Outsourcing is a myth!
The next time someone says that all the IT jobs are being outsourced to India, share the following article with them.
High-tech employees are back in demand. The U.S. technology industry added almost 150,000 jobs in 2006, according to an Apr. 24 report by the American Electronics Assn. (AeA), an industry trade group. That was the largest gain since 2001, before the implosion of the tech bubble resulted in the loss of more than 1 million jobs in three years.
The findings counter concerns�sometimes voiced by opponents of outsourcing�that high-tech jobs are being sent overseas.
There’s plenty of domestic demand for a host of IT jobs, says Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing company headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif. On average, it is taking 56 days to fill full-time IT positions, she says. Firms that want IT managers are looking at an even longer searchâ€â€?about 87 days. And the wait is only getting longer.
Employment Highs
Workers well-versed in the emerging Web, with its emphasis on user-generated content, are having little trouble landing jobs. “The big buzz right now is the whole Web 2.0 space,” says Spencer Lee, adding that anyone with a background in operating systems or knowledge of .net or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) is especially sought after. “We have seen pretty big demand.”
Unemployment for engineers, computer programmers, software developers, and other IT professionals is at the lowest rate in years. Less than 3% of computer systems designers are out of work and less than 2% of engineers are sitting at home searching the classifieds, according to the AeA study. U.S. unemployment across the board is about 5.1%. “I think this is a bit of a rebounding from the burst,” says Karen Carruthers, director of marketing at Rostie & Associates, an IT staffing firm with offices in Boston, San Diego, and Toronto.
Outsourcing Slowdown
So what about all those jobs supposedly headed offshore? To be sure, companies have relocated call centers and even some software development jobs to places such as Bangalore, India, Prague, and Russia, where some labor costs are lower and skilled workers abound (see BusinessWeek.com, 12/11/06, “Outsourcing: Beyond Bangalore”).
But there is so much global demand for employees proficient in programming languages, engineering, and other skills demanding higher level technology knowledge that outsourcing can’t meet all U.S. needs. “There would have been a lot more than 147,000 jobs created here, but our companies are having difficulty finding Americans with the background,” says William Archey, president and chief executive of the AeA.
One culprit is the dearth of U.S. engineering and computer science college graduates. Second, immigration caps have made it difficult for highly skilled foreign-born employees to obtain work visas. Congress has been debating whether to increase the numbers of foreign skilled workers allowed into the country under the H-1B visa program (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/27/07, “Immigration Reform: Americans First?”).
 Read: The Myth of High-Tech Outsourcing
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Outsourcing is an important Economical issue. Most people feel quite negatively about but the reality is that it is necessary and has many positive aspects. With the birth-rate in the US decreasing, the baby boomers retiring, and globalization intensifying we will likely experience more and more of these situations you reference to in your post.