The Job Market's Temp Recovery

by Charles Purdy, Yahoo! HotJobs

Americans' expectations about employment may be shifting away from traditional notions of what a job looks like: a recent Yahoo! HotJobs poll asked respondents whether they were likelier to accept temporary work this year than last--and 75 percent said yes.

And well they might. The U.S. Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate held steady at 9.7 percent in February, as employers eliminated 36,000 full-time jobs. But it also reported 48,000 new temporary jobs--and since September 2009, 284,000 new temporary jobs have been created.

Traditionally, economists have viewed rises in temp-worker hiring as an early indicator of job-market growth--companies often hire temp workers as a way of starting new projects or increasing production without making a long-term financial commitment to new hires. However, some experts feel that the slow rate of recovery from the current recession means companies will be more cautious than usual about moving from temporary workers to full-time employees.

"After the last two recessions, a lot of businesses don't want to get caught again," Richard Wahlquist, president of the American Staffing Association, recently told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Further, the rising costs associated with taking on full-time employees may force many companies to continue to evaluate cost-cutting measures such as replacing permanent employees with teams of contract workers, even in fields they weren't in before.

"Five years ago, you rarely saw a temporary engineer or a temporary controller--or a bit farther back, a temporary attorney. Now, you do," says Loretta Penn, of Spherion Staffing Services in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

Good for Business--and Workers?
IT is one industry that has seen more temporary hiring over the past several years. Dave Willmer, executive director of Robert Half Technology, a staffing company that specializes in technology industries, sees this shift as a potential boon for both companies and workers.

"It's a quickly evolving industry--new technologies require new skill sets, so companies are interested in looking at new resources," he says. He notes also that technology companies often work on a project-by-project basis, so assembling project-specific teams makes good sense.

Willmer sees this flexibility as beneficial for IT workers, too--they get opportunities to gain new skills and to network while evaluating new employers. And temporary work is still often a good stepping stone to a permanent position. Willmer adds that in the past few months, he's seen a rise in all three areas of staffing his company works on: temporary, temp-to-perm, and permanent.

Making the Most of a Temporary Assignment
Working with a staffing agency that specializes in your industry is often one way to ensure that you're making the most of contracting opportunities--for example, Willmer notes that his firm provides help with career guidance and training to its contract workers.

Many people see contract or temp work as a last resort during a long stretch of unemployment, but career expert Liz Ryan urges workers to try and see the positives: "Apart from the scheduling flexibility that temporary work provides, many workers are realizing that traditional corporate job security is evaporating so fast that up-to-date skills in a range of environments offer a powerful new kind of career security. ... Temping is the new midpoint on the spectrum between what we used to call permanent' work and freelancing."

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