I’m sure you’ve already heard about the Association for Computing Machinery report released this week, which examines the state of the offshoring of software. It was written by an ACM Job Migration Task Force. I’ve read a lot of these reports over the last couple of years, and this one stands out for several reasons.
* As the report points out, the task force examined "the forces shaping the migration of jobs worldwide" — not just in the US. This is the first time that’s been done. Most other research focuses on the impact of globalization on workforce issues within one country or another.
* Likewise, the report says the size of the IT employment market in the US is even "higher now than it was at the height of the dot-com boom." In fact, IT is predicted to be a growth area for the next 10 years.
* Also, the report acknowledges up front that good data measuring specifics about offshoring is hard to come by. It’s either suspect — because it derives from organizations with specific agendas — or tough to compare — because what’s being measured is so different from study to study — and even the Feds don’t have a good handle on what impact offshoring has on the current labor force.
Here’s the page where you can start reading the sections of the report for yourself. It’s going to take me a week to get through it, but I’ll do some more blogging as I go.
