E-Mail This Article

White-collar jobs may be next to move overseas

By Etelka Lehoczky, Globe Correspondent, 5/16/04

White-collar workers are starting to look over their shoulders as offshore outsourcing gathers steam.

Information technology has been the sector hit hardest by the export of skilled jobs by American companies to up-and-coming economies like India, Russia, and the Philippines, where the work can be done more cheaply. But the ripples from offshore outsourcing will also be felt in other industries. In a widely cited 2002 report, Cambridge's Forrester Research Inc. estimated that 3.3 million American service industry jobs would go overseas in the next 15 years.

As politicians debate legislation to curb the flow, workers are left to wonder: Which jobs are most vulnerable to offshore outsourcing?

One answer can be found in a research report released last fall by Ashok Bardhan and Cynthia Kroll of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Among the professions Bardhan found to be at high risk from offshoring were paralegals, X-ray technicians, accountants, health record technologists, medical transcriptionists, and architectural drafters.

There are several factors that increase the possibility a job will be outsourced, according to Bardhan. Does it involve lots of expertise? Can the job be done over the Internet? Is there a large wage difference between an American worker and an Indian worker performing the same job?

Take paralegals, for instance. Bardhan noted that both India and the United States are former British colonies that share a common language and similarities in political and economic institutions. That shared heritage is helpful in training Indian workers to perform research for US law firms.

''We share a common law,'' he notes. ''When lawyers come back from court and there is some research to be done, they transfer the questions over to India. Researchers there have access to the same Lexis-Nexis database, and the legal education is very similar. Overnight, people do the research and send it back. The lawyer has all the precedents, the similar cases, at his fingertips in the morning.''

Still, some American companies have found some jobs that seemed to be perfect candidates for outsourcing do not cross borders well. In a report on the potential to offshore computer help desk services, senior analyst Robert McNeill of Forrester Research found that sending the work to India was more complicated than anticipated.

''Help desk technicians often have to play 'twenty guesses' before they can work out what is going on when an end user phones up,'' he said. That process requires the technician to display many qualities an outsourcer may not possess, such as intuition and a wide-ranging knowledge of the systems in question.

The bottom line? ''Highly processized tasks are more eligible for outsourcing,'' said McNeill.

If your job's functions can be boiled down to a series of rules or is one of those identified in Bardhan's study, it may be time to start planning for your next career move. If you are in a vulnerable job, specialists say you have several avenues.

First, consider moving to a less ''offshorable'' division of your company. Outsourcing firms commonly target so-called ''back-office'' functions such as bookkeeping and accounting, data entry, research, and financial services. Known as ''business process outsourcing,'' this type of outsourcing alone will be a $146 billion market by 2008, according to a September 2003 report by Forrester Research.

Job security may also be affected by employer size. Annie Stevens, managing partner of ClearRock Inc., a Boston career development firm whose clients are executives, believes smaller companies are less likely to send work overseas.

''For a smaller company it might not be worthwhile to launch an initiative,'' she said. ''They may only have 50 people working the phones.'' A larger company may have thousands of employees and be able to exploit economies of scale by outsourcing their job functions.

Supporters of the outsourcing trend believe the solution is for American workers to acquire additional training and expertise in jobs that are not as easily moved. However, the potential for such training offers varies widely from field to field, and specialists are far from united as to its efficacy.

To figure out how additional training can help you, consider the approach advocated by Dave Thomas, a Texas consultant who works with software developers. Thomas and his partner Andy Hunt refer to themselves as ''the Pragmatic Programmers'' and advise software professionals on ways to make their work processes more sensible and efficient.

He suggests that workers view a career the way an investor looks at a portfolio of stocks and recommends creating a ''pragmatic investment plan,'' such as designing a long-term course of job training and other career development strategies to guard against the risk of job loss.

''You have to know where you're trying to get to. The objectives you have change the kind of investments you do,'' he says.

''If you pin your hopes to a particular company, there is a chance that company won't be there in a year,'' said Thomas. ''The same is true with sectors. Your hard-won specialization will be worth less and less over time. You need to have a sufficiently broad base so that you can quickly switch specializations. You have to keep learning, you have to diversify.''

If you have the opportunity to communicate with your boss about your training goals, you should use the time to emphasize how your understanding of your company's culture and processes impacts your job. As Forrester's McNeill found, it's easy for companies to overlook how important this is. It's up to you to remind them.

''Communication is one of the key values,'' he said. ''You've got to get out there and get a presence in your organization. Your value comes from the fact that you have your finger in lots of different pies in your company.''

It also helps to have a healthy dose of luck. That -- and his decision to pursue project work -- are what Cambridge resident John Malloy, a network specialist, credits for his continued employment. Unfortunately, though, Malloy's luck hasn't prevented his income from declining as he has moved from one project to another.

''I've been in the IT field for 23 years, and the career used to be very lucrative,'' he says. ''My income has dropped to less than half of what I was making three and a half years ago. I'm one of the lucky few who has actually earned some income.''

E-Mail This Article