Jobs Beyond Borders
It’s not news that companies are offshoring jobs to save money and India has become the biggest beneficiary; but research from CareerBuilder.com and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania reveals a lot more detail about why and what jobs are at risk and where they are likely to go.
Posted by: Robyn Greenspan
Based on a survey of more than 3,000 hiring managers/HR professionals and 6,700+ workers across the U.S., the research identifies the high-wage, high-skill jobs being offshored that were previously thought to be impervious to risk, and 69 percent of employers believe high-skill service positions are at equal or more risk of being offshored than low-skill jobs. Examples of jobs companies plan to offshore:
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At the HSM World Innovation Forum in New York City in early April, author Daniel Pink said if just 15 percent of India’s population of one billion has the talent, education and skills, it will surpass America’s workforce. “Last month, 146 million Americans worked to power the world’s biggest economy,” Pink noted, and India will be even more powerful by 2010 when English becomes the most spoken language.
Offshoring is not an immediate threat to U.S. jobs, according to Pink, but it is an example of how we overestimate the impact in the short run and underestimate in the long run. “Workers making $65,000 per year in the U.S. make $18,000 in Asia with the same skills,” said Pink, adding that any kind of routine work that is just a series of steps will disappear in the U.S. and race toward the cheapest mass provider. However, he also notes that as those lower-cost workers begin to see the abundance at hand, the cost to keep them rises, and thus they become more expensive workforces.
“Even certain kinds of white-collar work that our parents said we ‘could fall back on’ like accounting is becoming routine,” and Pink said that his “fall-back” profession — law — is also becoming automated. “Uncontested divorce is routine paperwork, reduced to lines of code; you can now go to a lawyer, or go to CompleteCase.com or 123DivorceMe.com for affordable solutions.”
