By Natasha Lomas, 28 July 2009 16:53
NEWS
Offshoring is a controversial topic at the best of times - and one that's becoming increasingly contentious as the recession continues to see thousands of jobs lost across the country.
It's also been accused of sapping UK IT skills by reducing the number of entry-level IT jobs available for UK graduates, giving fewer techies a chance to get a first foot on the ladder.
But do UK tech chiefs agree?
Photo credit: sacks08 via Flickr.com under the following Creative Commons licence
Asked whether offshoring of IT projects and infrastructure is having a negative impact on IT skills in the UK, seven out of 12 silicon.com CIO Jury members said they believe it is.
Peter Birley, IT director of Browne Jacobson, said: "By its very nature [offshoring] must have an impact on UK IT skills. You can't move large chunks of IT work abroad without it reducing the opportunities for UK skills. Whether it is right or wrong is another issue but it will reduce the UK's ability to compete at the technology level."
Birley's view is echoed by Graham Benson, IT director of M and M Direct, who said that while skilled personnel can still find jobs, there are fewer opportunities for other tech workers to build up their skills: "More demand directed offshore equals less demand onshore, and whilst the skilled personnel will always secure roles, it restricts career opportunities for people looking to progress up the ladder, as there will be a lack of available vacancies."
Ben Acheson, IT manager at PADS Printing and Commercial Stationery, believes the offshoring of first line support jobs is a particular problem for UK Plc.
"We are throwing away an important route for UK workers to get into the IT industry," he said. "We are sacrificing quality to cut costs and alienating internal and external customers who struggle to communicate with poorly trained foreign call centre workers."
"Managers need to wake up and see the bigger picture. Those call centres and their employees are our customers and we are shipping them out to other economies. It is time for us all to take a stand and reverse this short-sighted trend," he added.
A career choice for young people
Another problem with offshoring is that it is undermining interest in IT as a career choice for young people, according to Peter Pedersen, CTO of Figleaves.com.
"I think offshoring IT has had a serious negative impact on the number of young people being attracted to the industry and seeking a higher education in technology-related subjects," he said, adding: "It is time to review how we attract and excite youngsters for a future career in technology and in the business application and use of technology."
Other IT chiefs cited difficulties in hiring qualified staff as evidence shows UK skill levels have been hit by offshoring.
"We are already struggling to find...
Comments
There are 12 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
Off shoring IT positions is basically sending a message that these jobs are not needed any more in the UK. Its as simple as that.
This is a very similar phenomenon when people lost jobs when factories where out sourced to asia.
Will the UK lose out on innovation on IT? probably yes.
What will the people who were going to IT need to do? they will just find another job in another industry and that is where new innovations will occur.
2. London Techie
"We must of course ensure that we maintain the management skills"...
...well quite. Nation of shopkeepers anyone?
3. Eric the Disillusioned
Words fail me.
We know the strategic importance of skills over short term cash. We have multiple historic reference points for where local industries simply disappear when you give the skills to others.
It was always going to be that when we needed to look closer to home for skills we would be found wanting because of the need for ever lower cost driving the skills 5000 miles away.
The bunch of muppets at the high court of IT are as bad as the bankers!
4. A Mug
Common sense, a quality rarely used today, tells us that off-shoring is not only bad for jobs, but also for future development of IT in the UK.
Unfortunately, this has little clout where cost is concerned. If I can pay £3 / hour for a programmer in India, why would I want to pay £15 / hour, or more to a UK programmer.
The simple fact is; the UK government should make it very difficult for UK companies to export jobs. Punitive tax burdens for off-shoring UK jobs......and not just for IT jobs either!
5. karen challinor
"The balance of work is changing so that the high value management and strategy remains in the UK but the lower skilled commoditised jobs are moving offshore or near shore. This is the same for all industries and I would not expect IT to be different. We must of course ensure that we maintain the management skills,"
excuse me an analyst programmer is a lower skilled job than a manager ?
try swapping their roles and see who has more success then tell me who is less skilled
and to use a crude analogy
if we are all managers whose going to dig the hole in the road ?
sometimes you have to be physically present to get the job done and it's expensive flying someone in
6. Simon Allen
I saw this start in NYC in 1988. I thought that both offshoring and local outsourcing (push the staff into another company and make them worse off) was bad then and I think it's bad now. Only 21 years in, let's hope it's less time to get out.
"We must of course ensure that we maintain the management skills"...
Absolutely, we all know that the management skills are so much more important than the folks who do the job.
7. drew stephenson
Maybe it's just me but i've yet to have a decent manager who hadn't first done a load of time doing the job of the people they were managing. There is an idea that management is management and is automatically transferable, the refutation of this can be found in Dilbert cartoons on a daily basis...
8. karen challinor
Drew - sadly the decent managers are rarely the ones in charge of the offshoring or outsourcing decision
9. karen challinor
q - how do you make more profit without improving sales of your product after you've cut away all the fat in your organisation ?
a - offshoring and outsourcing
these are purely and simply about sidestepping employment law, getting the headcount down quickly and keeping it down
thereby reducing costs and increasing profits to shareholders
they have absolutely nothing to do with improving quality of service, getting a better product for the same money, improving sales, innovating or any of the other 101 reasons trotted out to justify their use
they are simply about getting people off the payroll as quickly and efficiently as possible with minimum cost, nothing else
and as long as the market is biased in favour of offshoring and outsourcing they will continue to put highly skilled and experienced people on the dole queue
10. Andrew Meredith CEng CITP
There's two sides to this off-shoring question and they are both about short sightedness, get rich quick attitudes and, sadly, laziness.
1 - We need to save costs
My fellow commentators have eloquently covered this one. I particularly like the reference to the Dilbert strips :-)
2 - There's a skills shortage in the UK!!!
Also known as "Run, run the sky is falling in" .. "again". Recruiting human beings to skilled, team based jobs (eg staffing an IT department) is very hard. If you have not found it hard, then you are not doing it properly. Sorry to be blunt, but there we are. This is where the laziness comes in. Line managers, either through laziness or company policy have for the last decade or more, completely abdicated responsibility for IT recruitment to external recruitment firms; usually decided by least cost bid. These firms then delegate the "grunt work" to young, cheap, unskilled agents who know nothing about the industry, the customer, the team to be augmented or the range of skills that would be useful. They get round this by extracting a job spec. The IT manager actually wants someone who will be up to speed as soon as possible and will work well with the team he already has. What then does he put on the job spec? Generally a list of the applications that he uses within the department and some mealy mouthed utterances about synergy and goal focussed empathising and such to please HR. The recruiter then gets a laundry list of applications and versions and parrots this directly into the job advert along with the HR burble.
Sound familiar so far?
Now we're at the receiving end. There are two strategies for the candidate; lie or tell the truth.
Lie - I will take the job spec and munge it into a CV. I will almost certainly be called for interview and quite frankly, on paper at least, I am the perfect candidate.
Truth - I may adapt the CV to bring out the parts of my professional life that best match the job spec, but then I probably won't. I only even get a reply from 1 in 100, so why bother.
Back at the ranch, the agent gets 2 dozen "Perfect Candidates" and a bunch of also rans that don't have experience of any of the right version numbers of the apps they want. Lets not worry that that one has years of experience of all sorts of RDBMSs of all sorts; he doesn't have Irical version 11.4.7b! So guess what, the porky tellers all get called for first interview and the genuine CVs get binned.
With luck and a following wind, the interview process shoots down the lies and they either get someone who actually does match the requirement, more by accident than design, or quite often they find that nobody called can do the job.
What next then. Well usually, the whole thing starts all over again. After all, the recruiter did present the employer with a bunch of on target CVs, so he's done his job hasn't he.
After a round or two more, the management throw up their hands and declare a skills shortage. The recruiters buy more Porches as they're getting two or even three bites at each single cherry and the actual IT people give up trying to find a job through this sick joke of a system and go off and drive taxis for a living.
Think it though people. Tell me where I am going wrong here.
11. Iain Marr
Andrew Meredith - Never so well said.
12. Stuart Fawcett
Its simple, Off shoring brings short term gain to the company and a bonus for those who make the saving.
The electorate allow this skills migration over time. We moved from farming to factories to shops to manufacturing to services & IT, we are now moving into financial services and strategic management, at each stage we lose key skills and become more reliant on other countries (e.g. Power, & Water).
Yes, and sometimes, local 'skilled' workers are a little lazy or rusty or maybe just disenfranchised with the recognition that their contribution makes.
So what to be done, its business vs the strategic goals of UK PLC. Its just that I don't think UK PLC has a clear vision of its goals for the next generation.
For a non bankrupt country vision what about a country privilege tax component that is 0% of turnover (not profit) if all UK trade is serviced by UK personnel & infrastructure, and rises to 5% of turn over if all UK activity is services outside the UK. If Effectively foreign companies are making money from the UK electorate lets have some of this benefit coming back into the UK for R&D knowledge investment in universities etc.