Offtopic! » People who left the farms

In January 2003 The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran this headline ?聯Ohio lost 200 Duncan Keith Canada Jersey ,000 manufacturing jobs? They blamed competition from India and China.

In a recent article, Business Week discussed how Call Centers are being sent off shore, sending 10s of thousands of jobs overseas. Dell Drew Doughty Canada Jersey , Citigroup, Microsoft, General Electric and others major corporations now have oversea call centers.

Microsoft and GE have one of the world聮s most productive research and development centers in India

Companies such are Ford Dan Hamhuis Canada Jersey , GM and Mercedes have built or off-shored entire plants to China.

Tata India has one of the world聮s largest and highly trained programming staffs.

Accountants are next to feel the heat from off shore competition. A clerk in the accountant聮s office can scan a company聮s financial data to an Internet server. An accountant in India will access this information over a secure link and process the financials overnight. The results are waiting at the accountant desk when he comes in the next morning.

How do you fight this?

Outsourcing and off-shoring are here to stay.

Outsourcing is defined as taking a specific task and having another company perform this service and then reintegrating the results back into the original company.

Off-shoring is taking an entire plant and moving it to another country.

In the following example Boeing is building a new plane. Boeing has Russian designers designing the wings. Boeing also outsourced the electronics of this plane to a Japanese company. This Japanese company out sourced certain electronic components to the same company in Russia that Boeing is outsourcing the wing design to.

Boeing can employ five engineers in Russia for the price of one engineer in the United States.

Are you untouchable?

Let me define untouchable. Being untouchable is the ongoing learning process that a person must go through to move to the next level of professional and personal development.

For example, in his book the World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, he discusses the outsourcing impact on his friend Bill Greer.

Bill is 48 years old and he has 26 years experience as a free lance artist and graphics designer. His clients include such notable names as New York Times and McDonalds.

In the past a client requests a finished piece of art. Greer would sketch it Dale Hawerchuk Canada Jersey , color it, mount it on illustration board, cover it with tissue Corey Perry Canada Jersey , package it, and have it delivered. The process I just describes is known as the creation of camera ready art

In the new process Greer聮s client would requests a design, Greer would create the product using digital software and email the product back to the client.

Programs like Quark Express turned graphic design into a commodity. Software gives everyone the same tools and allowed almost anyone the ability to create acceptable art work. I use a program call GIMP and it is free.

Greer pushed himself up the knowledge ladder and retooled his skill sets. He became the idea man. He would create the idea Corey Crawford Canada Jersey , draw it out and email it to his clients and they would finish it. For Greer, the old process was eight steps. The new process is three steps.

This concept of creating ideas moved him into a whole new business. No longer just another friggin artist, his clients now buy his ideas.

Bill Greer is an untouchable. He is adaptable. He continues to retool his skills. He creates new forms of value for his clients.

What are you doing to be an untouchable?

We have been though this before. It happened when we moved from the agricultural age to the industrial age to the electronic age. On the farm you could get by with a third grade education and no one cared. During the industrial age you needed a high school diploma. Hundreds of thousands of people migrated from farms to cities during the industrial revolution and retooled their skills to find work.

In the 1950聮s Claude Giroux Canada Jersey , in Akron Ohio, rubber companies would rent buses and send them into the mountains of Pennsylvania and West Virginia to bring worker to Akron to work in the Rubber factories. That聮s how I came to live in Akron. My father left the coal mines of Pennsylvania to find a better life here. Little did he know that working in the rubber factory was no different that working in a coal mine.

People who left the farms adapted, learned new skills and became untouchable in their generation. Men who left the mountains and came to Akron to find employment learned new skills as well.

In both of these cases education played a key role in this transformation.

In the technology age America is being pushed b . Cheap Jerseys China Cheap NFL Jerseys Cheap Jerseys Online Cheap Jerseys China Free Shipping Cheap NFL Jerseys China Cheap MLB Jerseys From China Cheap NCAA Hockey Jerseys Cheap Wholesale Soccer Jerseys Cheap New NFL Jerseys Cheap New NBA Jerseys