Five years ago, American firms were wooing India's computer science graduates with lucrative job offers and the chance to live in America. Now, the tables are turned.
Leading Indian IT services provider, Infosys, is to spend $US100 million ($A133 million) over the next year to hire and train 25,000 overseas workers and college graduates, targeting in particular those from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
Indian IT services and software companies are also opening offices around the world and recruiting local staff - labour shortages in India are forcing the offshoring companies to, well, go offshore for their workers - often right back to the countries whose workers they previously put on the job lines.
Indian companies are expanding beyond data entry and back-office processes into areas such as design, research and development, and sophisticated business applications that require highly skilled workers.
Tata hired John Dubiel, 59, of Westford, Massachusetts, in November. Mr Dubiel spent two weeks in India, learning about the firm's products and meeting his Indian counterparts. He now works out of Tata's Boston office as an executive helping North American companies solve their business problems with technology.
For years, US companies have imported talent from India However, caps on the number of visas for foreign professionals have caused lengthy delays in processing applications and have prompted Indian companies to develop another strategy.
"They said, 'Let's train people in the US or India and make them an extension of our offshore team, in the US'," says Gary David, an associate professor of sociology at Bentley College, Boston. "So, Americans are now becoming the offshore component for foreign firms."
More than 10,000 American expatriates work in India for Indian information technology consulting and other outsourcing firms, a number that is expected to grow, says John McCarthy, vice-president of Asia Pacific research at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
American firms looking to reduce labour costs are stepping up offshoring efforts and will be sending more white-collar jobs abroad, he says. Mr McCarthy estimates that US employers will move 3.4 million jobs and $US136 billion in wages overseas by 2017. Those jobs will include positions in technology, finance, life sciences, human resources administration, and business management. Most will be jobs that do not require face-to-face time with clients.
Analysts from another research firm, Gartner Inc, based in Connecticut, say that outsourcing of IT jobs from the US and Europe to developing countries will increase to 30 per cent by 2015, up from less than 5 per cent currently.
But as US firms seek to cut costs, Indian firms Infosys and Tata are scouring the world for highly skilled talent, and they say they will pay the local going rate.
This summer, Infosys will train 300 graduates it recruited from American colleges. The new employees will complete a six-month course at the firm's training facility in Mysore, India. The recruits will then start full-time jobs in the company's offices in Texas, Arizona, Massachusetts, New York, Illinois or California.
Infosys, the second-largest information technology consulting firm in India with $US2.15 billion in revenue and more than 52,000 employees worldwide, says there are advantages to hiring a global workforce.
"We're hoping to bring a different kind of diversity to our workplace," said Bikramjit Maitra, head of human resources at Infosys.
"For us, diversity is a way to encourage innovation."
Since India has become a centre for computer science, firms can teach new employees in India, where there is state-of-the-art training, says Surya Kant, president of Tata Consultancy Services America.
At Tata, new employees and professionals train in their own countries and then travel to India for orientation or full-time work. Tata employs 62,000 people, including 9500 Americans, most who work in the US.
"We have a robust and aggressive talent-acquisition plan to tackle recruiting in 34 countries around the globe, including the US," says Mr McCabe. "We want to grow in every geography."
Diane E. Lewis
