Operations Skills
At the operations level, though, it is common to find ex-pats working from China, India and other offshore locations. These are typically delivery managers, project managers and vendor-relationship managers, whose key role is to manage quality, metrics and relationship with the vendors.
Says Tim Bond, CEO, launchoffshore.com, U.K.-based recruitment consultancy offering career development in the offshore contact-center industry, “There are people who go to India, and when they come back they have an understanding of offshore. You can’t pick up these skills in a classroom; you need to be living and working offshore for a good number of months. Such people create a career path for themselves. So their marketability for companies looking to offshore is much more.” Bond gives the example of a U.K.-based call-center manager who ran an outbound call center from Delhi, India for six months. On his return to the U.K., he was selected as a senior sourcing and transition manager for a leading consulting firm at £10,000 more per year.
Many companies still don’t understand the difference between the skills required for an onshore versus offshore environment, and they often hire managers with local outsourcing skills even for an offshore job. They look for skills such as monitoring performance, benchmarking, managing vendors and drafting contracts, often ignoring the ability to be able to identify processes that can be sent overseas, migrating those processes, local IP-related issues, laws of the land and knowledge of cultures, hierarchies and communication, which are critical for an offshoring role.
“Outsourcing is different from offshoring,” explains Bond. “It takes a long time to begin to understand how to be productive in an offshore environment. As customers leverage services from different countries and continents, they need managers who can understand the landscape in these geographies — cultural diversity, business etiquette, cost structures, industry trends, comparative wage salaries, attrition, local laws and, of course, case studies from previous outsourcing experiences.”
Do these star performers demand extra pay in the market? Intuition would tell you they do. But, people in the industry don’t think so. While everyone we spoke to acknowledged that the role of a senior global-outsourcing manager is a premium role, they also agreed that it doesn’t warrant premium pay — at least not yet. “The sourcing role is a very senior role and a lot of importance is attached to it,” says the Hay Group’s Aggarwal. “The kind of work that you do and your seniority may go up, but your pay does not go up proportionately.” Khosla adds, “Because this industry is largely driven by labor arbitrage, don’t expect investment-banking type salaries. Though few people at the top do get paid very well, this flattens out as you go down.”
