Professionals could not organize before because they were geographically and company dispersed

· Hi tech marketing as an example

· X% of a hi tech sw company are marketing professionals

· Scattered across companies even though there are regional concentrations

· Jobs requirements are different across companies and within companies

Contrast this to the typical labor union:

· Large numbers of people work in one factory

· Jobs requirements are similar across companies and regions

What has changed in the job market?

· Professionals no longer have unwritten lifetime employment agreements with companies

· No loyalty from companies has generated no loyalty from professionals

· Rapid market changes require companies to be extremely flexible on hiring/firing/contracting.

· Pensions have vanished for many

· Current Hi-tech recession has led many professionals to think of themselves are their own “business” – sometimes they work for a company, sometimes they do contract work, sometimes both and sometimes neither.

· Identify more with their profession than with a company

The Internet enables professionals to encounter each other

· Across geographical boundaries

· Across company boundaries

· In a mode a regular and constant communication

· And allows a professional to have thousands of working acquaintances

· New social software enable professionals to find not only the person with whom they wish to make contact, but the best path to do so

· Professionals now have online reputations (whether they want to or not)

· Online communities and Googling allows professionals that used to be isolated and hidden inside a corporate structure to be visible

What will be the purpose of these new professional guilds?:

· Extend professional network by one or two orders of magnitude, this helps in

o Job seeking & hiring

o Moving in an out of the workplace

o Moving in and out of companies (e.g. book Free Agent Nation)

o Coming together to create virtual teams that do consulting/contracting

o Sharing of “best practices”

o Job hiring

o Competitive and partnering research

· Build professional reputation – no longer confined to the small set of work associates

· Band together for group services, e.g. health insurance

· Spread non-confidential information about companies, e.g. culture

How will this online guilds differ from the current professional associations?

· Geographically unconstrained

· Can move across professional boundaries for contacts, etc. e.g. marketing to engineering

· Realtime

· Larger

· Satisfy more needs

Example:

Software Product Marketing eGroup (SPM eGroup)