How to absorb the Outsourcing impact?

As part of my bi-weekly meetings with the business leaders in and around London, I visited the rapidly shrinking operations of a traditional steel bin manufacturing company near London last Thursday. In a 3 hour long meeting, the Managing Director told how his 150 year old business from the year 1850s was now left with no room to survive....cheaper imports from Poland and China were preferred by majority of buyers in the UK and Europe (his traditional markets) even if the competitive products has lesser quality.

He took great pains to show his operations were ensuring high quality and how skilled his staff was. This 52 year old man (an engineer by trade) was still finding difficult to believe that he has to innovate 'traditional' items.

The plant itself was operating in a building from 1890s. There were 7 young workers in their 20s and 30s working on the machines, packaging the bins, and loading a small truck. I guess they were aware that their jobs and skills were not needed in the UK much longer. It is always disheartening to such youth getting muscled by the larger economic forces.

While I had seen dozens of IT and Business analysts in the US and Europe losing jobs due to outsourcing, this particular instance had a strange impact. Somehow in this case, I was not sure if these youth had the money or the network to build new job skills- they looked vulnerable. The message is clear: the low earning people are getting badly hit and the hope lies in them picking up new skills and new technologies.

And irrespective of where you are, if you are doing a non-speacilized job, someone somewhere is trying to automate it, putting your income at risk!

If you are stuck in a job with no prospects, then action is required to correct the situation. You can start by visiting this website: www.top-jobs-careers.com

This website has a wide range of inputs on how to make a change. Hundreds of professionals and career experts have contributed their experience and views.