'Offshore-proof' jobs revealed

Hot jobs in IT used to be the ones with high salaries and big bonuses but now the best roles are the ones that are resistant to the offshoring drain, according to research company Foote Partners.

The company has identified a list of IT jobs that it reckons are harder to offshore.

These include "enabler" jobs such as enterprise architects, business analysts, business process modellers and project managers.

Roles such as these involve understanding the impact of IT decisions across the business and, as the research firm's CEO David Foote said in a statement, "The sort of inside knowledge required do these jobs obviously helps ensure their 'insourceability'."

Customer-facing jobs are "back in a big way" the analyst said, as companies look to new products and services and customer support systems. These jobs include applications developers (for .NET, Java, ERP and CRM), data warehousing and business intelligence workers, database developers and help desk specialists.

And while low-level coding will go offshore, Foote said: "It's obvious that this work increasingly requires customer and industry-savvy workers and sometimes familiarity with company culture. Tough to find that in Bangalore."

Infrastructure jobs in areas such as security (forensics, analysts and senior managers), network management, engineering, wireless engineering, disaster recovery and storage/SAN administration are also in strong demand and hard to outsource, the research company said.