Does Your Major Matter?

More Jobs Without Borders

Career Hub, an excellent blog for job seekers, just wrote about how employees of the Boston Globe are protesting the outsourcing of their jobs to India.

You're probably wondering if you read that correctly.  A major American newspaper is outsourcing to Bangalore? It's true.

And they're not the only one.  Manufacturing jobs being sent overseas is old news, but many companies are sending highly-skilled, college-degree-requiring jobs away too.

• At call centers, like AOL’s hub in Bangalore, employees earn $300/month.
• Stock market analysts in Bangalore make $15,000/year.
• The 70,000 accounting graduates coming each year out of Indian universities start work at $100/month.
• Indian MBAs earn only $12,000/year for financial analysis.
• Indian graphics artists doing movie special effects earn only $5000 a year.
• GE has several thousand PhD scientists working on cutting edge projects at its research and technology centers in Bangalore.
• “Personal remote executive assistants” who will do anything up to creating a complete PowerPoint presentation and finding relevant research overnight, can be hired in India for $2,000 per month.

Because Indian workers are able to work for such a pittance, they now being used by foreign companies for business, administrative, clerical and IT support functions.*  US financial service industry are projected to save approximately $30 billion from outsourcing--enough money that it doesn't matter to them that they will have to get rid of 8% of their American workplace.

Here's a few more jobs that are being sent over to India:

• In Bangalore alone, Intel employs 1,800 electrical engineering and computer science PhDs to design their next generation of microprocessors.
• Insurance-processing service Wipro uses 2,500 university graduates to deal with insurance claims.
• Global management consulting firm A.T. Kearney predicts that a half-million financial service jobs will be transferred to low-cost places like India before 2010.
• Non-profit labor analysts RAND Corporation estimates that 500,000 financial service jobs will be moved to India within the next five years.
• In 2005, an estimated 400,000 tax returns were done in India.

Students just about to graduate will be no longer be entering a stable workplace where job competition come from college graduates in the same city.  The rise of offshoring has changed the value of human capital in the US and today's college graduates will be entering into a completely new competitive job environment.  As a result, college grads need to work on their intangible skills--the human interaction and higher-level thinking skills that cannot be easily sent overseas.

* A pittance in American terms.  Cost of living in India is significantly cheaper than in the US.

(Books used as sources after click through.)

A video every college student needs to watch!

Shift Happens - Globalization and The Information Age was created by Karl Fisch, and modified by Scott McLeod. If you're interested in sources, go here.

Why Graduating From College is like Jumping off a Moving Train

Graduating college has always been a stressful experience for young people, but today it's becoming even more intimidating.  Less job security, increased job competition from around the world, high college tuition and a lot of other real-world pressures have all combined, and the result is that many college students are terrified about what will come next!

In fact, graduating college can be a lot like jumping off a moving train!  I would never recommend jumping out of a train to anyone, but there are some situations where you might have to do it just to survive.  (For example: a terrorist situation, a faulty bridge, James Bond casting call.)  In today's fast-changing workplace, graduating college is also a survival necessity for future employability.

So, for all those soon-to-be college graduates, here's my top five reasons that graduating college is like jumping off a moving train!

5.  You need to look before you leap.  It's much easier to close your eyes when you do a scary jump.  However, if you close your eyes as you're coming out of college, you'll probably miss some opportunities.  Career success books are full of stories about people finding incredible networking opportunities in the strangest places and then eventually landing the job of their dreams.  By keeping your eyes open, you'll end up in a much better place.

Photo: Many thanks to mulder.hu