ITM members were asked if students in Australia would be discouraged from considering IT as a career if offshore outsourcing continued to shrink the local employment market.
More than 90 percent of members said based upon current conditions, they wouldn't recommend information technology as a viable career path.
"I'd rather my kids opt for nursing as a profession--it has both local and global demand," said ITM member James Michaels, who works for a telecommunications company in Sydney.
Michaels said there was a huge "disconnect" in the supply and demand chain. "I think we've reached a saturation point...there's just too many skilled techies out of work and they're all fighting for either the same pie or the scraps left behind post-outsourcing," he said.
Occupational hazard
For some IT undergraduates, there's no turning back. "As a Computer Science student at Melbourne University, I can say it is almost
guaranteed that students will shy away from IT as a career without outsourcing legislation," said ITM member Jesse Stratford.
"My peers and I are very much aware of this [offshore outsourcing] situation and watching it with great interest lest our expensive, hard-earned education be thrown out of the window for the sake of lining the pockets of big businesses," Stratford added.
According to market research firm Gartner, offshore business process outsourcing (BPO) is expected to reach US$1.8 billion in 2003 on a global basis, representing a 38 percent increase from the previous year.
Gartner said India will represent 66 percent of the offshore BPO market or US$1.2 billion. "Most of today's offshore BPO opportunities in India are relegated to contact centres and back office transaction processing," said Sujay Chohan, Gartner's research vice president.
But it's not all doom and gloom, as one member said: "We need to be careful not to confuse "offshore" development with round-the-clock surveillance," wrote ITM member Peter Hannan.
Hannan explained that in many instances, it was logical to have service provisioning (network monitoring, for instance) overseas in a follow-the-sun arrangement--especially for multinational companies.
"Such arrangements generally provide commercial sense and have the by-product of reciprocity for our talent pool," he added.
Though outsourcing is difficult to stop, what I call "insourcing" can be byt our elected politicians here in the USA care more for their pockets than their constituents.
The US visa programs are a complete disgrace to American citizens.
George Bush says his tax cuts will create 1.2 million jobs? For whom and where?
I am one of 20+ Americans that were mandated to train our foreign replacement workers; in Lake Mary, FL. Those workers are Tata Consulting(TCS) India employees. TCS India transfers their employees from TCS India to TCS USA using the congressional H-1b and L-1 "intra-company transfer" work visas. Their goal, the jobs we did. Once the training was completed the Americans were laid off.
Our management brought the Americans into a room and told them they would be laid off. But first they said, "we want you to train your replacements". They held out a carrot for the Americans, a severance; "stay on and we'll give you this severance when you leave."
Over 9 months of begging and pleading for help from the likes of FL Senator Bob Graham(D), FL Senator Bill Nelson(D) and FL Representative John L. Mica(R) have gotten us nowhere.
TCS India has done this so many times they have become complacent. They put their entire replacement project documentation( 500MB/800 documents) on the shared drive at Siemens. Among those documents are the "infamous" knowledge transition documents.
That would be knowledge transfer from AMERICANS to Indians; right here in Lake Mary, FL. Those documents were provided to the DOJ, DOL, INS, Senators and Representatives. Did they do anything? Not a chance in hell.
You'd think your US representative would care about Americans being pushed out of the industry by foreigners on H-1b and L-1 visas. Not ours. Our representative, Rep John L. Mica was in contact with Siemens. During the exact timeframe we were pounding his office for help(Aug 15-Dec/2002) he was cashing campaign contribution checks from Siemens. You can see them right here at http://www.OutsourceCongress.org:81/USA/tata/Mica_Contributions.html
This was the most demoralizing time of my life. The worst part was not Siemens nor TCS, nor the Indians. The worst part was the lack of support from our political leaders.