This Christmas there was cartoon joke going the rounds which showed American kids queuing to talk to Father Christmas outside a store. Where the portly elderly gentleman should have been sitting was a videoconference terminal connected to a call center in Bangalore, India. The caption read “ I don’t believe it, they have even outsourced Father Christmas" . Far fetched? Probably not. So what next? Well how about college graduates having to apply to someone in India for their next job in the US? It may be closer than you think because the back door is already opened a crack.
Take Math for example. Math teaching skills in many parts of the US are far from adequate, so much so that college students are now subscribing to individual on-line coaching provided by teachers in India who are far more proficient and earn a fraction of what their US counterparts take home. It’s true that some outsourced jobs have been repatriated from India to the US because of Quality of Service issues however the outsourcing to India and other countries continues at a healthy pace and once the Indian’s, Chinese and others master such idiosyncrasies as Brooklyn slang then the call center jobs will almost certainly go back overseas.
So what are the prospects for college graduates? Can any jobs that don’t require physical contact with customers be preserved in the country or are only plumbers, carpenters and McDonald hamburger flippers and the like safe from outsourcing? Management is probably the last bastion of security for service jobs and 70% of all the positions in the USA are now in the service industry so management positions in the that sector are where many college students are headed. The gap between entry level on the lowest rungs of the promotion ladder and a management position which is unlikely to ever be outsourced may stretch a decade or more in the normal course of business. Jobs in the span between entry level and management positions at large and medium size companies in the service industry are at the greatest risk of being outsourced.
What strategy can the college graduate new to the job market use to reduce the risk of finding a job and being laid off before the career has hardly begun because someone in Bangalore can do the job at a lower cost? Smart as they may be in many areas, the overseas worker is not exposed to US commerce and industry in the same way that someone who has been educated and lives in the United States. The problem is that many college graduates are not taking advantage of their close proximity to the job markets in the US and are pitching their hat into on-line job recruitment web sites such as Monsterjob.com and waiting for jobs to find them. By the time a job has been advertised on-line the chances are that the employer has exhausted many other avenues such as personal contacts. That’s not to say that only crap jobs are advertised on Monsterjob.com but it stands to reason that the plum jobs are likely to have been snapped up and never get to the on-line web site. Innovative job hunting doesn’t appear to be on curriculum of too many colleges who stuff their students with sufficient knowledge to pass exams and then they are on their own. No student can be expected to be street-wise when they leave college and so it’s a great shame that many talented graduates don’t get into jobs where they could really prosper because they don’t know how. Imagine too how much more prosperous this country would be if more talent got into industry earlier. Seventy percent of all jobs in the US require ‘knowledge workers’ so it’s a crying shame that a void exists between the knowledge cribs of our colleges and the commercial enterprises that can breed the managers needed to maintain this country’s lead in the world.
Now is the time to act. Recent statistics have shown that the productivity in other nations is increasing and the gap is narrowing between them and the US. Future management is the lifeblood of this country and if we don’t get the right talent into the right positions sooner rather than later then we’re going suffer.
College students need to be educated in how to be pro-active in finding jobs and even creating jobs where none appear to exist. If they don’t learn how then the day may not be far off when college graduates have to call India to find jobs in this country.
So make 2006 pro-active job creation year for the American College Students. It’s simply too late to wait until graduation to start looking for a job, the process needs to start before students leave college.
Vince Waterson spent 15 years in personnel recruitment. He is author of Skyhooks - A BOOTSTRAPPER’S GUIDE TO FINDING A JOB For 18 to 20 something year old American College students, published by amazon.com. Extract on www.jobs-book.com |
