InShoring, RuralSourcing, and the Heartland
China puts in a call for Red Lake Workers
As many of you local readers know, "it" hails from the beautiful state of Minnesota. Here was a local story that I found to be an ironic twist in the outsourcing trend. The short & sweet:
About two dozen young men from the Red Lake reservation are in China for two to six months, setting up and operating carnival rides in a tour that will take them to Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tianjin.
A couple of my regular readers and I have been discussing the notion of"in-shoring". Another called it "rural-sourcing". It should come as no surprise that surprise that the discusser's came from rural areas and feel that the same technology that allows a white-collar job to be moved overseas, can also be used to move it to rural America.
Now I must admit that I was a bit skeptical at first. Thinking that it would be difficult to compare the number of highly educated engineers in Bangalore vs. Boondocks, USA . Recently however, I was reminded that there doesn't have to be a highly educated engineer living in Boondocks, rather just a highly educated engineer *willing* to live in Boondocks.
I was asked this recently by a high school classmate of mine. I ran into him near the town were we both grew up. He asked me, "Could you do your job from here?" Before I could answer he said, "Wait...why would you want to do!" The speaker is from in Los Angeles, and lives in the fast paced world of commercial radio. Whether *I* would be willing to do this or not, there definitely are people willing to do this, and there is a consulting company that is testing/proving this idea right now -- CrossUSA.
As many of you local readers know, "it" hails from the beautiful state of Minnesota. Here was a local story that I found to be an ironic twist in the outsourcing trend. The short & sweet:
About two dozen young men from the Red Lake reservation are in China for two to six months, setting up and operating carnival rides in a tour that will take them to Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tianjin.
A couple of my regular readers and I have been discussing the notion of"in-shoring". Another called it "rural-sourcing". It should come as no surprise that surprise that the discusser's came from rural areas and feel that the same technology that allows a white-collar job to be moved overseas, can also be used to move it to rural America.
Now I must admit that I was a bit skeptical at first. Thinking that it would be difficult to compare the number of highly educated engineers in Bangalore vs. Boondocks, USA . Recently however, I was reminded that there doesn't have to be a highly educated engineer living in Boondocks, rather just a highly educated engineer *willing* to live in Boondocks.
I was asked this recently by a high school classmate of mine. I ran into him near the town were we both grew up. He asked me, "Could you do your job from here?" Before I could answer he said, "Wait...why would you want to do!" The speaker is from in Los Angeles, and lives in the fast paced world of commercial radio. Whether *I* would be willing to do this or not, there definitely are people willing to do this, and there is a consulting company that is testing/proving this idea right now -- CrossUSA.
posted by Mike McGowan at 8:54 PM
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