Glimmer of hope

John P Matthew
19 August 2003

Mumbai: Forrester Research analyst John C McCarthy believes that the US will witness an explosion of information technology work going out of the country. This may seem a Cassandra-like prognosis to many Indians.

McCarthy prophesises that at least 3.3-million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages will shift from the US to low-cost countries by 2015. Which means 3.3-million white-collar American Stuarts will be out of jobs and the gainers will mostly be our desi Thomases, Dinkars and Haris.

And hear what Information Technology Association of America''s (ITAA''s) third annual IT workforce study has to say. The US IT workforce, it says, shrank by an aggregate of 528,496 workers in 2001, with companies hiring 2.1-million IT workers while laying off about 2.6 million.

So, the attrition rates have been quite high. Most of the 2.1 million hired maybe Indians, Chinese and Filipinos, while the 2.6 million who lost their jobs in a sort of quid pro quo maybe honest-to-goodness Americans. Therefore, the prognosis is that millions of cola-guzzling Americans will sit and watch the telly while the super-smart and deadly-clever Asian (read Indians) will walk away with their plum jobs.

Yawning gap
ITAA had estimated that the US will need 1.6-million IT workers in 2001. But the number of American college graduates with high-tech degrees is falling. According to the US department of education, the number of bachelor-level computer science degrees awarded by US universities declined more than 40 per cent between 1986 and 1994, from 42,195 to 24,553. So who fills the yawning gap in demand and supply? Obviously, Indians and other code-smart Asians.

Meta Group Research fellow Howard Rubin says the US''s piece of the estimated 5-million global IT jobs is decreasing. The US now has about half of the world-wide IT workforce (2.5 million), and that workforce is growing at a rate of about 10 per cent annually. Therefore, by 2015, there will be around 7.8-million IT jobs in the US. From this, as McCarthy has been quoted above, 3.3-million jobs will be going offshore. That will leave 4.5-million jobs in the US.