Re-shoring

Not that long ago the news was awash with reports of jobs fleeing the United States for India, China, or the like. Offshoring, to find the lowest possible production costs, was a well established practice in manufacturing cycles. Auto manufacturing moved from Detroit to Mexico. Steel production, with half its US workforce, rapidly left industrial towns such as Pittsburgh and moved to China. Jobs that are labor intensive, mechanized, and require minimal skill, migrate around the world in a global chess game to find this perfect mix at the lowest possible costs. Logically this makes sense so most of us accepted this as a rule and not an exception.

That is until offshoring started taking out the mainstay jobs of the middle class or so-called white collar jobs. First came the call centers in India. Then work that could be digitized started to move half way around the globe taking further advantage of productivity offered by the time zone differential. A computer programmer, accountant, or medical technician in the US could be replaced or augmented by his or her counterpart overseas. The types of jobs exported to India has moved in lockstep with their desire for more education.

Even the venerable Apple manufacturers their iPad/Pod/Phones overseas. Lately they have been in the news for the dubious working conditions at its Chinese manufacturing partner Foxconn. Companies have sometime had to take the good with the bad. No matter your ethical stance, offshoring has and will continue to offer benefits to some and costs to others. We’ll leave that debate to others.

What is perhaps more interesting is in the narrow scope of computer programming and developement where there seems to be a re-shoring effect going on. Search any job site and you will find information technologists, computer programmers, and data analysts in high demand. The business world is clearly in need of folks who can build systems to collect, organize, and analyze massive volumes of data. Others are then needed to distill the information into bite-sized chunks for intelligent business decisions. The work is a melding of high right and left brain functions.

On one hand you need the mathematical chops to propose a solution to the strategic problem. Afterwards you need design to simplify and bring clarity to the information. These new information workers have their own lingo and sets of tools. Today’s programmers and data scientist speak of stacks, Python, Rails, and Hadoop. Marketers speak of analytics, engagement metrics, SEO, clickstream analysis, A/B testing, and KPIs. The problem, of course, for businesses is there is too little supply even in a time of high economic unemployment.

This supply and demand paradox highlights the desperate need to re-tool our current workforce and re-think our current educational systems. Neither is an easy proposition.

photo: mikeyskatie