Written by Andrew Graunke, Director of Product Design
The jobs of tomorrow, whatever they may be, will require specialized training, oversight, and software. In certain fields, particularly creative ones, like graphic design and UI/UX, all three of these categories are ripe for massive disruption.
Good news: the Subscription Workforce is here and inevitable. There’s finally a better way to work.
Because the Subscription Workforce will deliver new capabilities to the doorstep of every employer, it’s hard to overstate the magnitude of the impact it will have on those who adopt it.
If you ask around, arming your business with the right skills for today’s demands is the most important task of any CEO. Ask around further, and meeting the demands of your customers has never been more nuanced. You need a deep, technical bench of partners to deliver on just about any brand promise. This is just as true for the mom-and-pop dog groomer as it is for Google.
Just as we’ve always turned to phone companies, internet providers, janitorial services, and postal carriers to get the job done, organizations will continue to leverage shared infrastructure and expertise outside their walls when the startup and maintenance costs of running it in-house don’t add up.
Historically, we’ve noticed four foundational ways businesses engage in work: with employees, with agencies, with freelancers, and with marketplaces.
In 2015, a fifth model of workforce procurement emerged, specifically for the creative industry. Design Pickle Founder and CEO, Russ Perry, envisioned a Subscription Workforce that would allow business owners to break free of traditional contracts and outsource help with minimal risk. He created Design Pickle to revolutionize the accessibility of graphic design for businesses and create stable, thriving work for graphic designers. Looking ahead, a Subscription Workforce that provides user experience and user interface design in addition to digital assets might be the wave of the future for this model.
Since the dawn of the app store, and even more so prior, the level of maturity and sophistication required of a company to deliver custom software, applications, or platforms was a bar set high. Yet, the need for companies to uniquely transact with customers directly online is becoming the norm for any business. This requires proprietary tech and teams that can design and support it.
According to Thomson Reuters, “All companies are technology companies now.” According to Marc Andreesen, “Software is eating the world.” In the next couple of years, it may be as simple as subscribing to Netflix for any company, regardless of their depth, to spin up a year-round, world-class, multi-disciplinary UI/UX team for only tens of thousands of dollars. Compare this to months of recruiting and many hundreds of thousands of dollars with traditional models.
If and when UI/UX takes on the Subscription Workforce model, we can expect three primary trends: fewer barriers to entering the industry, wider adoption of the skill set by companies, and a much more powerful tool kit for the workforce.
The same may be true for just about any skill set in the next decade.
Because the Subscription Workforce will radically accelerate new talent entering core disciplines, because company adoption of those disciplines precludes any positive outcomes, and due to the boundless potential of technology to better support these roles, it’s hard to overstate the magnitude of the impact the Subscription Workforce will have on the disciplines it absorbs.
Just as the arts and music are shaped largely by the personalities within the field, so too will the growing class of subscription workers shape the industries they form. Just as workers have always gravitated towards stable, thriving work, workers will continue to aspire to find work that benefits their lives the most.
The Subscription Workforce is a newly important category of labor that’s quickly expanding. For companies who have already engaged, it’s radically changed their ability to deliver and focus. Design Pickle welcomes this revolutionary change to the way companies operate and the transformational role it will play in the future of all work.
