Diversity of Job Types Outsourced to India

Outsourcing was once seen as a bad word in the west that meant proliferation of call centers in India, where undergraduates and ordinary graduates would provide customer care support. However, in the last couple of years outsourcing has taken a very different dimension in India with outsourcing expanding beyond low level software jobs and call center jobs to critical services such as market research and analysis, copy editing, patent generation, the drafting of legal documents and engineering plans. The knowledge process outsourcing has also reversed brain drain in India that had plagued the country for decades where the graduates from India’s elite institutions would leave their motherland for better opportunities in the west.

In fact, the entire outsourcing business has become more diversified. A notable feature of the current outsourcing business is that the Indian companies in their turn are outsourcing their work to countries outside India. With new job opportunities being created in Europe and North America, the Indian multinationals are spreading their tentacles through out the globe.

It's now commonplace to outsource offshore which means that today the different types of outsourcing jobs cover many different areas. Unskilled manufacturing jobs were the earliest kinds of outsourced work, but now outsourcing has reached knowledge-based positions in information technology (IT) and engineering. Virtual assistants, customer service representatives, writers, translators and medical transcriptionists are other types of outsourcing jobs that continue to be popular.

The Internet and the telephone make outsourcing possible. Companies and workers communicate and send documents back and forth through email. Job interviews may or may not be done over the phone. Virtual assistants, customer service reps, writers, translators, medical transcriptionists and technical workers are all outsourcing jobs that may be done virtually on an independent contractor basis.

Outsourcing jobs may also be traditional on-site positions. Many large corporations have divisions of their companies in overseas locations such as India and China. They hire workers in other countries to staff those divisions and usually keep their labor costs very low. For instance, in what is often called knowledge-based outsourcing, companies with overseas divisions hire engineers and IT workers offshore at a fraction of the cost of what they must often pay employees onshore in their home country.

Outsourced IT and engineering jobs include computer programmers, technical writers and other skilled knowledge-based work. Virtual assistants, customer service reps, writers and translators may outsource offshore for many different clients or they may work mainly for one customer. In order to find the best work, outsourced workers must have the needed skills and be fluent in the language of the hiring company's country.

Why outsource when workers in home countries need work is asked by many and the answer usually relates to the money outsourcing companies save on labor costs. People for outsourcing jobs often say global outsourcing and multinational work relations are positive things for the economy. Those against outsourcing usually assert that giving jobs to workers offshore makes the economy worse onshore for people needing work.