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2014 to be another great year for contract labor

Posted on February 10th, 2014 Read time: 1 minutes

2013 was a great year for contract staffing, according to The Staffing Stream. In June of last year, contract staffing expanded to 2.7 million active contractors, the largest number since 2006.

Some of the strongest industries included healthcare, which had grown to hold 31 percent of the contract workforce, and business professionals and support staff, which held a 20 percent share of temporary workers.

The Staffing Stream points out that there has lately been a crossover of the healthcare and technology and engineering categories, mostly because of temp worker placements in the biomedical and health IT field.

Finally, the source predicts that 2014 will be another big year. According to Career Builder, 42 percent of companies polled were planning to hire temporary labor in 2014. This is up by 2 percent since last year, and it's up by 14 percent since 2009. Additionally, of the companies planning to hire temporary labor, 43 percent planned to hire some of the workers permanently.

The Staffing Stream predicts contracting will become a mainstream long-term strategy, with a core of direct hires who manage important operations, along with a group of temporary workers who would report to them and expand and contract along with demand.

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