IT Work in India

Experienced Professionals Leaving U.S. for India

By Siddharth Srivastava

Faced with the prospect of job cuts due to work being outsourced to low-cost economies, skilled foreign workers from the U.S. and U.K. have been doing the next best thing—finding employment in India. If you can’t beat them join them. The number of foreigners working in India in the software and outsourcing industries is mounting at a rapid pace, surpassing 50,000 at the last count by registrar’s office in New Delhi.

“Many foreign nationals are looking at mid-level and senior level positions in India. Every week, we get at least one well qualified foreigner looking for a job here,” says Kris Lakshmikanth, founder CEO and managing director of the executive recruiting firm Head Hunters (India). “As IT product firms set up shop in India, experienced professionals from the U.S. are also on the lookout for jobs here and the trend is being witnessed by the top-tier recruitment firms.”

“Earlier only call-center jobs were being outsourced to India,” says Anil Mahajan, executive director of Talent Hunt Private Ltd.“But now as companies start to ship high-end research and senior managerial jobs too to India, foreign workers see a huge opportunity for themselves here.

“Till recently, we were getting regular job queries from expatriate Indians who wanted to move back to India. But we were also taken by surprise when overseas professionals from countries as far as the U.S., Britain, and South Africa also started to call us up to inquire about job opportunities here. This has now become a trend,” says Mahajan.

Estimates suggest that 200,000 to 400,000 jobs have moved from the U.S. since the outsourcing trend began in the 1990s, which is still a fraction of the some 138 million jobs in the U.S. The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) says only around 2 percent of the 10 million computer-related jobs have been sent abroad; 12 percent of IT companies have outsourced work, compared to 3 percent of non-IT firms. The highest projection for outsourcing is by Forrester Research: a loss of 3.3 million U.S. jobs by 2015, including 1.7 million back-office jobs and 473,000 IT jobs, which will create a dent in the U.S. job market but not the wreck everyone fears.

Foreigners are coming on their own to India for the opportunities on offer and because it is an attractive destination. An indication of the global reach of Indian IT giants can be gauged from the fact that Infosys Technologies, which has risen to become the country’s second-largest software maker mainly due to outsourced work from the West, has reversed the trend by investing $20 million to create nearly 500 consulting jobs in the U.S. Infosys Consulting is “aggressively hiring in America,” Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani said in a statement. “As we are looking to expand our global footprint, we are creating local employment in the countries where we operate,” he said.

Resources for Finding Work in India

Consult sites such as www.naukri.com, www.monsterindia.com, www.timesjobs.com. It is best to register in these recruitment websites, as employers and headhunters keep a constant watch. Prominent newspapers such as Hindu, Indian Express, and Hindustan Times bring out job opportunity broadsheets every week that are posted online. It is sometimes worthwhile visiting the websites of prominent companies.

Siddharth Srivastava is a post-graudate in economics with more than 12 years in the media. He has worked for the Times of India, India’s largest selling English daily, for over nine years.