12 IT Jobs Headed Offshore

The scale and scope of offshoring IT jobs are on the rise. While staffing help-desk positions somewhere in India is a given, advances in areas such as cloud computing and open-source software have encouraged U.S. companies to ship more jobs to overseas workers. We consulted with two industry experts: Rich Milgram, CEO of Beyond.com, which releases quarterly trends report on careers; and Jack Williams, vice president of strategic recruiting at Staffing Technologies in Atlanta. Both pinpointed IT jobs most endangered by offshore outsourcing, but neither is very excited about the prospect. In fact, both say it's a bad idea overall. “Most of the time, quality suffers significantly,” Williams says. Milgram says outsourcing overseas presents “problems such as time gaps, a lack of loyalty and language barriers.” That said, the trend doesn't appear to be ending anytime soon. Here are a dozen jobs – in no particular order – that top of the list of those most likely to be outsourced overseas in the not-too-distant future.