What happened to the manufacturing industry is currently happening to the professional services industry. The foundations for change have been laid and over the next ten years the industry will change dramatically and the smaller businesses who do not act on the opportunity are likely to fail.
Global Workforce
A little over ten years ago, with the advent of skype we started seeing free voice communication globally over the internet. This very soon followed with Video and now there are literally millions of people around the world who are using skype (and other communication platforms) as a free or low cost communication medium. The communication quality is reasonable most of the time. It is also relatively cheap and relatively accessible.
The current situation is that overall the ‘Global Workforce’ is viable and provides a ‘reasonable’ level of service. Some of the aspects of this workforce are:
Skills and Experience
Many people from overseas countries have reasonable skills and experience. A lot of them have degrees, and even master’s degrees. The level of education is perhaps a lower standard than ours, however these people can be trained to do excellent work.
The skill levels can be a bit of a barrier in some cases.
Language
The language skill of people overseas is gradually getting better. We have staff in the Philippines for example and some of them speak extremely well and others are good, mostly with a bit of an American accent.
This is still a bit of a barrier and there are some people who don’t like to deal with offshore staff or people with accents.
Cost
The cost of people working in developing nations is somewhere between 15% and 50% of the cost of a local staff member.
Attitude
Developing nations don’t have social security, aged care, health care, safe environments or a host of other wonderful benefits that we have. On top of that they tend to have a very high unemployment rate. As a result of this background they are very keen to work, they are proactive, enthusiastic, reliable, loyal and dedicated.
Humagrams®
We are just seeing the first Humagrams® emerging. That is a live hologram and if you google Tony Robbins Humagram or go to : https://vimeo.com/131408557 and you will see Tony delivering one of his seminars to an audience in Sydney. He is jumping around on the stage as he normally does, only this time he is physically in Miami, Florida. People in the audience said that it was like he was physically there on stage presenting.