One of the major offshoots of Internet has been outsourcing
withing a country or to overseas. This is mostly practiced by multinational
companies as a way of reducing costs and maximizing revenue. Major beneficiaries
of outsourcing are less developed countries like India and China.
Essentially a company can have virtual staff anywhere all over the world. Even
small companies have now started reaping the benefits of outsourcing. They
have been hiring human resources, accounting or IT staff from outside. With
outsourcing, these are now able to do without big establishments, local staff,
infrastructure, office furniture, buildings, facilities etc.
Outsourcing appears to have started with call center outsourcing to countries
like India. Now companies outsource anything. Usual projects of outsourcing
besides call center outsourcing are business process outsourcing, IT outsourcing,
payroll outsourcing, HR outsourcing, software outsourcing etc.
Companies hire virtual staff by global outsourcing and assign jobs worldwide.
So far, they appear to have been quite satisfied with this trend. They are
reported to be getting excellent worldwide staff, better service, timely completion
of projects, reliable sources of getting work done and above all huge savings
in costs.
In addition to selecting virtual staff on an ongoing basis, there are numerous
websites which accept projects from companies and their members bid for them
and then the persons being awarded the projects complete them. In this case,
hiring of workers is strictly on project to project basis and the recruiting
websites do the intermediary role.
There have been instances when some companies have been started from one's
home with virtual staff all over a country. Though outsourcing started as offshore
outsourcing, now any work being done outside the premises of a company can
be termed as outsourcing. So outsourcing can be within the same country or
offshore.
There has been a lot of criticism in developed countries against overseas outsourcing
as it has been alleged that jobs are being diverted to other countries at the
cost of local workers and wages.
Outsourcing basically saves a company big bucks. A job which an Indian worker
can happily do in $100-$200, the same will cost many times more in developed
countries. Therefore, it makes sense for big companies to get thousands of
work done from outside.
Despite adverse reaction from job seekers in developed nations, outsourcing
is getting additional attention. More and more companies are looking to the
outside to get their works done. Networking, Internet and more efficient means
of transportation have made it easy for companies to outsource their projects.
Quite a large number of workers are glued to numerous websites for independent
work. There are thousands of works online which are available to professionals
to choose from all over the world.
Outsourcing has two elements. One, it is easy for outsourcing companies to
get their jobs done all around the world. Second, outsourcing facilitates individual
workers to get freelancing work in their fields of expertise.
As Internet progresses and there are more advancements in technology, outsourcing
will only go further.
