Globalization

From Business Week Online, distance is dead for professional jobs. This is a golden opportunity for eLearning.

It's globalization's next wave--and one of the biggest trends reshaping the global economy. The first wave started two decades ago with the exodus of jobs making shoes, cheap electronics, and toys to developing countries. After that, simple service work, like processing credit-card receipts, and mind-numbing digital toil, like writing software code, began fleeing high-cost countries.

Now, all kinds of knowledge work can be done almost anywhere. "You will see an explosion of work going overseas," says Forrester Research Inc. analyst John C. McCarthy. He goes so far as to predict at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages will shift from the U.S. to low-cost countries by 2015. Europe is joining the trend, too. British banks like HSBC Securities Inc. (HBC ) have huge back offices in China and India; French companies are using call centers in Mauritius; and German multinationals from Siemens (SI ) to roller-bearings maker INA-Schaeffler are hiring in Russia, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe.

Even Wall Street jobs paying $80,000 and up are getting easier to transfer. Brokerages like Lehman Brothers Inc. (LEH ) and Bear, Stearns & Co. (BSC ), for example, are starting to use Indian financial analysts for number-crunching work. "A basic business tenet is that things go to the areas where there is the best cost of production," says Ann Livermore, head of services at Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ ), which has 3,300 software engineers in India. "Now you're going to see the same trends in services that happened in manufacturing."

It's one thing to put your sales force in EMEA. When you farm out core development, say hello to fat-pipe, continuous learning.