They could have interviewed you for the article, seniormoment. “Nearly half of IBM’s engineers and technical specialists work outside the United States. Hiring trends are similar: While big U.S. firms like Microsoft, Accenture, and EDS are taking on modest numbers of American workers, their payrolls are mushrooming in places like India. Corporations closely guard the details of patent and employment data, but this much is obvious: American companies are becoming less American.” (Go to the Invest in Corporate America link). The offshoring trend, while causing a loss of jobs to American workers, has kept the competitiveness of American companies. It’s better to be a stockholder than an employee of an American company, according to the article.
The main article is about the offshoring of high tech, telecom, and biotech jobs, and our complacency. “We had more sports-exercise majors graduate than electrical-engineering grads last year,” lamented General Electric Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt in a January speech.
How will this affect our economy, nationally and locally? How do we best prepare our youth for the global marketplace?
I’ve come to believe that keeping our youth in structured activities most afternoons and weekends is going to hinder them in the new economy, but that is a whole different topic. I was one of those parents spending $1K/month on my kids’ activities, driving them all over, and had done that for over 10 years. It was expensive, time-consuming, and restrictive. I now believe that this new way of raising kids is not doing them any good, so a few months ago, I cut back on the activities. A modern kid’s life is a huge social experiment, and what are the benefits of being constantly in an environment where adults tell you what to do? How can you create, socialize, structure your time, make up your own games? What skills do people really need to be productive and make a living in the new economy?
As the article said, while the American college student is drinking beers and watching football, the Chinese student is on his fourth book. And that’s the person that our kids will be competing against.
