CNN Money interviewed Spherion and came up with 5 careers that are hot at the moment. It set me thinking about the personal career plans my MBA students had come up with in the Global Outsourcing class – last fall. The top careers in the CNN story really make sense for American students.
Take accounting, obviously Sarbanes-Oxley implementation and oversight is hot right now and everyone is deluged. A good SOX implementer must understand the accounting of buying,making and selling. In marketing and sales New Product Development (NPD) and Product Management skills are important and outsourcing of parts of the NPD process and the American managers ability to integrate stuff should be an in-demand skill indeed. Patent Lawyers who have Science and Technology backgrounds are in high demand, no surprise that for the moment top Law firms are hiring Bio-Informatics Ph.D.’s from Yale to bridge the "gap" in the patent law firm. In Technology Software Quality checking skills are hot. It again brings in the integrator role where the Quality person needs to understand parts and how the parts fit to make the system work. In Manufacturing "Lean is in" and lean needs the manufacturing manager to be similarly clued in to various parts of the system i.e. machine,labor,utilities and control systems and how they work together.
In academe these skills are supposed to come in through "capstone" classes of each discipline . However, in my experience students who have actually worked somewhere, anywhere, seem to "get it" better and quicker…