With this economic crisis which get’s day by day more serious, I believe that it is crucial to foresee, after a first period potentially favourable to the low cost production modes, that these countries will also be affected by the economic slowdown. The Indians already know it since many giants have already reduced their workforce by 10% or more.

A number of our colleagues, Romania and Moldova, working for the U.S. or the UK (countries with an already major offshore maturity), know it. What should do the IT specialists in order to prepare themselves for the crisis? I see two key strategies: choosing an employer who knows how to manage his risk portfolio and to upgrade his versatility.

1. Choosing an employer with a strong commercial dynamic: many projects, many clients, frequent opening of new projects, multiple geographic origins, avoid companies too specialized or sector niche. Prefer outsourcers to software editors. Choose multi-specialized companies. Prefer a developing start-up on non-mature offshore markets (France, Germany, Scandinavia, Austria, Switzerland, Benelux..). Does this remind you of such a company? However, I truly believe in it. It’s an old technique spreading the risk. Although probably no sector will be spared by this crisis, some are more concerned than others.
2. Be more versatile: the IT specialists from low cost countries are often specialized to idiocracy. They are frequently trained by Microsoft during University (through partnership programs). They are often convinced that we can not be Java when we are dotnet or otherwise. Often they confuse language and technology. We recently had to let go two people REFUSING Java training. Can you believe it? An IT specialist saying “no” to training. As if their whole career will use only one language! Or that being trained to Java will exclude them from other Microsoft projects! I am on my third economic crisis since the beginning of my career. The one of 92-95 (after a burst of real-estate bubble), the one of 2002-2004 (the Internet burst bubble). We innovate today with a banking crisis. All I can say to everybody is that those who have crossed the most difficult years were those who knew best to move from one folder to another, no matter the language they used. It’s pure arithmetic, since there are fewer projects, we must be more agile to be part of it. We don’t choose a language as we were choosing our religion. Personally, I am very proud that I can speak French, English, German and Romanian and this allowed me to multiply by 3 the geographical origins of our client projects and likely to increase by 3 the commercial signatures. It’s the same thing with Java, PHP or Dotnet. Knowing several languages is certainly a way forward to the positions of manager and management techniques. Add that what I say about the languages may also be extended to different specialties: DBA, Business Intelligence …

The question now is at what point would the economics of IT offshore be affected by this storm, but its violence has surprised many countries in only a few days. Its spread is staggering. Therefore, it seems more appropriate to prepare before being affected! We belong to a profession that eludes most of the time more unemployed than others, but you must know that this rate has exceeded 10% for several months in the early 2000s! Offshorers, nearshorers, developers, analysts, administrators, let’s prepare for the storm! Maybe this will scare it off!