I participated in a panel discussion in Atlanta today, talking about the employment situation now and in the future. How has the current crisis changed the employment climate? Will unemployment persist? Will the lost jobs come back?
While unemployment is always painful, one thing I have noticed personally about this recession is that many of the people I know who have had their positions cut are not exactly idle. That is, they are looking for full-time positions, but at the same time they are making ends meet by doing a variety of part-time or free-lance projects. It's much more common in this crisis than in previous ones to find laid-off professional people working "virtually" from home, at least temporarily, while trying to land a more permanent position.
The other panelist in this discussion, for an audience of Florida State graduates and supporters, was Doug Tatum, an FSU grad and founder of Tatum LLC, the "largest executive services consulting firm in the US with over 1400 professionals and employees." Doug recently wrote the book No Man's Land: What to do when your company is too big to be small and too small to be big, and he had just addressed the Inc. 500 convention a few days previously.
Our consensus-of-two opinion was that the jobs lost in this recession will NOT all come back, and that this crisis (like many others before it) has transformed the landscape of the economy in ways that may not become clear for years. But Doug agrees with me that many of the people who are having their jobs cut out from under them are not, for the most part, simply going home and watching television. They are starting new businesses. Downturns provide great incentives for start-ups, which by definition have very little to lose.
We also agreed that small businesses are the primary job creators, not large businesses. In fact, technology today is empowering small and entrepreneurial companies far more than was ever the case before. Witness the assortment of professional employees hanging out their own shingles. In fact, everything in the economy today seems to be getting smaller, and faster, and cheaper. Except the government, which is getting bigger and more expensive. But that's another topic.