Jobs Without Borders?

Unionized workers at The Boston Globe recently placed an ad protesting the outsourcing of their jobs to India: "It's the Boston Globe, not the Bangalore Globe," the ad said.

But the horse is already out of the barn. At a recent Boston conference on the offshore outsourcing trend, Craig McCaw said, "Essentially, it's a marketplace realignment that we can't stop."

It's not just a one-way trip, though. Some of the same jobs are returning stateside as quality concerns surface. The offshore outsourcing trend itself is predicted to die a natural death by 2027 as wages level out.

So US workers are trying to track a moving target. As companies chase lower-cost labor across borders, employees see that the jobs being outsourced include ones higher up in the value chain, such as design engineering and project management.

While there may be fewer career “safe havens,” there are a few key ways to enhance your job security:

• Keep up with leading-edge skills, certifications, and training
• Be an innovator or support pockets of innovation in your organization
• Grow your management abilities, business savvy and people skills as part of becoming a "versatilist," Karen Ann Kidd's term for people who gain deep cross-functional skillsets and broad general competencies
• Build a strong personal brand by knowing what you bring to the table and what you want to be known for
• Stay in frequent contact with your networks inside and outside of the company to keep your brand fresh and visible

These lifelong career skills can give you an edge as you navigate the white water of today’s work environment.

Comments

[Katie Konrath]

Hi Jean,

Thanks for writing about this! There isn't much talk going on yet about the outsourcing of white-collar jobs, even though it's an issue for many job seekers. And we especially don't expect newspapers to be sending jobs overseas!

I recently did my Master's dissertation on the changing American workplace and was shocked by how many supposedly "secure" jobs are going away. I listed several more outsourced jobs on my blog for college students: http://www.doesyourmajormatter.com.

Looking forward to hearing more from you!

[umar kabli]

i want to work in different countries under different environmental conditions to get a lot of work experience.

[ridwan]

very inspirative article for people outside US

[Tesfaye Alemu]

I am looking jobs abroad

[Tesfaye Alemu]

Looking for jobs abroad

[Boran]

Most of the IT projects outsourced in India have higher rate of failure and the quality is somewhat questionable. So at the end of the day the products outsourced there have lower quality and higher cost. But unfortunately most of the decision makers in US are totaly clueless. Most of the Indian developers were kicked out of Germany for the same reasons

[santosh]

Check out http://www.indiaJobster.com (IndiaJobster.com)

IndiaJobster.com launched last week and indexes all the jobs from India ( currently more than 3,25,000 jobs and thousands are added everday and are listed from all the major Indian job engines/job boards and news papers all with one click)

You dont have to go to multiple job sites to search for jobs posted. IndiaJobster.com does that for you and shows you jobs from all the sites in one place!

You can do a search on IndiaJobster (http://www.IndiaJobster.com) by location and keyword easliy with one click and get all the jobs in one place. You can even email the job search results to yourself!

They also provide a way to filter the job results by the job board.

Try IndiaJobster.com It’s cool! and its free… no advertisements or annonying pop ups!

[Offshore Web Development]

Thanks for sharing this info post.