EverFile

Portfolio Career

Randall Hansen, Ph.D., founder of Quintessential Careers, talks about the portfolio career, which involves working in a number of part-time jobs (including temporary, freelance, contract, or self-employed) with different employers or clients that combine to be the equivalent of a full-time position. Portfolio careers offer greater flexibility, variety, and freedom, but they generally require a tolerance for risk and a high degree of personal and professional organization.

Hansen writes, "Portfolio careers are usually built around a collection of skills and interests, though the only consistent theme is one of career self-management."

Microbusinesses

Another sign that the population of independent knowledge workers is growing comes from recent statistics published about microbusinesses, firms that are individually owned and do not have employees.

Steve Strauss is an expert on entrepreneurship and small business. He writes in a December AllBusiness online newsletter, "This new generation of technologically savvy, Internet-connected entrepreneurs has the advantage of creating businesses with a worldwide reach, and they can offer countless goods and services without having to hire staff and incur the expense of employees."

Jim Hopkins writes in USA TODAY that in 2006 the number of microbusinesses reached almost 20 million, up 27 percent from 1997. The number of companies with employees rose only 7.3 percent during the same period, to 5.9 million. Microbusiness receipts rose to $887 billion in 2004, and 7 percent annual growth puts the total at $1 trillion in 2006.

Love the Work You Do

If you're like me, you love the work you do. While you may be grateful to your employer for providing you a particular opportunity, access to resources, or a certain level of authority or responsibility, you are aware that you can do what you do for multiple employers. What keeps you where you are? What makes you think about getting up and moving on?

Or do you have a choice about going or staying? Does someone else decide this for you? Employers want to find, recruit and retain great talent -- but they also want to be agile in terms of acquiring and releasing resources as market demands require. They see advantages to a flexible contract workforce that enables tighter cost control.

Perhaps this scenario works out best in the long run, where workers know their skills are portable and are confident that they can work for many different organizations, and where employers know they can access an independent talent pool that offers skilled people on a continuous basis. This is a much different proposition than staying decades with the same organization and rising up through the ranks.

Is the Resume Enough?

Most people have a general understanding about methods for constructing and sharing resumes. The writer delivers a resume in some form; the recipient accepts and reviews it compares it with others, then passes it along or "files" it. Today a resume is a viewed as a standard tool.

It essentially presents a handful of information.

Although the exercise of building a resume results in a useful standard tool, it does not greatly assist someone to understand her or his total self worth  or personal contribution capital. To help with personal development the resume is, overall, a weak aid. It is a reductionist document: we are forced to distort presentation of self in order to be seen at all. Yet the resume continues to be a standard by which people offer presentation of self. A personal blog or a web page can provide more dimensionality but it does not work well in approaching an organization, because a recipient does not have time to review it or find key information out of a non-standard format.

We each tell stories about ourselves and our desires. The stronger the information platform we can stand upon, the richer and more specific any given story can be, and the more easily it can be crafted for a given situation. In order for the independent knowledge worker to build confidence and present the best virtual self for a given situation, she or he is best served by starting from the strongest possible platform -- a platform comprised of the greatest possible accumulated amount of information.

Control of Personal Information

The way people engage and share information with organizations is changing rapidly. Today's well-trained and independent knowledge workers can work virtually anywhere in the world, and they can and do move frequently between organizations. These individuals often cannot gather good information about their work and performance as they move because the organizational systems cannot support them.

This situation limits their effectiveness in demonstrating growth, skills, and contribution value. Another problem is managing information that is fragmented across multiple, non-compatible data management tools and environments. The independent knowledge worker who wants to take control of her or his information needs a smart, unified structure -- under her or his control -- that helps in the capture, storare, retrieval, and exchange of information. This degree of control brings a whole new dimension to how information moves with and stays with the individual over the course of her or his career and lifetime.

Information Handling Strategy

EverFile challenges traditional assumptions about who needs to be responsible for holding information. Our goal is to:

1. Move information management responsibility to individuals -- the independent knowledge workers who need the information to build and share their comprehensive records;

2. relieve organizations of the burden of maintaining information they actually need only for the time they are engaged with individuals; and

3. help individuals best showcase or demonstrate contribution value to organizations with which they interact.

EverFile looks at the total relationship cycle between individuals and organizations and addresses how to better support information management and exchange in all phases: approach, engagement, and separation.