HIGH-TECH JOBS ALL OVER THE MAP

If any megatrend kindles hopes of producing megajobs for skilled Americans, it is the coming of age of the Information Revolution. U.S. companies are already setting industry standards and pioneering virtually all of the key technologies. Plus, America possesses the wealth of creative talents needed to lead the coming wave of newfangled software, multimedia gadgetry, and ingenious programming. There will be jobs enough, it would seem, for anyone with a decent education.

But trek out to the laboratory of Kenneth Chou in a new business park on the outskirts of Beijing, and you begin to wonder. There, 30 artists, software engineers, and computer programmers at Chou's Bilingual Educational Computing Inc. are busily designing interactive CD-ROM programs, complete with voice and animation, for teaching English. Since 1991, Bilingual has sold 50,000 sets of its First Aid English multimedia lessons, now $55 apiece, to institutes from Japan to Germany.

In fact, practically anywhere you go in Asia these days, local workers can be found doing the same highly skilled tasks you would expect to find in Palo Alto, Boston, or Tokyo. At a Silicon Graphics Inc. joint venture in Bangalore, India, software designers earning $300 a month are developing programs to produce three-dimensional images for diagnosing brain disorders. In a sleek industrial park in Singapore, engineers design future generations of personal digital assistants for Hewlett-Packard Co. In Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South China, research and development teams are at work on multimedia gizmos ranging from digital answering machines to interactive computers for children.

NEW WORLD ORDER. The message is that anybody who still thinks the only competitive edge of developing countries is cheap, unskilled labor has a lot of catching up to do. One of the less-heralded developments in the emergence of a global economy is that there is an increasingly better balance of skills in the world. The worldwide shift to market economies, steady improvements in education, and decades of overseas training by multinationals are all producing a global workforce in fields ranging from product development to finance and architecture that is capable of performing tasks once reserved for white-collar workers in the West.

What's more, dizzying advances in telecommunications are making these workers more accessible than ever. As a result, just as Westerners learned in the 1970s and 1980s that manufacturing could be moved virtually anywhere, today it is getting easier to shift knowledge-based labor as well.

Conventional notions of comparative advantage are getting blurred in the process. In electronics, cities such as Taipei, Edinburgh, Singapore, and Penang (Malaysia), which are far away from the end-user and technological breakthroughs, already have emerged as global product-development hubs.

Service providers, too, can now spread across the globe. Citibank taps local skills in India, Hong Kong, Australia, and Singapore to manage data and develop products for its global financial services. Houston-based M.W. Kellogg Co. farms out detailed architectural-engineering work for power and chemical plants it builds around the world to a partner in Mexico. And everyone from law firms to U.S. nonprofit groups cuts costs in managing and analyzing documents by hiring ``outsourcers'' such as International Data Solutions Inc. in Herndon, Va., which employs thousands of workers in the Philippines.

What makes Third World brainpower so attractive is price. A good computer circuit-board designer in California, for example, can pull down $60,000 to $100,000 a year. Taiwan is glutted with equally qualified engineers earning around $25,000. In India or China, you can get top-level talent, probably with a PhD, for less than $10,000.

TEDIOUS TASKS. Where the big savings can come is in the ``back end'' of product development--the painstaking work of turning a conceptual design into blueprints, computer code, or working models and in testing the final product. Take Bilingual's CD-ROMs. With wages ranging from $75 a month for a Chinese keypunch operator to $400 for a good artist, Bilingual can produce a CD-ROM product for anywhere from a quarter to one-tenth of the cost in the U.S. In a business as tough as CD-ROMs, where the few titles that succeed can have a shelf life of less than a year, keeping costs under control is critical.

It doesn't matter that few of the staff speak English. Bilingual writes the scripts, the most creative part, in Taiwan. The rest of the work, from animation to voice-over recording, is done on the mainland. ``When you get down to it,'' says Chou, ``about 80% of the labor in producing software is very tedious.''

Since marketing and creativity will always be in hot demand, graduates of Stanford University business school or Massachusetts Institute of Technology probably needn't worry. Trouble is, the back end happens to be where millions of Americans are employed. And they're well-paying jobs: software designers, bookkeepers, mechanical engineers, draftsmen, librarians. Most require a bachelor's degree or at least a few years in a polytechnic institute. Yet in theory, at least, none of these jobs can be regarded as secure from foreign competition. ``Just as with the move of manufacturing overseas, you're going to see an increasing flux of technical jobs out of the U.S.,'' predicts Intel Corp. Chief Operating Officer Craig R. Barrett. ``We don't have any protected domains anymore.''

NEW VIEW. Policymakers have only begun to ponder what all this means for American, European, and even Japanese white-collar workers. Until recently, it seemed the impact would be minimal. Groups such as the National Science Foundation have been warning that as the Digital Age makes industries technology-intensive, there will be an acute shortage of technicians in the West. Skilled workers displaced by outsourcing would simply move on to higher value-added sectors.

But this view is being challenged. In a jarring keynote speech to the annual convention of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in September, Edith Holleman, counsel to the House Science, Space & Technology Committee, warned that exciting new high-tech jobs ``are not reserved for you in the First World.'' What's more, she said, high-tech breakthroughs in the U.S. ``cannot be counted on to spin off into domestic manufacturing facilities providing employment for many engineers and skilled workers.''

Consider what already has happened to the PC motherboard, the circuit card loaded with chips that runs every computer. Five years ago, most motherboards--regarded as the guts of a PC--were produced in-house by U.S. computer makers. Today, some 60% are subcontracted to Taiwanese companies and their army of 150,000 information-technology engineers. And now, the Taiwanese are becoming a major force in customized computer-chip design and local-area networks. Little wonder, it would seem, that unemployment among U.S. electrical engineers hit a record 5.9% this summer, according to the IEEE, and the situation is expected to get worse.

Still, a host of factors suggests that the outflow of skilled work to cheap Third World havens is only a temporary phenomenon. For one, the wage gap is bound to close eventually, as technicians and engineers in the developing world command more. Also, the Information Superhighway is a two-way street, allowing U.S. and European engineers to compete for work in Asia as well as the reverse. Moreover, experts fear that education systems in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Mexico, among others, are not producing enough skilled workers for those nations to guarantee advancement up the industrial ladder.

ROBO-TECH. What's more, as factories in the Third World turn to state-of-the-art automation to stay competitive with domestic rivals and meet international quality standards, that automation could threaten Third World job growth. Meanwhile, technological leaps in areas such as text and voice recognition and computer-aided design software that reduce the time-consuming code-writing process will wipe out jobs in service industries.

But for now, the ground is shaking under skilled workers as Western companies take advantage of big wage disparities. Anyone who has witnessed the exceptional performances of Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese emigres in U.S. schools and labs knows that developing countries are loaded with talent. The rapid growth of Asia's economies means they can now apply their skills at home.

A wild card in the global skills game is telecommunications. Consider Hong Kong's Johnson Electric Holdings Ltd., a $195 million producer of micromotors that power hair dryers, blenders, and auto features such as door locks, windshield wipers, and automatic windows. With factories in South China and an R&D base in a Hong Kong industrial park, Johnson is thousands of miles away from a leading auto maker.

This hasn't stopped the company from virtually cornering the market for the electric gizmos it makes for Detroit's Big Three. ``My customer is right here,'' says Managing Director Patrick Wang Shui Chung, pointing to a videoconferencing unit in the midst of hundreds of engineers. For two hours each morning, design teams ``meet'' face-to-face with their customers in the U.S. and Europe. Concepts are transmitted from R&D centers in North America and Europe to Hong Kong, where 200 engineers on a network of workstations develop the motors using CAD/CAM software.

Their specifications are programmed directly into Hong Kong production lines. The process is so streamlined that Johnson can take a concept and deliver a prototype to the U.S. in six weeks. To cut that time even further, the company is investing in more advanced telecommunications to link its 9,000-worker operations in China. ``Today, your location doesn't matter,'' says Wang. ``It's turnaround time. I want to be the fastest gun in the world.''

KNOWHOW. The pioneers in bringing foreign technicians into the global workforce are multinationals such as Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, and Philips Electronics. Originally, they set up plants in Asia chiefly for cheap labor. But many of these assembly shops have gathered so much knowhow that they now do critical design-and-engineering tasks.

A good example is Motorola Inc. Its paging-device plant in Singapore boasts 75 local engineers and a new $35 million building dubbed the Motorola Innovation Center. There, the Scriptor pager was developed almost entirely by Singaporean industrial designers using Singaporean software.

Hewlett-Packard has gone even further. It encourages each of its manufacturing sites around the world to become the global base for its product. Penang, Malaysia, has become a global center for many components used in HP's microwave products and is taking over responsibility for computer hard-disk drives from Palo Alto. And in Singapore, a plant HP opened in 1970 to assemble keyboards is now the global R&D and production center for its line of portable ink-jet printers. It is also the base for all handheld devices, such as personal digital assistants and calculators.

Intensive training by multinationals is another reason that skills are rising rapidly. A key training locale is the Penang Skills Development Center, a 360-student polytechnic institute funded by 57 foreign companies and the government for local high school and university graduates. Intel donated a $140,000 microprocessor lab. A 20,000-square-foot ``team building park'' for leadership training and a clean room for vacuum technology came courtesy of Seagate Technology Inc., which has a big hard-disk plant nearby. Motorola Inc. kicked in $320,000 for PC software training and a bachelor-of-science program.

India, China, and Russia are closely watching the successes of Malaysia and Singapore. The potential of all three is staggering given the heavy emphasis their schools place on math and basic science. In these countries, notes Intel's Barrett: ``I see a ton of people who are as technically well-educated as people in the U.S.''

India has the second-largest pool of English-speaking scientific talent in the world, after the U.S. This includes 100,000 software engineers and technicians and hundreds of companies, many locally owned, that supply software to Western customers. The number of engineers could double by the end of the decade. And a monthly salary of $800 for an engineer with five years' experience is enough to place a worker squarely in India's upper-middle class. Central Europe also is peppered with brilliant scientists rapidly being discovered and unleashed. The most promising spots as production bases by 2020, according to a study of 404 European locations last year by Cologne-based market researcher Empirica, are Bratislava (in Slovakia), Western Bohemia (in the Czech Republic), Gyur-Sopron (Hungary), and Poznan (Poland).

Germany's Robert Bosch has been making engine parts in the Czech Republic since last year. ``Czech engineers have the technical competence we require,'' says Heinz G. Grewe, Bosch's head of management systems for gasoline engines. Despite added startup and training costs, industry analysts say, auto-parts makers can still save 30% by outsourcing to Central Europe. Farther east, in Russia, most multinationals have been slow to exploit the huge pool of technologists who worked in the former Soviet Union's defense industries. But pioneers such as Sun Microsystems Inc. and ABB Asea Brown Boveri (Holdings) Ltd., which already employ thousands of Russians, are bullish, particularly about the hard-driving younger generation that is eager to get rich.

WELL-STOCKED WATERS. The deepest pool of untapped skills is in China. Dataquest Inc., the research firm, estimates that there are at least 350,000 information-technology engineers in Chinese research institutes, state companies, and universities. The average salary: about $105 a month. And with the Chinese government placing electronics, telecommunications, and software industries high on its list of priorities, colleges across the country are preparing to train hundreds of thousands more.

Multinationals are fishing in these well-stocked waters. Northern Telecom Ltd. just opened a lab at the 10,500-student Beijing University of Posts & Telecommunications that will soon employ 250 engineers. NT will work with faculty and students on cellular phones, multimedia-transmission devices, and software. In the northern city of Tianjin, Motorola will have 3,000 workers making semiconductors and telecom equipment by yearend. Meanwhile, AT&T, which is just getting started in China, plans to link up the telecom plants it has scattered across the country.

For now, these facilities will focus on the enormous telecom needs of China. But it's only a matter of time before Chinese engineers start playing key R&D roles in products sold globally. ``All of our joint ventures can be technical centers in their businesses,'' says AT&T China Inc. Human Resources Director Albert Siu. ``I've never found people more open to learning. They soak up everything.''

Many of the lessons companies are learning in high tech can also be applied to the West's other big job generator: services. There, the potential of offshore skilled labor is just beginning to be tapped. For more than a decade, companies such as American Airlines Inc. and Citicorp have been loading tons of ticket stubs, credit-card receipts, and insurance forms onto planes headed for places such as the Dominican Republic or the Philippines, home of low-paid keypunch operators.

Many experts think high-end services can also be farmed out to overseas workers. Why not let specially trained Filipino accountants do much of the grunt work in preparing tax returns for multinationals? Or how about outsourcing the legal research for expensive product-liability cases? Using CD-ROM libraries, paralegals in India could churn out the mountain of writs and affidavits for such cases at a deep discount. Anupam P. Puri, managing director of McKinsey & Co.'s Bombay office, says such task transfers are long overdue. ``Most of our multinational clients are still very behind in seeing how they can redistribute service work around the world,'' he says.

Regulatory hurdles remain, of course. But the technological barriers are falling fast. International Data Solutions, for example, scans case and client files for U.S. law firms and transmits them in digital form via satellite to the Philippines. There, workers organize and index the documents so they can be readily retrieved by a computer network in the U.S. International Data employs two full-timers in Virginia--and up to 3,000 Filipinas. ``With the Information Superhighway revolution, this trend is accelerating dramatically,'' says International Data President Kenneth R. Short. ``It really doesn't matter where the work is done as long as quality, price, and service are right.''

BROADER VIEW. In the construction industry, Houston's M.R. Kellogg has teamed up with Mexico's Bufete Industrial on contracts to build petrochemical-refining systems worldwide. After developing conceptual drawings on a computer, Kellogg transmits them to Bufete, of which Kellogg owns 21%. The Mexicans turn the drawings into detailed blueprints. The arrangement, says Kellogg Manager Robert Salazar, ``makes us competitive all over the world.''

While this flexibility sounds great for corporations, it could be traumatic for professionals who are not well-equipped for a global economy. As gaps between experience levels and wages narrow around the world, skilled workers will compete on a more equal footing. To profit from the emerging trends, workers will require broader training than is now provided by most education systems--in both the East and the West.

Rather than focus on one discipline, for example, professional workers will need to understand the economics and technologies that are revolutionizing their industries. In the banking world, ``the pure technologist is already dead,'' says George P. DiNardo, Singapore-based chief technology officer for Citibank's Asian consumer business. ``And so is the pure businessperson.''

In electronics and telecommunications, engineers discarded by Corporate America are taking advantage of cheaper access to data and video networks by forming their own design houses for Asian manufacturers. In many other fields, professionals may have to similarly redefine their jobs in order to prosper from the globalization of work rather than be at its mercy.