SPHR and PHR stuff - you'll use that for sure now and in the future.  But, the bleeding edge is out there related to the intersection of HR, Workforce Management, Outsourcing -  and some would say Labor Exploitation - and it's called Mechanical Turk.

What is Mechanical Turk?  I'm going to go to WikiPedia for the cleanest explanation I can find:

"The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables individuals or businesses (known asRequesters) to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do. It is one of the sites of Amazon Web Services. The Requesters are able to post tasks known as HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a store-front, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs.Workers (called Providers in Mechanical Turk's Terms of Service, or, more colloquially, Turkers) can then browse among existing tasks and complete them for a monetary payment set by the Requester. 

Requesters can ask that Workers fulfill Qualifications before engaging a task, and they can set up a test in order to verify the Qualification. They can also accept or reject the result sent by the Worker, which reflects on the Worker's reputation. Currently, Workers can have an address anywhere in the world.  Requesters, which are typically businesses, pay 10 percent of the price of successfully completed HITs to Amazon."

Boom. So Amazon runs one of the biggest outsourcing shops in the world, and they do it in a way where small, repetititve digital tasks can be performed by anyone in the world.  It's big business and labor costs are.. how shall we say this.. manageable.  More on the size of this labor market and what the average hourly rate is on Mechanical Turk from The Verge:

"in the eight years since launch, Amazon’s micro-labor platform, also known as mTurk, has become something of a secret weapon for startups. It’s big business too: Analysts estimate the "cloud labor" sector, as it's called, is worth $1.2 billion in annual revenue. But it's also come under fire as exploitative. Researchers have estimated the average wage on Mechanical Turk is just $2 an hour, and some claim that’s an overestimate.  Experts estimate Mechanical Turk sees as much as $400,000 worth of transactions every day, but despite the money, Amazon has kept a hands-off attitude to the marketplace. 

I know - $2 per hour.  That's going to give a lot of you cause for pause.  Is that a concern on quality or American guilt?

How's this impact you as a new world HR pro?  It's labor, it's digital in nature, and it's global. Even if you're sitting a Dundler Mifflin-style office in Peoria, you've got a chance to experiment with what's going on out in the big world of leveraging labor costs and managing a digital (and probably offshore) labor force for some of the mundane digital-based labor tasks you can't get done today.

You should go to Amazon's Mechanical Turk and open an account and try to hire someone to do a $50 project for you.

Here's how a company called MailChimp recently used Mechnical Turk for feedback.

Tags: Get out of your box, global, virtual, say hi to Sally in Turkistan, outsource, 2020, Things that make you feel dirty.