A new word has appeared during water-cooler conversations in offices across the U.S. The term is "Bangalored." It means your job just moved to India without you. But in the shifting global labor market, vernacular can quickly become outdated. What's the term for a job that is outsourced to India only to be relayed on to China, Uruguay or Romania?
There is none—but one may soon be needed. That's because India, which virtually invented offshore outsourcing of software programming and back-office business operations, is becoming a victim of its own success. Companies such as Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India's top three outsourcing companies, became giants by tapping armies of quick-coding, English-speaking, low-wage technoserfs. But Indian salaries are rising—the median annual wage for a software engineer jumped 11% from $6,313 in 2004 to $7,010 in 2005, according to India's National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM)—and there's a mounting shortage of qualified workers that is crimping further growth. Fewer than one-third of the 400,000 Indians who annually graduate from the country's technical colleges have the right skills, says Kiran Karnik, president of NASSCOM. "We are sucking the well dry," he says, "and the current education [system] cannot replenish it quickly enough."
