The Rebranding of Jobs

As long as we’re talking about outsourcing, here are a couple of book-ends to my last post that will add some context and clarity: First, a short interview with Tom Friedman is enlightening for his take on the outsourcing of white-collar jobs. If you think that it’s just the overpaid tech folks that are being hit with the blunt end of the trend, guess again:

“These work-flow platforms can chop up any service job — accounting, radiology, consulting, software engineering — into different functions and then, thanks to scanning and digitization, outsource each function to teams of skilled knowledge workers around the globe, based on which team can do each function with the highest skill at the lowest price.”

Friedman implies that this kind of white-collar outsourcing is likely to be a blade that cuts in two ways: 1) If you flow with the premise that your job and its underlying skill sets can be located anywhere, then suddenly the world can be your oyster; but 2) the knowledge worker who wants to stay one step ahead will have to have skills that are current, top-notch, and always evolving through continuing education and personal, continuous improvement.

Second, Business Week provides this dated article (from 1998) which talks about the web-enabled virtualization of services that in 2006-7 is being rebranded as “virtual outsourcing.” Hard to believe that this trend was identified almost 10 years ago, but the growth of it, along with the explosion of outsourcing in general, means that entrepreneurial freelancers, independent consultants, and other work-travellers will have great opportunities on the other side of the fence, as long as they embrace the change and accept the new realities.