The EY-Parthenon CEO Outlook Survey covers 1,200 chief executives across 21 countries. Seventy-two percent expect skills shortages to be a bigger barrier to business growth than access to capital.
That is worth sitting with. Capital is the comparatively abundant resource. Expertise is the binding constraint.
For most of the time I have been watching how organisations grow, the limiting resource was usually money. Raise the round, extend the runway, hire the team, execute. The argument for going independent was personal: more control, more variety, the chance to build something of your own. Those are real reasons. They are also easy to dismiss as preferences when someone is trying to convince you that employment is the practical choice.
The structure has changed.
When expertise is the binding constraint, the mechanism of a permanent hire is often a poor fit for the problem. A permanent hire optimises for continuity. What most companies with a skills gap actually need is precision: the right expertise applied to the right problem at the right time, without the overhead of a role designed for a different situation.
Independent professionals who have spent years building specific depth, in communication, in positioning, in marketing for technically complex products, in AI adoption for content and documentation teams, meet that need more precisely than a hire can. They are not generalists. They do not have to be.
I leave Tonbo Imaging on November 4. I start independent work on November 5. That timing is not incidental. I have watched the structural case for this mode of work build for several years, and the EY-Parthenon finding is the clearest articulation I have seen of it from the CEO's perspective.
The assumption this project is named after: that going independent is a gap to explain. It shows up in how people frame a transition, in the apologetic framing of "I've been consulting for a while." The assumption is that employment is the default and everything else requires justification.
The data has moved. For a growing number of senior professionals with real depth in specific domains, independent work is the closer fit between what they know and what the market needs.
What assumption have you been making about what comes after a long tenure in one place?
If you are thinking through your own transition, or working through a skills gap that a hire has not solved, I am at calendarhero.to/callpartha.
Related: "The Machine Is Doing It," parthans.com/blog/2026/09/19/the-machine-is-doing-it/
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Sources: AI drives productivity, but CEOs struggle to turn gains into growth | EY - Global