One of the big obstacles to selling offshore IT outsourcing is the perceived negative impact on U.S. IT jobs.  Many people rely on the conventional wisdom to conclude that offshoring causes net job loss here.  We try to arm our sales team with counter points including:

• Leveraging the offshore team will allow you to focus on more interesting work
• Take advantage of the expertise among the offshore resources to fill in gaps in your in-house skill set
• Let your onshore staff concentrate on core projects, let the offshore team handle other tasks
• Enable the onshore team to expand their skills to include distributed project management
• Use the offshore testers to gain better coverage
• Outsourced teams are often valuable to manage spikes in resource requirements and they can be scaled down when the demand goes back down

Across all of the projects that I’ve sent over to China, I have never been aware of a single case where a U.S. layoff resulted from the offshore work.  I suspect that some clients may have delayed hiring to fill a position when the work could be performed offshore, but I’ve yet to see a company reduce existing technical staff as part of shift to China.

In spite of my best efforts, we still encounter resistance to the idea of outsourcing based on the fear of job losses.  With this in mind, I was delighted to see Ann All’s post on her IT Business Edge “Straight to the Source” blog.  Ms. All cites recent studies that show:

“…that offshoring has only a minor impact on U.S. jobs and that job losses are offset by increasing sales of U.S.-produced goods and services in countries such as India and China.”

and

“…that jobs lost to offshoring are only a problem in the absence of job gains. Hires continue to outweigh job losses in the United States, he notes. He also mentions strong growth projections for IT jobs, especially for high-skill positions like systems analysts, database administrators and system software engineers.”

In the spirit of full disclosure, and perhaps a bit of shameless self-promotion, I should acknowledge that Ms. All has quoted me here and here in her previous work.

The bottom line is, at least for software and IT outsourcing, resources in China do not display U.S. technologists.  Instead, they complement the activities underway here.

Technorati Tags:  China, China Outsourcing