I spent a number days meeting with US technology recruiters to discuss recent employment trends and to help identify their most significant needs. The aim being to look at how to facilitate linkages to a number of foreign technology markets. What they reported was not unexpected. Recruitment opportunities are fewer, downward pressure on wages has increased, the quality of people looking for work has diminished – it is not usually the top people in a company’s technology shop that are the first to go when times are tough.

The trend to offshore technical projects may be over as the difficulty of wrestling with timezones, communications and quality disturbances might have become to costly after all. The latest movement in technical project management and sourcing is ‘near-shore, off-metro‘. This means locating the technical project teams outside of capital cities, but within the shores of the parent organisation. This model offers a compromise of lower costs, ease of communications and improved quality (due to better manageability) than that of the pure offshore model.

A number of companies in the US have been doing this since the 1990s, when Internet access was not as fast as it is today but when it became obvious that ‘off-metro’ staff would be cheaper to engage – one might say the near shore movement is a return to a model that worked. I am hopeful that the current cut in employment will be short lived in the technology sector as other industries scramble to improve productivity with higher degrees of business automation and technology. The ‘near shore, off-metro’ model is likely to be applicable until such a time as when collaborative tools for distributed team management are seamless and ubiquitous and truly blur the lines of space and time for the small- and mid-sized technology shops.