Information Technology assignments such as applications development and integration, software testing and data reporting are proving expensive for U.S. companies to do in-house. To reduce costs, these jobs were being moved more and more to lower cost countries like India. Such outsourcing of work has led to loss of jobs in the U.S.
A new initiative has been taken by an entrepreneur in Missouri, USA, to halt this trend. The initiative involves going to rural areas where there are no existing IT-trained staff, locating unemployed workers and putting them through a four-month program designed to make the trainees into software developers.
Trainees to undergo the programs are selected carefully. Local Missouri Career Centers do preliminary screening of the candidates. This is followed by behavioral interviewing and a Computer Programming Aptitude Test by the recruiter. Only those who reach a threshold, about one in eight, are accepted for training.
The entrepreneur describes the training program as “gut-wrenching hard work” and not everybody can get through it. What this means is that in each rural area, only a few persons get selected. To achieve volumes, it will be necessary to extend the program to cover ever wider regions.
While the rates charged by the new initiative are still a bit more than offshore firms, the higher charges are compensated by the risks off shoring involves, according to the entrepreneur. Off shoring typically involves communication gaps, time zone differences and quality issues arising from high attrition rates.
Read the story at The Economic Times of India.
