Off-Shore or Bust: 4 Ways to Save Your Job From Off-Shoring

Off-shoring has gone uptown, or downturn, depending on where your white-glove financial institutions are. There is great concern at the lower rungs of the employment ladder about jobs being sent overseas. Now, that concern has taken the elevator a few floors up to the junior management suites.

With Wall Street and other major financial centers cutting jobs and costs, analysts, research associates and junior management jobs in the financial services industry are being off-shored to India, China and Eastern Europe where they can save big on six-figure salaries they’d normally pay to newly minted MBAs.

Much of the off-shoring is simply about shifting work from one office to another within the same company. But, lately more in-country companies are getting in the game, getting higher level, non-administrative work instead of the back-office work they’d previously gotten.

According to the New York Times, the biggest players in the financial services and banking industries are moving some or all of their research and analysis work overseas. Here’s a quick list.

COMPANY	# EMPLOYEES	COUNTRY
Morgan Stanley	500	India
Goldman Sachs	3,000 (100 researchers)	India
JPMorgan	325	India
Citigroup	22,000	India
Deutsche Bank	6,000	India
Credit Suisse	6,500 (500 high-value jobs)	India, Poland, Singapore

While the vast majority of the jobs are junior level, industry analysts believe this is only the tip of the iceberg, that more, higher-level jobs will likely be moved to cheaper international locations, that financial services and banking organizations will reorganize their organizations so that these positions are off-shored as a matter of course. That means that only the highest-level sales and executive positions, and positions that are responsible for client-facing transactions, will be located in expensive U.S. and European locations.

So, is there anything you can do to avoid being outsourced out of a job? YES!

3 WAYS TO SAVE YOUR JOB FROM OFF-SHORING (Not just for financial services jobs)

Consider upgrading your skills and knowledge to include relevant international management or international relations. Invest in executive education programs, or pursue an MBA or Master’s degree (Learn more about international education).
Find a job abroad. There are plenty of companies looking for U.S.-educated talent, especially if you have in-country work experience (even an internship counts), speak a foreign language or have gained relevant international experience by some other means.
Get an onshore offshore job. You don’t have to leave the states to work in an international role. Huh? Turns out there are loads of jobs with international responsibilities and scope that don’t require you to leave the U.S (Click on the country links to find U.S.-based jobs with overseas focus).
For the truly ambitious and adventurous only. Learn the ropes and set up your own business in India, China, Poland, Russia, Latin America, or one of the other hot low-cost locales.