Offshore and Onshore Usefulness When the Inevitable Happens

No matter what you company does, if it grows big enough, at some point a suit will get the bright idea of using a foreign company to offload work on. This will happen, and jobs will be lost. Those who are retained will find themselves facing obstacles they have never faced before on project teams, and will have to accept that their job is now much harder.

The first and most important point is that your company isn't really saving any money. It may look like it on whatever report they are using to blindly look at dollar per hour spends, but the hard reality is that the projects will take longer and have more problems. This will not change a thing though, and you are stuck with your new resources.

The second important point is that you will have to work much harder and longer to pick up the slack. The knowledge transfer will have been terrible, so be prepared to be a professor to your new resources. You will need to go through all deliverables with a fine tooth comb as there will be countless grammar issues, wrong information, and a lot of filler. The language barrier will make every meeting slow an painful, so make sure to set aside enough time for important meetings.

The third point is that no matter how long you work with your new resources, there will always be friction. It could come from the cultural differences in work ethic, it could be a lack of expected initiative, it could be the constant replacement of people that typically happens with large foreign consulting firms. Be prepared and be steady.

The company is really breaking even, and that's only because you are going to have to work much more to pick up the slack. You also know where the blame will go if the project fails, and it won't be the offshore resources.

What Happens When the Next Rung is Management?

As a young professional I often ponder where my career is going. Can I guide it? If so, where should I attempt to guide it to? Is management the only real path in climbing the corporate ladder? There are always questions and uncertainty, and sometimes it feels like I'm trapped on a path. In the last year or so I have found other paths that I didn't think were available to me, and in following these new paths I have found ways t climb the ladder without having to become the dreaded middle manager.

Years ago I was in retail banking. Like now, my main goal was to climb up the ladder. My reasons then mostly centered around money. The things I wanted to do costed more than I could afford at the time (mostly travel). Over the years I worked up from a front line teller to a lead sales person, and then I jumped into management. Eventually I found myself one step away from being the head manager of a branch, and that's when my self-reflections began. That kind of leadership role was not something for me. Using my experience I was able to jump-ship and get a corporate operations job with the same salary.

The new job was something more akin to my early days as a teller. The field users would call in, and I would process their requests. It was mind numbing on the best days, but it afforded me the mental bandwidth to learn a lot about my employer and quickly make myself far more useful than my job description would suggest. Within a year I had earned a promotion into my first individual contributor role.

Unlike every job I had ever occupied up to this point, there was no customer service aspect. days would go by without even a phone call or e-mail, I just produced results. I earned a reputation as a producer, but found my satisfaction with the job lacking. Total freedom sounded interesting, but I felt disconnected from the world. After a year I took a Business Analyst position at the same company.

This is where I found my sweet spot. While still an individual contributor in some aspects of my job, there was now a new large social aspect of my position. On any given day I would spend several hours in analysis mode, then switch into social mode as meetings were held to discuss the project. I had found a path that didn't require management, and a lucrative one at that.

Once more I stand at the edge of the career path cliff. I can no longer see the path to the next rung that doesn't involve management, and I'm still as uncertain about it today as I was all those years ago. While I enjoy business analysis, I have no intention of doing this for the rest of my career. Is there something more interesting out there? I hope so.