Over the last few months, I have noticed an apparent move away from full-time staff and the 9-5 worker and a move towards contractors and flexing towards resources as and when it is needed.

One of the bigger problems of the digital transformation for mature businesses is their culture and processes are firmly rooted in the analog world.Whereas the digital world demands that businesses are more agile, efficient and most importantly quicker off the mark.

If they carry on with the old way of doing things, guess what? A startup will remove the pain points and disrupt your business. But what is the future of the workforce and why are businesses are relying on and hiring contractors to meet their company's bottom line. 

I invited Ray Grainger, the CEO of Mavenlink, a cloud-based project management firm. Mavenlink partnered with researchers at Gigaom, and together they interviewed 480 executives in the IT, marketing, and business/management sectors.

Mavenlink and Gigaom found that today we are working in a project-based economy, being run by freelancers. Mavenlink put all their findings in a new report titled, “2017 State of Services Economy.”

Mavenlink and Gigaom predict that 40% of American workers will be contractors, service providers, and freelancers by just 2020.