In the comments section of an earlier post, New Equities consultant Rajah Chacko calls our attention to an amusing series of Dilbert comics that ran last week:
Asok, the intern, has his job outsourced to India. The irony of Asok coming from India is not lost. Today's (6/1/06) comic comes full circle.
The comic punchline Rajah references above can be found here.
And once again, life imitates Dilbert, but with an ironic twist. This week, Information Week's Patricia Keefe points out that outsourcing has indeed come full circle, as even India goes offshore to meet the market demand for talent. The outsourcers are now themselves outsourcing. (What do we call this phenomenon -- "off-offshoring"?)
Dubbed "reverse outsourcing," the effort involves both opening offices in other countries and hiring foreigners to work in India (see Marianne McGee's recent blog asking whether IT pros would consider moving to India to move up the career ladder, for a range of perspective from InformationWeek readers on that idea).
Now much of this hiring supposedly won't be done in the U.S. That's not surprising - Indian firms are under the same cost pressures as are U.S. and other western companies, and they are looking at rising salaries for local workers given the fierce competition for their services. But they will hire some Americans, and that trend is expected to grow. It will be interesting to see whether that sparks a mini price war or helps to ratchet up salaries a bit - at least in some jobs - on both sides of the ocean.
In the same post, Keefe links to an item on a recent study by American Sentinel University that suggests the impact of offshoring on the US job market may be overhyped, especially as regards jobs requiring a combination of technical skills and business knowledge. This is in line with an earlier study done by the McKinsey Global Institute on the impact of offshoring service sector jobs.
In fact, according to another linked article, half of the IT workforce is confident enough to be looking to the next job:
"Tech employment is on a steady uptick," says Kevin Knaul, VP at staffing firm Hudson, another firm that also today released its own new survey data showing that job confidence among IT workers was up significantly in May compared with last May.
Demand for talent in "niche pockets," like business analysis and project management, has been up for a while, he says. But in the second quarter, "there's been enough pockets seeing an increase that there's an overall improvement" in the general IT employment market, says Knaul. This makes IT pros feeling confident about looking for different and better opportunities, he says.
Being in the business of putting IT consultants to work, we agree with the above analysis. Far from a loss of IT jobs, we see a coming boom in the IT job market, which will present both opportunities and challenges for employers and staffing firms alike. The traditional reactive approach to finding and hiring talent is inherently inefficient, and neither consultants nor the companies who benefit from their expertise are well served by it. The process, roles and people involved are changing, and the realization is setting in that staying ahead of the curve will require new models for workforce management that provide greater flexibility and better serve the goals of the people who do the work.
New Equities gets it, and we're on it. In fact, it's what we do.
Local historical trivia question for Charlotte residents: Can you explain the significance of the statues downtown at the corner of Trade and Tryon?
