By Cynthia Typaldos

--- The coming demise of the Jobosaurus Era and how to profit from it ---

Rev 4.0

Monster.com, HotJobs, and CareerBuilder are only a year or two from the tar pits, doomed dumb jobosaurs in the upcoming wave of extinction of jobs sites and newspaper help-wanted ads. Social software will dominate the landscape as white-collar professionals take control of their working persona, and manage their careers as a business. ProfGuilds and its member-owned customers, who are industry professional guilds, plan to dominate that enormous market space and make the Jobosaurs and newspaper employment ads extinct.

The Software Product Marketing [SPM] eGroup was launched nearly two years ago on Nov 15, 2001. It has evolved from a simple job board to a vibrant community of with over 4,000 software marketing and business development professionals as members. SPM is staffed solely by volunteers and has a zero budget. SPM is now rapidly evolving sibling organizations to cover other functions within the software industry (e.g. engineering, sales, finance, project management) and once these are addressed, new industries will be taken on. SPM and its siblings (Software Sales Prof Guild, Automotive Engineering Prof Guild, Hotel Management Prof Guild, etc.) implement the essence of an open innovation organization that taps into the very best talent to fuel the development of the guilds.

This evolution, which I call ProfGuilds, implements social software, but in a unique social-centric (rather than node-centric) way. ProfGuilds is a package of hosted software services, organizational know-how, and a very specific legal structure that taps into the enormous resource of volunteers in professional organizations. The ProfGuilds business model is based on an open organizational structure.

The business goal of ProfGuilds is to define and manage and profit and enable (but NOT own) the web-based identity, reputation and portfolio of every white collar professional in every industry for every functional role.

These professionals are organized into member-owned-and-managed professional guilds. ProfGuilds hosts web-based social software and provides processes for a fee to these professional guilds.

In essence ProfGuilds create its own customers

While I developed the ProfGuilds business concept through active experimentation and implementation of the Software Product Marketing [SPM] eGroup; social scientists have also been researching the new development of internet-based social networks by working professionals. Stanford's Professor Mark Granovetter, the leading sociologist in "social networking" and the author of "The Strength of Weak Ties" is on our scientific advisory board:

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/soc/granovet.html. We also have several other top academics advising us.

Visit the SPM Website to get an overview of our first professional guild (in software marketing). We are actively building out two additional guilds (software sales and software project management) and plan to launch several more (software engineering and software finance) in the next few weeks. We are also adding some very interesting services -- a database of members, a mechanism for members to be highly visible in a Google search, a "360DegreeResume" -- all utilizing free tools (blogs, blog-tools, egroup, etc.). To see Rev 1 of our ResumeBlog(TM) go to Cynthia's ResumeBlog™. Note the member ResumeBlog database (search box in the list of colleagues) is done without ANY database software or software development. (To create your own ResumeBlog go to www.resumeblog.blogspot.com.)

The academic literature and current research activities are surprisingly relevant. Here are the professors that I know and who are working in the area of finding a job, contract employment, and professional guilds. I've met with all of them except Henry W. Chesbrough and Malone & Laudbacker at MIT

Mark Granovetter, sociology, Chairman of the Sociology Dept., Stanford University, most cited author social networking, creator of "The Strength of Weak Ties" concept
Chris Benner, sociology, formerly at Berkeley working with Manuel Castells now at Penn State, intensively studied the rise of professional guilds in Silicon Valley over the last few years
Steve Barley, management science and engineering, Center for Work, Technology and Organization, Stanford University, studying contingent work among engineers and software developers in Silicon Valley
Tom Malone, Professor of Information Systems at the MIT Sloan School of Management, founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and one of two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century"
Robert Laudbacker, Research Associate, Center for Coordination Science, MIT Sloan School of Management
Chris Dellarocas, Associate Professor of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management, interest in online reputation systems
Paul Resnick, Associate Professor, University of Michigan, School of Information interest in online reputation systems
Henry W. Chesbrough, The Era of Open Innovation

Short list of relevant books and articles:

“Computers in the Wild”: Guilds and Next Generation Unionism in the Information Revolution, Chris Benner (not yet published). Also a presentation of the paper that he gave to our team last month.
Work in the New Economy: Flexible Labor Markets in Silicon Valle y, by Chris Benner, Manuel Castells (Preface)
Free Agents in the Olde World: The future of work in Free Agent Nation may look strangely like the past, says MIT's Thomas Malone. Prithee: Art thou ready to join a guild?, Fast Company, May 2001

· Retreat of the Firm and the Rise of Guilds: The Employment Relationship in an Age of Virtual Business, by Robert Laubacher and Thomas W. Malone. This paper will appear in Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century, a volume of articles edited by Professor Malone and me and their colleague Michael Scott Morton--it's being released by MIT Press this fall

· "The Open-Innovation Model", Henry W. Chesbrough, MIT Sloan Mgmt Review, Spring 2003

A academic working paper on the use of the internet by job seekers is here:

FINDING A JOB IN THE INFORMATION AGE: JOB SEARCHING, LABOR MARKET OUTCOMES, AND THE INTERNET
See especially the section titled "The strength of online ties", starting on page 26.

When funded, ProfGuild would broaden SPM's functionality, and launch a linked cluster of Software Professional Guilds (marketing, sales, engineering, finance, customer support, legal, entrepreneur, internet, human resources, misc.) [We are already recruiting leaders, volunteers and members for these additional guilds and held our first organizational meeting in early August.] ProfGuilds would develop and host the software and train the professional guilds' volunteers. The professional guilds have 7 potential revenue streams - the first implemented will be a modest membership fee. ProfGuilds takes a percentage of revenue from each guild in exchange for the "franchising" of software and other services. After success and domination in the software industry, the next set of professional guilds would be created and launched, ( i.e. automotive, banking, semiconductor, consumer packaged goods, etc.) using the enthusiasm and entrepreneurship of the existing working professionals in that industry.

Notes:

We have a working prototype of much of the functionality of the ProfGuilds service

· The optimal size of each professional guild (within an industry) is 1,000 to 25,000 members. As guilds become too large, they can be divided (in the same way that eBay divides a product category when it becomes too large). While there is interaction between members of different guilds, because no guild becomes gigantic (e.g. 1M members) the hosting workload can be distributed. Additionally the software development is less difficult.

SPM is our first instantiation of a professional guild. SPM has achieved great success in its major function (job postings for software marketing professionals) and is staffed solely by volunteer labor using free collaboration tools on a $0 budget. SPM has 4,000 members and 100 volunteers. SPM has garnered significant press, including an article in the NYTimes Jobs section.

We have developed and implemented all of the management processes and many partnerships (e.g. with Intuit for Quickbase) that enable the professional guilds' volunteers to create and manage their virtual organization.

ProfGuilds allows the white collar professional to be his or her own business by providing the infrastructure, networking and tools to empower professionals to manage their careers from that first job thru retirement.