If you’re anything like us here at IMT, you hate it when people overreact. Now a new study says we have good reason to despise all of the panicky analysts and industry pundits who have painted a bleak picture as it relates to the vitality of IT jobs in the U.S. in recent years.

Don’t'cha just hate it when people overreact? If so, you now have reason to despise all of the panicky analysts and industry pundits who have painted a bleak picture as it relates to the vitality of IT jobs in the U.S. in recent years. According to a new American Sentinel University study called “Offshoring of Information-Technology Jobs: Myths and Realities,” IT positions requiring advanced degrees and business knowledge are growing at a pace on par with the boom years experienced in the 1990s. That’s a far cry from all of the previous hoopla we’ve been hearing — of a mass exodus of IT jobs to India and elsewhere.

Why have fears of offshoring in recent years become so overblown? The American Sentinel study believes most of the job losses in high-end IT occupations were cyclical rather than structural. The study also found that offshoring risks are limited to low-end occupations that are labor intensive, easy to codify, or require little face-to-face contact. So now, according to these smarty-pants at the American Sentinel, many of the job losses following the recession earlier in the decade have been recovered. Go figure.

Jeremy Leonard, chief economist at American Sentinel University, and author of the study had this to say:
“Once the current economic expansion took hold…we found that the 2000 to 2002 job losses had little, if anything, to do with jobs moving overseas. Software engineers in particular saw a phenomenal turnaround in job fortunes, swinging from 4 percent decline to 25 percent growth.”

The news only gets weirder, it seems.

Take a Boston Globe article, which says that India is now seeking American workers for IT jobs whereas five years ago U.S. firms were luring India’s computer science grads with lucrative job offers.

Indian software provider Infosys Technologies will spend a cool $100 million over the next year to hire and train 25,000 workers and college graduates culled from places like Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University. Tata Consultancy Services of Bangalore will add 30,500 employees over the next year, including 1,000 from the United States.

The Boston Globe piece refers to this new trend as “reverse offshoring,” as Indian tech companies are making such a serious investment toward getting Americans and foreigners to work in India.

“So, Americans are now becoming the offshore component for foreign firms,” said Gary David , an associate professor of sociology at Bentley College.

Forrester Research says more than 10,000 American expatriates work in India for Indian information technology consulting and other outsourcing firms, a number that is expected to grow. American firms seeking to reduce labor costs will be sending more white-collar jobs abroad, about 3.4 million jobs and $136 billion in wages overseas by 2017, according to Forrester.

But not everyone wants to be a willing participant in offshoring, especially the Brits, as IT Week points out.

A quarterly ICT Inquiry report revealed that only four percent of 1,000 UK firms surveyed had outsourced some of their IT or telecom functions to an offshore services provider, while 94 percent of respondents said they did not currently offshore any IT or telecom activities and had no plans to do so within the next two years. A paltry two percent were considering the use of offshoring in that timeframe.

Phillip Everson, partner in consulting at consultancy firm Deloitte said he is surprised by these numbers:

It doesn’t surprise me that offshoring is not quite as popular as some would have it, but these are very strong figures. If it was 60 or 70 percent of firms, I’d have expected that.

Confusing? Indeed. What do you and your firm expect from this recent shift in offshoring of jobs?