See Why your college degree is worthless in Tennessee

For businesses looking at outsourcing, saving money is the bottom line

By LESIA PAINE-BROOKS

In the current and future global economy, business and industry will get work done where it is least costly, according to a recent local study completed by Karen Tarnoff with East Tennessee State University's department of marketing and management.

Saving American businesses money is the bottom line, according to information released by Cynthia M. Tauscher, professor of business and industry services at Northeast State Community College, who presented "Preparing for a Brighter Future through Workforce Development" during Johnson City's economic summit held in October.

Tarnoff's results precisely match findings by the national corporate firm Forrester Research, which predicts that at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages will have shifted from the United States to foreign countries by 2015.

Approximately 30,000 technical jobs moved overseas in 2000, according to a Forrester November 2003 study, and that number is expected to escalate to 472,000 by 2015 if U.S. companies continue outsourcing at their current rate.

Forrester estimated that the United States and Europe will spend 28 percent of their info-tech budgets on overseas work in the next two years.

Even as American colleges and universities stress the importance of training their graduates to master the most updated computer software programs, India graduates 55,000 computer programmers and 350,000 engineers annually, according to Tarnoff's study.

India is currently the world's largest exporter of software products and is recognized globally for its systems development and maintenance services.

In fact, India's successful Internet technology market, which is receiving a boost from outsourcing from American companies, currently provides an estimated 3 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, valued at $16 billion between 2002 and 2003, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Fearing a loss of jobs at home, eight states have even introduced bills to ban foreign labor on government contracts. Tennessee is currently not one of them.

The United States also has a hefty competitor in Ireland, which is now Europe's Internet technology leader, producing 40 percent of all software packages and 60 percent of personal computer business applications sold in Europe.

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