For employers is advantageous to acquire workers in conditions not met in their regions. A project manager skilled in working with human resources in a multicultural context can obtain good results with offshore teams.
In high tech countries the very old and very fresh software solutions are the best candidates for being outsourced - both are considerably less profitable and riskier than a mature product or service.
Outsourcing customer services and digital marketing jobs is already a common practice, and if a company has been able to externalize such activities without losing their customers, then the competition has to streamline their internal processes too.
Using chatbots as customer support representatives may be trendy and funny, but not of much help in resolving non-trivial problems, emergencies or filtering out fraudulent schemes. I consider that replacing skilled workers with AI is more a media buzz than an upcoming technology with real impact on the current markets, and employing offshore teams is one of the typical characteristics of the globalized economy rather than a transient fashion.
For employees the possibility of working in offshore teams usually represents an opportunity to fund their studies or to collect seed capital for a small business.
The catch with these externalized jobs is that the employers eventually will train the worker to do what he or she needs to get done, but nothing more and nothing else, many of them don’t even want to spend time and money with entry-level workforce.
In such conditions the remote worker has to keep taking carefully selected courses, has to search for possibilities for doing professional practice, and to choose contracts for consolidating his or her skills and job history.
It’s not easy to keep the right balance between a well-paying contract, permanent learning and taking up occasional jobs for pushing us out of our comfort zones. The temptation of a boring but materially rewarding job is always there, and it's nothing wrong with investing all our energies in a single project for a couple of weeks, or making money during 20-30 hours per week, but stagnating professionally is as expensive as ignoring our health.
Each project has a start date and an end date, regardless of how optimistic the project owners are. Consequently a contractor or employee working for remote clients has to assume the responsibility of pursuing a personal study plan and diversified work experiences - a need which consolidates the demand of educators and personal coaches ready for the challenges of our epoch.
