The changing world
I get the Economist magazine weekly. I read it avidly whenever I can. The only downside is that it often so packed full of important articles that I don’t always get time to read them all. So I end up snatching 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there reading the next bit of an article I am in the middle of reading.
(By the way, if you don’t already get it, I would recommend it – they are doing a special offer at the moment. The issues are £3.50 each if you buy them individually, but the special offer is 12 issues for just £12, which is pretty good -
http://www.economist.com/.)
Anyway, today I was catching up on an article in one of last month’s magazines (that is how much I am behind because of paternity leave and slotting in work etc). The article is an in-depth survey of the global economy, and this ties in and effects your own business quite a lot. More on how this effects you in a minute …
It is all about the truth about the effect of the global market, outsourcing and offshoring (where people in other counties do a job or task for a company in this/another country).
In summary …
It is not so much about how jobs have been lost to foreign countries (in reality very few have, relative to the overall market of the UK or USA), so much as wages depressed for *fear* of the potential for jobs to be moved abroad. In Germany, 3 major companies recently signed contracts with their labour unions to REDUCE wages across the board, in return for the company agreeing NOT to move the jobs to foreign countries. Ie because of the THREAT of losing their jobs to abroad, they accepted wage cuts … Even if their jobs were not actually going to BE moved abroad.
Most affected are the middle employment area between low paid, low skilled jobs and high paid, high skilled jobs – that middle ground being Accountants, web developers, radiologists, mid-level skilled work – because the tasks for these jobs, with the aid of modern technology and telecoms, can be communicated over vast distances to the cheaper wages of the far east, China, India etc.
Why is the middle area effected? The lower end jobs, eg a Janitor or cleaner’s job, could not be done by someone in India etc. Likewise, top-level management, eg a Director could not delegate decision-making responsibilities to other non-employed outsource staff.
Meanwhile, the middle level skill jobs ARE tradable - there are trained accountant, web-developers etc in India, China, Brazil etc that can do the job perfectly adequately, will do it for a fraction of the normal UK/USA cost, AND with the aid of the internet and other modern communication tools, CAN be done over vast distances.
The global market IS a reality. Outsourcing IS a reality. Emerging economies, India and China in particular, will in a few short years be dominant on the world economy, and hence political scene. For example, at present India and China combined produce 1.2 million University science and engineering (hecne technical and about ‘development’) graduates each year, which is more than the UK, USA the whole of the European zone AND Japan PUT TOGETHER … Which means they are producing more trained, skilled labour than we are, and hence can do more and more of the middle-level jobs.
How does this affect you?
There are 2 ways that this affects you …
- You need to make sure that you are not in a ‘tradable’ job. That means that your job is not ‘offshorable’ ie that it is not the type of job that gets moved to offshore locations. In the extreme, this means you need to be either the Janitor, cleaner etc or the Director, CEO etc. If you are reading this here, then you are likely to be wanting to be, if not already be, the Director. You need to be in charge of your own company, no matter how big or small that is.
- You need to USE the global markets for you own benefit. A point I have made many times is this (in counter to the myopic argument that outsourcing is using ‘sweatshops’ or slave labour etc) … We use a number of outsource staff – and we pay them above the normal wage for them in their country. This wage is still considerably lower than a UK person of similar ability, so we are saving money, hence able to achieve more for our money. So outsource as many tasks and sections of your business as you strategically can.
So with this in mind, the main question you need to consider is “How an I going to put this into action?”
Part of the 2U ADVANCED Marketing Course goes in some detail into exactly how you can put this into action to your own benefit, and how it becomes part of the overall growth of the global economy.
The ADVANCED Marketing Course is available at the end of the Basic Marketing Course (after 10 days – you need to go through the first 10 days of the Basic course, as a foundation for the ADVANCED course to build upon).
If you have not already, you can sign up for the Basic Marketing Course in your 2U login area at https://users.2u.co.uk/.
If you have previously signed up for the Basic course and stopped it before you got to the end, simply re-subscribe once you are logged in at https://users.2u.co.uk/, soak up the first 10 days, then subscribe to the ADVANCED Marketing Course when you are instructed.
Login and subscribe now at https://users.2u.co.uk