* IT careers in the age of offshore outsourcing
Remember when your phone rang off the hook with calls from recruiters looking to attract you to “a great role in a growing, dynamic company”? Ten years ago IT seemed like one of the best career choices any of us could have made. Then came 2001.
The Economic Policy Institute reports that 16% of jobs in the U.S. software industry disappeared between March 2001 and March 2004. This is primarily the result of cheaper labor in India and now China. Outsourcers based in China can undercut Indian companies by 20% to 30%, and can cut American IT costs by two-thirds. A typical Chinese IT worker earns $700 to $800 a month, less than one-fifth what a U.S. worker would earn. Now even the big Indian outsourcers are opening offices in China to stay competitive.
The American IT job situation is not lost on high school graduates. According to the Taulbee Survey of the Computing Research Association, undergraduate enrollment in computer science programs has dropped 7% for each of the last two years. That’s great if you are picking a career today. What are those of us already down the IT career path to do in the face of continued offshoring growth?
My suggestion is be flexible, listen to the market and stay competitive. You can:
* Add presentation and customer skills to your repertoire and move toward a sales engineering or product manager role. Selling technical products requires technical skills and extremely current and accurate technical knowledge of a variety of products. This is a position where language skills and cultural affinity are extremely important, and it is not likely to be affected by offshoring.
* Become known as “one who delivers on time” and add project management skills to your capabilities. A project management role will allow you to manage projects even when part or all are performed by offshore resources. Local interaction with the end users and the installed base is often key to project success, making this a keeper role when large parts of a project are outsourced.
* Take your technology skills to the business side of your company. More and more, technology and process automation are not just supporting the business, they are key to the business operating successfully. Business managers need a better understanding of technology. Learn to be a businessperson with a technical background and you can go far. The top IT jobs require solid business skills as much as technology skills, so this foray into the business side may be temporary and lead to a more senior IT role later on. Adding accounting and P&L management skills, people management skills and customer skills to your deep technology skills will make you a keeper.
* If you are intent on staying completely technical, be extremely current on new technologies and focus on the architectural and business specifications aspects of the development process. Take advantage of industry analyst subscriptions and other industry news sources available to you to stay out front on trends. Here again, language skills and cultural affinity are key to interacting with the businesspeople who need to drive the development roadmap to meet the business needs.
In general, get closer to the core business of your company and find ways that your technology knowledge can benefit the company. In our IT consulting practice, we regularly assist technology managers in demonstrating and improving their value to the core business of their companies. This often means starting with a better understanding of the business and the customers. Just as good service-level agreements come from a good understanding of the business metrics and users’ needs, good careers have their root in delivering observable value to the bottom line. You can’t stop the offshoring train, but you can use its momentum to your advantage.
