It's difficult with the noise of bad economic news to hear about the fastest growing industry in the United States. Since October of 2009, this growing business sector has added 495,000 new jobs. While December of 2010 was a slow down in recovery for most, this sector was up slightly month-to-month and still 19% higher than the same month last year in total employment.
This business is Staffing. The professional services sector most people know as "temp agencies". Full disclosure, I do work for a staffing company and have learned first-hand that American business is utilizing this resource in a different way than they used to.
Staffing has traditionally been a bell-weather for recovery in the minds (and charts) of economists and government analysts. Most experts will tell you that a six-month lag between the return of Staffing industry growth and the return of "regular" employment in business has been a common trend in the modern era.
Yet the turn-around in Staffing was Q4 '09. Now that we're sitting in Q1 '11 you would be excused if you expressed some urgent concern about the fact that jobs have not yet appeared to be moving up the trend charts in any respect. Experts forecast a "jobless recovery" and a possible 18-month, 2-year or even longer period before employment starts moving into "normal" territory.
The reasons are consistently being tied to housing starts, construction, and Corporate spending which are all traditional leading indicators of recovery. Today, that's simply not the case. Housing surplus numbers, mortgage loans and the population of individuals who can quality are scary numbers. Corporations are sitting on huge piles of cash yet they continue to "rent" people from Staffing companies instead of hiring new employees.
Is this trend temporary? Or has something fundamentally changed in the idea that regular employees are required to design, develop, produce and distribute your product or service?
I tell my current applicants and client contacts the same thing: There is no such thing as "permanent" work. You can apply that same matra to most things that surround you as you read this.....your computer is not permanent, your chair is not permanent, your job, your house, your lifestyle and many of your personal relationship will indeed change in the next few years.
Likewise for the service product I deliver in my job. I don't like the work "temps" because it devalues the important work they are given to complete: learn this role/function quickly, ask some smart questions, stop talking, get the work done, do it very well and please leave my building when it's finished.
All work is project work. All companies are trying to create, fix or avoid something very specific. And when that's done, there's a new project at hand.
Maybe the nature of work itself is changing. Your ideas on that are welcome.
