Expert: SMEs to generate 40 million outsourcing jobs by 2040

Small and medium enterprises are expected to seek outsourced services in the next 18 years as demand for global employment sees an upward trend.

CLARK, NOVEMBER 26, 2022 – 40 million outsourced jobs worth US$600 billion will come from small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by 2040, according to outsourcing expert Derek Gallimore.

During his keynote presentation at the Payoneer Outsourcing Forum 2022 in Clark, Pampanga, Gallimore highlighted the huge untapped potential of the SME sector as a major employment and economic driver for countries around the world.

“There are about 40 million SMEs in the ‘high-cost English-speaking world’,” said Gallimore. “If most of those companies outsource one person over the next twenty years, that means 40 million jobs are coming offshore by 2040. That is a massive wave. That is worth about 600 billion [dollars] annually. I believe remote and global employment will become a default.”

Figures from Statista show that in the United States alone, 99.9 per cent of companies are considered SMEs. Employees from these firms represent 95 per cent of the U.S. workforce. But according to Gallimore, only one per cent of SMEs engage in outsourcing services. In contrast, the majority of big commercial enterprises, which represent only 0.1 per cent of all U.S. companies, are already outsourcing the majority if not part of their operations overseas. This is why Gallimore believes that global employment is the future.

Gallimore explains the development of workplace technologies—like Slack, Google Workspace, and Zoom—have made remote work and work-from-anywhere arrangements accessible to companies of any size.

Recent phenomena like the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of the work-from-home (WFH) movement, and The Great Resignation also allow companies to adapt to non-traditional forms of employment like freelancing, outsourcing, and building a distributed workforce.

Similarly, news of a possible global recession also encourages employers to look for cost-cutting strategies, and outsourcing offers a ready solution to this.

“Whether it’s ICT, whether it’s call centers, all of it is leveraging the concept of global employment. And it’s not just cost-saving, it’s not cost efficiency, but it is also availability,” said Gallimore. “The world has a shortage of talent, and the global employment paradigm, which is a very very new concept, is the resolution.”

Gallimore is regarded as a leading expert on all things outsourcing, having authored the best-selling book “Inside Outsourcing,” which talks about how outsourcing can bring economic prosperity to emerging countries like the Philippines. He has been in business for 20 years, outsourcing for over eight years, and has been living in Manila (the heart of global outsourcing) since 2014.

He is the founder and CEO of Outsource Accelerator (OA), the world’s first outsourcing marketplace that helps businesses explore, build and operate offshore teams. The OA website boasts of over 250,000 unique visitors and 750,000 pageviews every month, reaching over 1,750 monthly inbound outsourcing inquiries, which translates to 3,000 full-time jobs.

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