IT and business viewpoint from the National Outsourcing Association

In recent weeks Lloyds Banking Group has been under fire from the media as a result of a Daily Mail report that said Indian IT contractors were being brought into the UK to work in place of UK counterparts.

The article claimed that information from internal documents, seen by the Daily Mail, had revealed Lloyds managers are concerned about knowledge gaps of some computer specialists, hence they were possibly looking to their Indian partners to provide them with the necessary skilled workers.

The Daily Mail’s headline was that Indian IT staff are taking British jobs, perhaps in a bid to stir up more protectionist feelings towards using any form of offshored service, whether Lloyds actually decided to do so or not. However, there is a point to be made with regards to the UK’s ever expanding skills gap.

The offshoring of low level IT jobs has been scrutinised for some time now. Firms excessively offshoring work and not retaining (and training) in house specialists has resulted in fewer graduate opportunities and in turn means that mid level IT specialists are becoming a rarer breed. As India and various other destinations have enjoyed a wealth of low level IT work, IT specialists in these countries will arguably have had better experience and training than their UK counterparts. In turn, those IT workers that have climbed the career ladder in key offshore destinations would have had such a breadth of experience that they may be better placed to manage the IT teams of the future.

With this in mind it is understandable that large corporations are looking to incorporate offshore teams within onshore operations. However, there needs to be a proper balance between onshore and offshore work and UK organisations need to start working with home grown specialists a lot more.

Why not look at the opportunities for businesses to send their people offshore to get ‘on the job’ training? Organisations sending technical entrants or graduates offshore for the first year would be safe in the knowledge that they have a quality skill set to bring back home. And these staff members would have built up good working relationships with the supplier’s team, too.