMEs<\/strong><\/p>\n New attitudes<\/u>\u00a0among talented people are also changing the workplace\u2014in particular, the growing preference for independent work instead of dedicated corporate careers.<\/p>\n Independence is becoming the dominant motivator for a large section of the population, particularly for millennials (born from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s) and Gen-Zers (born in the mid- to late 1990s and after). These younger people tend to get bored doing the same kind of work for long stretches, and they are especially interested in independent careers. Empowered by digital platforms and ecosystems, many are choosing entrepreneurship and self-employment over traditional corporate employment.<\/p>\n Thus for talented workers, working on and getting paid for multiple projects may be particularly interesting.<\/p>\n How SMEs can get access to these skills and competences<\/strong><\/p>\n The ability to tap information and ideas from anyone, anywhere, is multiplying exponentially.<\/p>\n People can be continuously connected, access data from any location, work remotely with ease, and collaborate with their global colleagues in real time. They need not even be employees: at several leading IT companies, outside contractors make up almost half of the full-time staff.<\/p>\n Rapidly expanding access is giving rise to crowdsourcing and the sharing economy. The most innovative solutions today are being developed by people around the world who come together in online communities, internet platforms, and digital ecosystems that disrupt the traditional models of venture funding, product development, and product life cycle management.<\/p>\n Crowdsourcing communities<\/u>\u00a0such as\u00a0Kaggle<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Innocentive<\/a>\u00a0allow companies to \u201crent\u201d talent without much upfront investment. Instead of hiring full-time employees, companies can staff projects with the specific expertise needed. And freelancers come with the added benefit of being well-connected to developments in the wider industry, unlike employees, who tend to get caught up in internal dynamics.<\/p>\n Kaggle\u00a0is a company which seeks to make data science an affordable fun sport. It offers crowdsourcing , social network, wiki, and job board opportuities on one portal, easy to be eased by SMEs lacking tech and data savvy talent.<\/p>\n Innocentive is a tool for producers to outsource research and development on an \u2018as needed\u2019 basis, which makes it perfect for SMEs, who\u2019s R&D needs usually do not justify maintaining in-house staff.<\/p>\n Acxiom<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0DataLogix<\/a>\u00a0are data brokers which provide SMEs with highly valuable data at reasonable prices. For example these data brokers obtain names of expectant parents and families with newborns from\u00a0Experian<\/a>\u00a0( a\u00a0marketing-services unit of credit reporting giant\u00a0) and sell it to relevant SMEs.<\/p>\n Support Legal<\/a> is the Middle East and Africa\u2019s first legal services platform for entrepreneurs and emerging companies and is leading the innovation of the legal sector in the Middle East & Africa region. Support Legal\u2019s lawyers have at least 10,000 hours of relevant experience and are alumni of internationally renowned law firms and multi-national companies. Support Legal\u00a0does not charge by the hour. Support Legal offers fixed fees for defined scopes of work.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most striking of all the on-demand services is\u00a0Amazon\u2019s Mechanical Turk\u00a0<\/a>which allows customers to post any \u201chuman intelligence task\u201d, from flagging objectionable content on websites to composing text messages; workers on the site choose what to do according to task and price.<\/p>\n Some examples of other\u00a0Staff-On-Demand platforms<\/u>\u00a0could be:<\/p>\n Coople<\/a>, which focuses mainly on the following industries: hospitality, events & promotion, retail, logistics, healthcare, as well as business and administrative services (office jobs).\u00a0The idea is simple. A staffing app which allows employers to advertise work at an hourly rate \u2014 whether that be for a few hours cleaning, for security stewarding work, or for a catering job. Workers sign up, complete the work, and get paid through the app. Once that part is complete, both the employer and the employee provide an Uber-style rating for each other.<\/p>\n Cand<\/a>, a Danish platform maching students and SME-projects.<\/p>\n Remote<\/a>, for\u00a0<\/strong>software development, design, marketing, customer support and other non-tech jobs.<\/p>\n Peopleperhour<\/a>: is as an online platform giving businesses access to thousands of skilled\u00a0freelance\u00a0experts in hundreds of different fields.\u00a0Tasks and services include website development, SEO, web design and social media marketing to name a few.<\/p>\n Upwork:<\/a>\u00a0Programmers, designers, writers, customer support reps, and more.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n How SMEs may get organized<\/strong><\/p>\n However, Staff-On-Demand will also\u00a0revolutionize the way that work gets done<\/u>\u00a0in companies<\/p>\n It will result in new ways of organizing, performing, and leading, along with new approaches to recruiting, developing, and engaging employees.<\/p>\n As organizations begin to rent rather than hire talent, they will have to make do with a lower level of commitment. They will need to\u00a0create career paths and roles\u00a0<\/u>to serve the entrepreneurial aspirations of the highly skilled talent they seek. And leaders will have to tailor their\u00a0leadership style<\/u>\u00a0to the hyper individualized environment, finding new ways to empower and inspire individuals and teams in their dispersed organization.<\/p>\n Companies will develop\u00a0a more fluid sense of what is inside and what is outside<\/u>\u00a0their boundaries. They will move beyond rigid distinctions between employees, outside suppliers, and customers, developing platforms to promote collaboration among all stakeholders. Eventually, as\u00a0value chains break up into networks and platforms<\/u>, the role of the organization will shift from that of a controller of resources to that of a facilitator of ecosystems and a conduit for realizing individual aspirations.<\/p>\n But in contrast to start-up companies that often use Staff-On-Demand as an integral part of their business-DNA and in contrast to large corporations that have an HR-staff who can examine and evaluate the many new Staff-On-Demand opportunities, SMEs often have limited resources to do these tasks. So\u00a0how might SMEs get organized<\/u>?<\/p>\n Thanks to:<\/p>\n The Economist: \u201cThe \u2018On-Demand Economy\u2019 Is Reshaping Companies And Careers\u201d, 2015-01-04.<\/p>\n Boston Consulting Group: \u201cTwelve Forces That Will Radically Change How Organizations Work\u201d, 2017-03-27.<\/p>\n Bjarke Stengaard, Director, Curia Management, 2017-05-15.<\/p>\n Theresa Blegvad, CEO, Insights Nordic, 2017-05-15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SMEs typically can\u2019t afford nor attract top notch experts with crucial value creating skills to become employees. And no matter how talented your employees are, chances are that many of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_oct_exclude_from_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smexo.dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/456"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smexo.dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smexo.dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smexo.dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smexo.dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.smexo.dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":857,"href":"https:\/\/www.smexo.dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/456\/revisions\/857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smexo.dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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Read more:\u00a0What digital skills and competencies do you need \u2013 and how to get it?<\/a><\/h4>\n