Pharma and biotech meeting planners may find a new wrinkle in their work as more jobs begin to be "offshored" to places like India and China, according to this article in the New York Times (free registration req'd). While the number of jobs going overseas is still relatively small,
"It's a trend that's becoming more pronounced as people's budgets get tight," said Riccardo Pigliucci, chief executive of Discovery Partners International, a San Diego company that does chemistry work for drug companies...Clinical trials of new drugs, for instance, are already moving to countries in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, because the costs of conducting the trials are lower and human subjects can be recruited more easily.
I can see training becoming a bigger issue as the workforce becomes more global, and possibly even the offshoring of some meeting planners themselves as their constituents grow in Asia.
Stephanie Downs at ConferBlog also reports on the outsourcing phenomenon in this post, though it doesn't seem to address the offshoring issue. One quote from the study she discusses:
Four areas will see greater outsourcing. The [learning and training] activities and functions that a greater number of respondents expected to see outsourced in 2007 included content modification (that is, conversion of content to eLearning), content localization, management of professional learning communities, and management of other vendors that are providing training.
Pharma and biotech meeting planners may find a new wrinkle in their work as more jobs begin to be "offshored" to places like India and China, according to this article in the New York Times (free registration req'd). While the number of jobs going overseas is still relatively small,
Discovery Partners International, a San Diego company that does chemistry work for drug companies...Clinical trials of new drugs, for instance, are already moving to countries in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, because the costs of conducting the trials are lower and human subjects can be recruited more easily.
Stephanie Downs at ConferBlog also reports on the outsourcing phenomenon in this post, though it doesn't seem to address the offshoring issue. One quote from the study she discusses:
Four areas will see greater outsourcing. The [learning and training] activities and functions that a greater number of respondents expected to see outsourced in 2007 included content modification (that is, conversion of content to eLearning), content localization, management of professional learning communities, and management of other vendors that are providing training.
