It is 2024 and we continue to see sizable changes to corporate staffing within the technology and media markets. Week after week, news stories appear tracking yet another round of layoffs.
Many analysts point out that the technology and media companies over-hired during COVID. Many layoffs are now due to firms shedding these roles, rebalancing teams, embracing AI, and looking to generate profits. For those who have held onto their job, congratulations. Unfortunately, you will be left carrying a bigger workload. Your products will still need to evolve, new features added, and platform issues will need to be addressed. Your ability to continue to evolve will ruthless prioritization and long days. Perhaps over time, you can plead with finance to let you hire again.
It may be several years for corporate hiring to revisit growth hiring again. Coming off over a quarter million tech layoffs in 2023, the market is still experiencing significant cuts. Even in the face of growth and profitability, organizations will overcompensate for their past hiring spree by limiting new positions for quite some time. The cost of hiring and firing, not to mention the emotional toll it takes on everyone, is going to linger in the corporate psyche like a bad hangover.
The realities of missing project deadlines will eventually come to a head. Expectations are that organizations will need to add resources, but they’ll want to maintain financial agility. The use of contractors and fractional workers will be an increasingly valuable tool to minimize fixed employee overhead. Adding temporary, qualified staff to time-constrained projects or working through workload peaks will allow companies to avoid repeating the costly cycle of over-employment and offer them another means to meet their growth needs.
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The use of contractors is nothing new but will likely increase for both companies and workers in the gig economy. What we will see is more surgical decision-making about which roles are staffed with full-time employees vs. contractors. Workers that add to a company’s core competency and increase market-specific knowledge, for example, engineers, sales, or product marketing, will be the focus of full-time positions. Those positions that support these functions will increasingly be recast as contractors or temps. It is not to say these roles are not critical to a company’s success. Instead, many of these roles may be more suitable for supporting the ebbs and flows a business requires as its financial position evolves.
At Pivotal Allies we have observed deep changes in the technology and media markets over the past year. Financial uncertainties have increasingly impacted project management staffing. In some cases, entire project management offices have been eliminated. It’s not for the lack of skills or contributions to the company. It’s simply the fact that when costs must be controlled the employees that are not deemed to be part of the core IP of a company will be most at risk.
Organizations will still need to meet deadlines, coordinate across multiple teams, track deliverables, mitigate risk, and pay close attention to schedules. Project management is that connective tissue that will oversee this work, lower business risk, and allow key employees to have the space to focus on their core contributions.
Pivotal Allies was founded on today’s new reality. We recognized the shift businesses have experienced and their need to maintain flexibility. Our team is focused on offering companies seasoned staff that can support short and mid-term project management needs to meet the flexibility company’s project goals. We are dedicated to continually enhancing our methodologies and ensuring our expanding staff can make your team successful.
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