How To Keep Your Job Onshore

[OhioChick]

AUGUST 20, 2007

An ever-wider variety of white-collar jobs is being sent offshore. Here's how to make sure yours isn't one of them

How do you keep from being Bangalored? Or Shanghaied? That's the question Valparaiso University freshman Matt Cavin asked himself two years ago when he was in China on a summer study program. Young Chinese were intently studying English, science, and math. One day, when he was sitting by a lake reading Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat, a Chinese student approached, wanting to practice his English. As they talked, Cavin mulled Friedman's message about U.S. jobs moving to low-cost countries such as India and China, and he had an epiphany: "I started thinking about what it means to be in active competition with kids overseas. I realized I had to set myself apart."

When he returned to the U.S., Cavin mapped out an ambitious self-improvement program. Gone was his theology major. In its place, when he graduates next spring, he'll have no fewer than three bachelor's degrees: international business, economics, and Mandarin. Cavin, 21, sees plenty of opportunities. He isn't running scared. But he's running.

As he should be. We're entering a new phase of outsourcing where an ever-wider variety of American and Western European jobs are being sent offshore. First it was the software programmers, then call-center employees, then back-office personnel in accounting, banking, and insurance. Now it's financial analysts, pharmacists, lawyers, and research scientists. There's practically no limit to the types of white-collar jobs that can be shifted, as long as the work can be done via the Web and telephone.

Fortunately the offshoring trend is moving with the speed of a road paver rather than a hot rod, so there's time for alert Americans and Europeans to scramble out of the way. The safest bet is having a job that absolutely requires your physical presence, such as being an electrician or brain surgeon. Failing that, sustainable careers typically are those that involve deep relationships with customers and extensive knowledge of local market conditions. It helps if you have multidisciplinary skills that aren't yet common in many low-cost countries. (Think computer science plus biology, or law and international business.) Bonus points go to those who perform well in person with the boss. And while entire jobs are being moved offshore, in many cases it's discrete tasks that are shifted. So U.S. and West European workers need to break down their jobs into the tasks that are easy to move and those that are not—and make sure they're excelling in the second category.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_34/b4047417.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_businessweek+exclusives

[liberal N proud]

1. You have to make yourself diverse yet indispensable

You have to be an asset to the company you work for, one that they see as key to the business.

[Bonhomme Richard]

2. The reality is that people with that amount of drive, forethought and.........

resources will always be "fairly" secure in their work. They always have been. The problem is that not everyone has the skills, wherewith all and drive to do that. The majority of the employed are basically "worker bees", for want of a better term, and are happy with that. They want to go in, do their job, get a decent paycheck and leave it all at behind them at the end of the day.
They are exactly the ones being replaced by the "worker bees" overseas.

[Nay]

3. Exactly, Richard. Those people are pretty safe no matter what the

conditions are. Our concerns are with all the other workers -- you know, the ones who are at the bottom half of the IQ scale, the ones who aren't Mighty Mice -- nearly all the rest of us. Plus the Mighty Mice who may prefer a less frantic pace of work life. This Business Week article is the usual pro-business crap, telling employees that it's all their fault if they don't keep their jobs. I am truly sick of it.

And frankly, even many of those driven people will be replaced -- that brain surgeon? Yeah, maybe his patients have to come to him, but there's nothing stopping the patient from going (or being forced to go, by ins companies) to a brain surgeon in -- India, or China, or Mexico -- for a tenth of the cost. So the electrician, rather than the brain surgeon, has the safer job.

[Locrian]

4. god damn it

Another "World is Flat" type bullshit article. Just buck up kiddo and work hard - you can do it! Of COURSE there will be a few that can be "indispensable". But you can't just "grow the pie higher". There is NO FUCKING contest if your job costs 10x less it WILL be outsourced. And the masses that get left behind. Fuck em right?

You know, ironically, the kid may be screwing himself by trying to play the game. I think the future will be to make your own "niche" type job - possibly based more on creativity and innovation than being the best cog in the machine. That theology / art lit major may wind up being the way to go if you can market it.


Go here for a real "World is Flat?" perspective and watch the videos and buy the book

http://www.mkpress.com/Flat/

"From boardrooms to classrooms to kitchen tables and water coolers, globalization has become a hot topic of discussion and debate everywhere, including a best-selling book by a famous journalist. However, Thomas Friedman's runaway bestseller, The World is Flat, is dangerous. Friedman makes "arguments by assertion," assertions based not on documented facts, but on stories from friends and elite CEOs he visits --not even one footnote reference. Yet his book influences business and government leaders around the globe. By what it leaves out, it does nothing more than misinform millions of people and our leaders.

In The World is Flat? Aronica and Ramdoo show that the world isn't flat; it's tilted in favor of unfettered global corporations that go the ends of the earth to exploit cheap labor, lax environmental regulations and tax breaks. This concise monograph brings clarity to many of Friedman's misconceptions, and explores nine key issues that Friedman largely ignores. To create a fair and balanced exploration of globalization, the authors cite the work of experts that Friedman fails to incorporate, including Nobel laureate and former Chief Economist at the World Bank, Dr. Joseph Stiglitz. Refreshingly, you can now gain new insights into globalization without weeding through Friedman's almost 600 pages of ill-informed, grandiloquent prose and bafflegab"

[JDPriestly]

5. I wonder how much debt he took on to get all those degrees?

And how much will he end up with (after taxes, living costs and --- paying back his school debts)? Even after all his effort, he will not be competitive with someone with a similar education, drive and reliability who lives in China or India and who lives on next to nothing, in part because of the extreme poverty of many around him and in part because of the currency valuation that favors paying for labor in Chinese or Indian currency, selling the product to a Cayman Islands dummy company and then reselling the product in the U.S., hiding a huge profit in the safe of the Cayman Islands company.