Shoring up your job prospects even as work shifts across borders

In this series, manpower correspondent Tay Hong Yi offers practical answers to questions on navigating workplace challenges and getting ahead in your career.

- 

Get more tips by signing up to The Straits Times' Headstart newsletter.

Q How do I preserve my job prospects against offshoring?

A Offshoring is the practice of shifting work from one country to another, usually for reasons such as cost or greater availability of the required skills in another market.

Workers caught up in the shift may be at risk of retrenchment if there is no more work of the sort they have been doing where they are based and there are no clear-cut alternative roles to transfer them to.

To discern how vulnerable you are to offshoring, and hence decide on your next steps, you need to first understand the nature of your role.

Jobs with repetitive work performed through digital tools and driven by highly standardised, formal processes tend to be more vulnerable to offshoring, says Mr Ravi Nippani, head of regional industries and solutions at Mercer Asia.

These roles involve tasks that can be more readily standardised and scaled up at pace with new hiring, he notes.

Examples of such roles include transactional finance, information technology (IT) support, data entry or data processing, and IT testing and maintenance, Mr Nippani says.