I can’t speak for all freelancers, but for most of my work, I focus on training people who can take over for me after I leave. When someone can’t hire an online community expert, I can step in to provide the expertise while also providing training and mentoring to the people who will eventually be providing this role within the company. I’m not a fan of the freelancing model of becoming so valuable that the company becomes beholden to the consultant.

If I was on the other side as a company hiring a freelancer, I would make sure that I specify training and mentoring as part of the project.

This approach works well with online community consulting, but may not work for all types of freelancing, especially those freelancers with highly technical or specialized niche areas of expertise.

I’m not a freelancer, but as a corporate consultant, I can sort of identify with some of these things.

However, when reading your post above I was more struck by the fact that if corporations turn increasingly to freelancers, even with perfect knowledge management practices, they have the potential to lose valuable experience if the freelancer leaves, or they have to let them go.

So, my question would be, from a corporate side, how do the businesses utilizing freelancers protect themselves from too much ‘brain drain’? Does the threat of this knowledge exodus actually bode well for the contract worker (in terms of a perceived ‘job security’)?