As usual GBS hit the nail on the head. From my experiences as a former member of a (non-IT) profession, I learned that the number one priority is regulating the flow of new members in order to maintain the scarcity salaries of those already 'in the club'. Too many new entrants coming along? Simply increase the difficulty of the entry process until the flow is suitably reduced.

If you get any say in the matter (you almost certainly won't), try to ensure that IT does not become a 'profession'.

People dont want to enter and people want to leave IT because of the contempt with which they are treated & the ease with which cynical employers are able to discard and dispose of them in favour of cheaper offshore resources. The UK legislative regime seems deliberately constructed to make this easy to do.

India, & china are turning out MILLIONS of IT graduates a year and are able to hawk them in our economy with total impunity. Work permits are p*** easy to get. Yet they set up barriers to entry to their own economies. (Did you know that you will not get an Indian Telecom operators license if you intend to operate your network from outside of India - Yet inceasing proportions of our own networks are operated from there) The government supports this mode of operation in a number of ways whilst not protecting UK employees in any substantive way.

WIPRO, TCS, INFOSYS, TECH-MAHINDRA and the others are not just eating our lunch, soon they will be setting the menu, cooking, serving, eating it and washing the plates. The only question is who onshore will be left in a position to take a place at the table. Unless you are a plumber, shop worker or gardener your job is going to mumbai soon.

Offshoring is bad for employees, customers and the economy - good for . . . . . . . shareholders ....... in the short term

The Government is blind? Quite possibly; but that pessimistic view isn't really supported by the report I was commenting on (feel free to disagree with it, of course).

Off-shoring is no panacea - managing a remote workforce is harder than managing a local one and a successful user of outsourced services needs a certain organisational maturity. Firms doing it well seem to concentrate on a mixture of local and global resources.

However, using the best, most qualified, people for the job, regardless of where they happen to live, has a certain attraction. And English workers seem to be competing much better as "knowledge workers" than they do as plumbers, say, these days.