How to protect your job, outsmart outsourcing and secure your family’s future

Have you ever wondered if outsourcing/offshoring is a dangerous threat to your job and by extension your livelihood?

Let’s look at what some of the industry experts have to say based on studies.

“In what might be an underestimate, a University of California study concludes that 14 million white-collar jobs are vulnerable to being outsourced offshore.” says Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal and Author of the article The Offshore Outsourcing of American Jobs: A Greater Threat Than Terrorism published by Global Research. “These are not only call-center operators, customer service and back-office jobs, but also information technology, accounting, architecture, advanced engineering design, news reporting, stock analysis, and medical and legal services”

Outsourcing/off-shoring appears to be a threat to most of our jobs. The good news is you can prepare yourself for minimal impact.

The difference between outsourcing and off-shoring

Outsourcing refers to the practice of working with third-party usually within a country to get the job done. Off-shoring refers to the practice of working with a third-party outside a country to get the job done. The major difference is off-shoring deals with overseas services.

In this article, we will use the two terms interchangeably because we are looking at the effect that both have on your job.

Why organizations are opting for outsourcing/off-shoring

• Cut down on operation costs to gain competitive advantage – outsourcing/off-shoring has proven to be cheaper. This means an organization can offer superior products at competitive prices.
• Access to specialized skills – In the late 1990s, Visual Basic 6.0 was a hot thing then came .NET. VB.NET and C# become the next cool languages to use for development. If a company only has VB 6.0 programmers and want access to the latest technologies then they may be forced to outsource development.
• Access to resources – firms that provide outsourcing services such as customer call center already have the infrastructure needed to get the job done etc.
• Allow the business to focus on its core business – Let’s take Google Search as an example. The core business is to help people find relevant information. Technology is a tool that they use to achieve first. Google Search is always working on its search algorithms to make them better. If you want to compete with Google Search on a limited budget, you may want to focus on development a better search algorithm and outsource the programming work to someone who is experienced.

Well-known individual/companies that outsourced development successfully

• AppSumo – AppSumo is a daily deals website for digitally distributed goods and online services. AppSumo was originally created by an outsourced team from Pakistan. After the initial success, the app was re-written Sources
• Fab – Fab is an e-commerce company founded in 2010. Once estimated at a worth of over 1 billion dollars, in November 2014, the company was rumoured to be in talks to sell for 15 million. Fab started out by outsourcing development to a team in India True Sparrow. Fab eventually bought True Sparrow. Sources
• Developer Bob
  
   – He outsourced his job to a Chinese consulting while he watched videos of cats and enjoyed social media. His performance review noted him as the best developer in the building