U.S. to Lose 3.3 Million IT Jobs
Analysts estimate that 3.3 million IT jobs will leave the U.S. to foreign countries by 2015, as companies find it cheaper and just as efficient to have a variety of IT work done offshore -- such as software programming done in India, China and Russia. Forrester, a Cambridge, Mass., technology-research firm, said that "a growing base of companies are shifting a range of IT, back office, customer service and sales operations offshore to cut their costs by upwards of 50%." The lost wages associated with those positions will go from $4 billion in 2000 to $136 billion in 2015, Forrester said in a new report. The huge cost savings are the motivation. "The cost of an entry-level programmer in China is 30% to 50% less than one in Tokyo, London, or Chicago," said Forrester. Low-cost bandwidth and a huge increase in capacity means that firms can ship huge volumes of scanned documents overseas cheaply, while standardized business software applications make it easier to hand work off to workers in other countries, Forrester said. For example, major software development firms such as Oracle Corp. and i2 Technologies Inc. have recently moved work to low-cost centers in India and the Philippines, the research firm said. |
