Traveling Onsite: Reasons (contd.): # 5

Reason 5: Strategic Staff Exchange

Long term relationships between a client and a vendor; joint ventures and partnerships; merger / acquisitions trigger the need for a strategic staff exchange program. The motive of such staff exchange program can vary from basic training knowledge sharing to a more intangible benefits like cultural sensitization, international exposure to staff (in order to scale up their abilities) or job enrichment (to keep the morale high).

Post-merger Consolidation measures often trigger large scale staff exchange programs wherein the teams of the two business entities work together in order to gel the systems, processes and work approaches together.
I once happened to witness some client side engineers to travel to India to work with their vendor's team just because they wanted to add 'international exposure' in their CV. Their complaint was that often Indians travel to US which inflates their profile whereas the professionals in US miss on this international exposure tag because company does not send them to India. So it was more of an HR issue which the client had to deal with. Not so often seen but yes, it has started to happen in US :-).

Traveling Onsite: Reasons

Being in outsourcing industry you get to travel a lot. People find it valuable to quote such travel experiences in their professional resume. There is a great 'demand' for skilled resources having international exposure- at least in India. Prospective employees with 'onsite experience' are valued more as compared to equally qualified people with no onsite exposure. This trend is more prominent in India.

I got several chances to travel various locations of US and Europe for serving client organizations. The most common reason for such travel is to gather knowledge, get training from onsite resources and then come back to your offshore location and carry out the work (and extend the training to other offshore resources). When I visited abroad for the first time, this was the very reason for my travel. However, over a period of time, I have seen more pervasive reasons for such onsite travels. These reasons are rarely known to most of the people and lesser understood by the recruiting agencies.

The reasons are (in their order of value addition):

1. Winning new accounts by showcasing skills to (still a prospective) client.
2. Establishing the building blocks of a long term outsourcing relationship.
3. Providing consultancy to clients
4. Knowledge gathering for new project (to be executed at offshore)
5. Visits under staff exchange program as a strategic step for long term relationships (between vendor and client).


Watch this space for interesting findings about the nature of onsite visit, and the recruitment perspective attached with them...