Today on MSNBC.com, there is a report that according to the Gartner group, one of 10 the U.S. computer services and software industry could be sent offshore by the end of 2004

This story may be yours. It is much too familiar. Yet the ending of the article (I hope) is the thing you take away from this because it is a more common story. Job searches are taking a very long time, particularly for senior talent. Yet many are re-connecting with work even though it may take over a year.

Keep applying!

Jobless tech exec keeps applying
By Jane Weaver
MSNBC

MORGANVILLE, N.J., July 8 — Being out of work is hardest for Chad Henderson when his 11 year-old daughter asks her father if he can afford to buy her a toy or game. “I die inside, because she shouldn’t have to worry about that,” says Henderson, a computer specialist who’s been unemployed since 2001.


BEFORE THE INTERNET crash hit in early 2000, Henderson, 52, was earning a comfortable, six-figure income as director of global technology services for business information giant D&B. After nearly 16 years with the venerable financial publisher, formerly known as Dun & Bradstreet, Henderson was a senior manager in a 50-person technology team charged with the responsibility of keeping the company’s computer systems running.
Henderson and his wife, Robyn, imagined he would to stay with D&B until he retired.
He, Robyn and their daughter enjoyed life in their spacious ranch home in a rural, affluent New Jersey town about 50 miles from New York City. Summers were spent relaxing by the in-ground pool in their backyard.
“I truly didn’t appreciate what I had until I lost it,” says Henderson.
As a veteran information technology executive Henderson was accustomed to career security in an industry that had always had more jobs than people to fill them. Demand for infomation-technology (IT) executives exploded in the 1990s as corporations invested billions in technology. But after Y2K passed without incident and the Internet bubble burst, the high-tech industry began to collapse.

In 2001, a new chief executive arrived at D&B, whose operations include ACNielsen and R.H. Donnelly, with a mandate to modernize the 160-year-old company. The company’s stock price was languishing and the CEO began an aggressive cost-cutting mission which lead to D&B outsourcing its computer information functions to another firm.
Along with other key managers, Henderson was laid off in August 2001 with a six-month severance package.
Initially he decided to start his own consulting firm called Optimum Business Solutions and began trying to line up clients in New York.
Then 9/11 happened.

“After 9/11, the dynamics of the IT industry changed immensely,” Henderson says. “The focus had changed from looking at the cost of the machines to looking at the cost of the people. Companies cut staffs. Small companies didn’t have a chance.”
When it comes to job losses, IT has been one of the hardest hit industries in the country. Sales losses and the weak economy meant businesses stopped investing in new technology.
Nearly 5 percent of IT jobs in the U.S. have evaporated in the last year, according to the Information Technology Association of America. What’s worse, many of those jobs are gone forever as more corporations outsource computer functions to firms overseas.
The future remains even more uncertain for IT professionals like Henderson. A recent report by Forrester Research predicted that outsourcing to countries like India, the Philippines and China would cost 3.3 million American jobs and result in $136 billion in lost wages by 2015.
Consulting work is hard to come by. A yearlong project with an investment bank was cut after six months when the investment bank had financial trouble.

Chad Henderson scans the Internet for job possibilities in the basement of his Morganville, N. J., home. He has computer workspaces set up in the office for himself, his wife, and their 11-year-old daughter.

In some ways, Henderson is fortunate.
Robyn, a real estate agent working for Century 21, has been able to cover many expenses. They don’t have big credit card bills because they always paid for things like home renovation with cash. They aren’t bankrupt and aren’t yet worried about losing their home.
“We’ve managed to live on a lot less money,” says Robyn. “We don’t use credit cards. We don’t go to movies or out to eat.”
Vacations are out, too.
“The only thing that won’t suffer is my children,” says Henderson. “My little girl still takes piano and dance lessons.” They also continue to financially help Henderson’s 3 grown children from a previous marriage.
But he does worry about having to dig into his 401(k) to cover the $1,000 per month health insurance and the house payments.
“We’re eating that up and I’m afraid the retirement savings is going to be gone in another 12 months,” he says.
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In moments of despair Henderson considers leaving IT, a career he’s pursued since he was a teenager, to start his own business in home improvement or lawn care.
“I’m afraid that IT has gone the way of the mechanical engineer, that for the first time in my life, I’m going to be obsolete,” he says.
“People are still getting laid off. Nobody’s growing; everybody’s shrinking. The prospects are so dim, I need to have a fallback position.”
Maybe he won’t need one.
A recent interview for a full-time position with a major corporation in the area looks promising. It’s narrowed between him one other candidate. Chad is confident that the job is a “distinct possibility” although he’s cautious in his excitement.
“You never know. I’ve had jobs that go away the day before I start because the company got into financial trouble,” he says. “But they really liked me. Maybe soon I could have a job offer.”
MSNBC.com update: There’s a happy ending to Henderson’s saga. Shortly after his profile was published, Henderson was offered and accepted a full-time, senior IT position with “a good salary, a signing bonus and excellent benefits” from a nationally known firm, he says.

Globalization takes toll on techies

It’s not just low-level jobs that are leaving U.S. shores

By Martin Wolk
MSNBC

July 24 — To some high-tech workers, the New Economy is starting to look a lot like the Old Economy. And that is a frightening prospect.

IN THE OLD ECONOMY, the manufacturing sector has lost nearly 4 million jobs since 1980. Some jobs have disappeared because of increased productivity, but many affected workers in industries like steel, apparel and electronics have been replaced by lower-priced labor overseas. As globalization marches on, many jobs in the New Economy of services and high technology seem to be headed the same way.
It’s not just a matter of the dependable but relatively low-level jobs like answering phones and providing technical support. With improved technology allowing for seamless patching of telephone calls around the world, those call center jobs have been migrating at a rapid clip to India and other countries with a plentiful supply of well-educated workers who can be hired at a small fraction of the cost of U.S. workers.
Now the trend is moving up the skill ladder, with jobs in computer software development, accounting and even investment banking research all offering opportunities for companies to cut labor costs, often at the expense of U.S. workers. And that worries labor activists, some economists and policy-makers.
“The globalization competitiveness problem has always been seen as a problem for blue-collar jobs in manufacturing - dirty old industries that policy-makers probably figure might just as well be elsewhere,” said Jared Bernstein, economist at the liberal
“There are companies that realize that there are lots of skills in places like India to do accounting for a fraction of what the costs are in the U.S.”
— TOM LYNCH
IBM's employee relations director Economic Policy Institute. “But these are not those industries.”
A sobering glimpse into the mind-set of high-tech companies considering the offshore option came this week from International Business Machines Corp. in the form of a conference call recording that was obtained and released by WashTech, a labor union. In the recording of the March call, an IBM executive says the company is looking at “an emerging trend” of moving service jobs offshore, including engineering, software development, computer chip development and accounting and financial services.
“There are companies that realize that there are lots of skills in places like India to do accounting for a fraction of what the costs are in the U.S.,” says the executive, identified by the union as Tom Lynch, IBM’s employee relations director. In the call, Lynch says IBM will face an employee relations “challenge” as it moves more jobs overseas.
“We don’t want to sit back and say don’t do it because there are going to be problems,” he says. “Our competitors are doing it, and we have to do it. On the other hand it does raise significant employee relations concerns….”
An IBM spokesman declined to comment on the recording specifically, but he noted that the Armonk, N.Y.-based company generates most of its revenues overseas and has offices in 160 countries.

“Expansion in China, India and any number of countries in the world does not mean subtraction in the U.S.,” said the spokesman, Tim Blair. “There is a global war for talent, and we are looking to add capabilities to satisfy our customers.”
Blair also said IBM has added to its U.S. work force every year for the past five years and plans to do so again in 2003. IBM’s overseas work force has been growing more rapidly and now represents 54 percent of the nearly 300,000 total, up from 51 percent five years ago.

International growth drives United Parcel Service
Lynch, the IBM executive, was certainly right about one thing: In the high-tech industry, everybody is doing it. Forrester Research, in a much-quoted study issued late last year, estimated that 3.3 million jobs representing $136 billion in wages will move overseas from the United States by 2015. Everything from computer programming to accounting to architecture will be affected, moving to countries like India, Russia, China and the Philippines, according to the study.
Already tech giants like Oracle, Dell, Motorola and Intel have opened software development centers in India, Russia and China. Insurance giant AIG is moving some back-office functions to the Philippines, according to the Forrester study. Investment banking giant Morgan Stanley is building a facility in a Bombay suburb that will employ 1,600 people in jobs like back-end operations and research, according to the Economic Times of India.
Microsoft recently opened a small technical support center in Bangalore, India, to go along with its software development center in Hyderabad, said Stacy Drake, a Microsoft spokeswoman.
“India is a very, very key area for us,” she said. “There is a wealth of technical talent, and there is a growing number of customers and partners there. … Cost is a factor in everything we do, but it’s not the single determining factor.”
Microsoft plans to add up to 5,000 jobs over the coming year, including 3,000 to 3,500 in the United States, the company announced Thursday.
Drake said the majority of the company’s “core development work” will continue to be done in the Puget Sound area around Seattle, where nearly half its 55,000 employees are based.
(MSNBC is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC.)
Stephanie Moore, a vice president at Forrester who helps companies outsource technology work, says she has mixed feeling about the trend of highly skilled jobs moving offshore. But she says companies like IBM are responding to customer demand for lower-cost services. Because even highly skilled programmers in India make only about $5,000 a year, companies like IBM can offer their customers a billing rate of just $22 to $37 an hour for work done in India, compared with $150 an hour for comparable work done in the United States.
“Certainly they are well-paying jobs disappearing from the U.S. economy,” she said. “In my opinion, it’s helping U.S. companies survive right now. Companies that are basically paralyzed because of their finances can do more with what little budget they have. But it’s a double-edged sword. It is hurting the labor market in general, but it’s helping the economy to succeed.”

Ernest Goss, a professor of economics at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., agreed that the trend is troubling when technology could allow even professors, for example, to be replaced by remote lecturers.
“We’ve all got to be on our toes now,” he said. “Even the person with a Ph.D. has to be much more flexible than they were 20, even 15 years ago.”
Concern also is growing in Washington, where the lack of U.S. job growth has become a huge political issue. U.S. Reps. Jay Inslee and Adam Smith, both Democrats from the Seattle area, last week asked the Government Accounting Office to study the issue of information technology jobs moving overseas. “I’m concerned that we may be training individuals at home for jobs that are being sent overseas and I want to make sure that we better understand this issue,” Smith said in a news release.
John Challenger, chief executive of the outplacement firm of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said it is natural that workers grow nervous as more skilled jobs go overseas. “Technology and globalization are two major forces that are inevitably going to wreak real change in the way things are done now and over the next decade,” he said. But he said globalization also will bring enormous opportunities for U.S. companies as vast new consumer markets are created in places like China and India.
He noted that even in the 1990s, as manufacturing jobs disappeared, the U.S. economy created a net 26 million new jobs. And he said tens of millions of jobs can never be shipped overseas because they rely on face to face contact or proximity to the vast U.S. market.
But that is small comfort to displaced workers.
“The future of the American economy is at risk right now because of companies exporting our jobs,” said Marcus Courtney, president of WashTech, a Seattle-based affiliate of the Communications Workers of America. “What skill is the United States going to be able to create that some other country isn’t going to be able to replicate it and do it cheaper?”

And actually, the unemployment rate nationally is 6.4%, the highest in ten years.

The government has run ou of tricks and will spend its way out of this one. Low interest rates. Increased government spending to inflate our way out of this. I know that employment is a lagging statistic in a recovery but I hope it works soon or we're heading for chaos. G-d help us if there is an attack on our soil.

Will the job market ever get better?

Though job cuts have slowed, employers still aren't hiring, extending longest slump since WW II.
July 2, 2003: 12:23 PM EDT
By Mark Gongloff, CNN/Money Staff Writer



NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Two years ago, the U.S. economy was just entering its third -- and probably last -- quarter of recession, and the unemployment rate was just beginning to climb.

Two years later, the jobless rate is still climbing, and is likely to rise further Thursday when the Labor Department is scheduled to report on unemployment and payrolls for June.


According to a recent Reuters poll, economists, on average, think unemployment will rise to 6.2 percent from 6.1 percent in May, and they think payrolls outside the farm sector will be unchanged after losing 17,000 jobs in May.

Usually, by this point in the recession-recovery cycle, the jobless rate should be on its way back down. The last time it rose two years after the last quarter of a recession was in 1982, when the economy was just climbing out of a deep, prolonged slump.

Today's economy, too, seems to be climbing out of its own slump -- but it probably won't be enough to create many new jobs any time soon.

"We're looking for increases in employment, but because the labor force is growing 1 percent a year, we need 125,000 new jobs per month to stabilize the unemployment rate," said Mickey Levy, chief economist at Bank of America and one of the best economic forecasters of the past 17 years, according to a recent Federal Reserve study. "We see the unemployment rate drifting slightly higher and lingering higher for the next year."

Even if the Labor Department says the unemployment rate didn't rise in June, there's little hope that payrolls grew very much, if any. Payrolls have fallen year-over-year for 23 straight months, according to Labor Department data, and could very well add another month in June, extending the worst stretch for the labor market since World War II.

The real unemployment picture

And the unemployment rate, though relatively low by historical standards, may actually understate the labor market's woes.

For one thing, many unemployed people have simply quit looking for work, meaning they are not counted as part of the "labor force" and thus are not counted in the Labor Department's calculation of the unemployment rate. If the economy improves, many of these "discouraged" workers -- 482,000, by the department's last count -- will likely start looking for work again, and the unemployment rate will rise.


Unemployment rises to 6.1%

Meanwhile, 1.9 million people have been unemployed 27 weeks or more, meaning many of them have exhausted their unemployment benefits. According to research by Anthony Chan, chief economist at Banc One Investment Advisors, 43.2 percent of all unemployed workers have exhausted their benefits -- the highest rate in more than three decades.

"Despite the fact that the unemployment rate remains low relative to prior economic downturns, the burden on the unemployed population has been the most severe, by one measure, since at least 1972," Chan said.

Furthermore, many of the people who do have jobs are working only part-time. According to the Labor Department, if you add all the workers "marginally attached" to the labor force -- out of work and not looking for work -- to all those working part-time and those unemployed and looking for work, the unemployment rate rises to 9.7 percent.

Not included in this group are the untold number of people who have had to take lower-paying jobs because they can't find work in their chosen profession. That trend, combined with all the slack in the labor market, has conspired to slow wage growth. That, in turn, could hurt consumer spending, which fuels more than two-thirds of the world's largest economy.

Signs of a plateau, if not a rebound
Still, there have been some hopeful signs for the labor market lately. New claims for unemployment benefits have slowed lately, dropping to just above 400,000 in the week ended June 21, the benchmark level indicating labor market weakness.

And monthly job-cut announcements tracked by Chicago outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas fell in June to their lowest level in 31 months.


But these numbers simply mean that employers have finally stopped cutting jobs. They've yet to show any inclination to hire more workers.

The Manpower Inc. survey of the third-quarter hiring plans of 16,000 U.S. employers showed only 20 percent planned to add workers -- a lower percentage than the second quarter, and lower than the third quarter of 2002.

"U.S. employers are still void of the business confidence needed to increase their employment projections for the third quarter," Manpower CEO Jeffrey Joerres said last month. "Employers have expressed uncertainty in hiring intentions in recent Manpower Employment Outlook Surveys, but this quarter represents the weakest job outlook in 12 years."

And a Conference Board survey of help-wanted advertising showed job listings fell in eight of nine regions, and the private research group's "Help Wanted Index" was lower than it was a year ago.

"Consumer spending remains the mainstay of this weak economic recovery. With tax cuts enacted, the consumer is likely to continue hanging in there," said Conference Board economist Ken Goldstein. "But a real recovery, including a slowdown in layoffs and the opening of new jobs, is far more dependent on recovery in (business) investment than on stronger consumption growth."

Is This Progress??

So here we are in the beginning of July. What's going on.

From my seat, I see the beginning of a long slow recovery. People are starting to get jobs again. But not nearly enough to make a difference in the unemployment numbers. Mass layoffs are ending. Off-shore outsourcing is here and will reduce more jobs in the near future . . .but create some jobs for more senior professionals.

There is some senior level hiring going on for the first time in several years. The bulk of jobs remain staff level positions at reduced salaries from a few years ago. Consultants are starting to find work again but rates are off.

In our Yahoo group (NewYorkMetroTechnologyJobs is also a group on Yahoo. To join you can click on a link on our website home page or go to Yahoogroups.com and join the group) we are distributing more jobs than at any point since inception.

You can find work, but kind of like the Clinton administration referred to the "continuous campaign" in describing how everything they did was with an eye to ward running for office, everything you do must be with an eye toward networking for a job.

A lot of people make the mistake of in this economy, you are making a huge mistake if you think their job search ends with an offer of employment. Your firm could begin layoffs a feew months after you join. The simple suggestion is keep involved with the network of resources you built up while looking for a job. Social calls. Notes. Periodic emails. Stay in contact. You never know when you might need them.