Outsourcing Dominica Part 2

In the last article, I talked about outsourcing at a high level. To recap, there’s big money out there and it won’t stop anytime soon. That’s the hard reality. The more sobering truth is that we won’t touch a dime if we maintain our current course.

I recite a familiar line that I would like to share with you: if it was so easy, everybody would be doing it. It’s not easy to bring these projects home but it’s worth a try. Here is what we need to do.

Invest in education

IT professionals have IT degrees. These aren’t cheap but they are worth every penny. You won’t land an IT job without an IT degree. That’s the hard reality. How do we get there from here? We have to push education as a priority. Computer courses at the state college need to be a priority. More importantly, course credits need to be recognizable and transferrable to institutions of higher learning. The sad reality is that our college A-level courses cover the 2nd to 3rd year of university at most North American colleges but because we don’t have a good accreditation system, our A-levels don’t transfer effectively. Students have to endure the humiliation of putting up with high-school algebra when they are fluent in calculus. That sets our IT degree a few years back placing our crop of graduates behind others seeking to break in to the outsourcing market.

Venture Capital

Venture capital, or start-up money, must be readily available with friendly terms. I’ll leave it up to you to define ‘friendly’. However, you need to recognize that one or two IT shops attracting major work pays out to the country in tax benefits, office space rentals, airport traffic, hotel accommodations and more. It’s worth it to grease these wheels so that they roll smoothly.

Diaspora Incentives

Let’s face it, our talented pool of workers capable of making this initiative a reality live outside of Dominica. We need to make it worth their while to give up high paying jobs to return to Dominica. We won’t attract them with high salaries because we can’t possibly match North American salaries. What we can offer is less stress, duty free incentives, tax breaks and other bits of candy that will sweeten the deal.

Qualified Workers

Any IT shop needs a steady stream of workers to grind out code. However, if we have a functioning education system, it’s trivial to have these students gain practical experience for their degrees by apprenticing at the local IT shop. They’ll earn income while gaining valuable experience. It’s a win-win model that works well in North America and it should find traction here as well.

Business Environment

Finally, policy friendly laws and initiatives need to focus on attracting and keeping businesses. That’s the hard part because it requires a mentality change. We need to not focus on the single dollars landing at the airport. Instead, we need to focus on encouraging that new dollar to stay and breed more. Today, this isn’t the case. The high rate of tax and generally unfriendly business policies tend to make it difficult to attract the right quality of people.

It’s important to point out that none of this will happen if we maintain our current heading. The talented workers who have left Dominica to live and work abroad have valuable connections that they can call upon to land important contracts – that’s what they do on a daily basis. The key is to get these people to work out of Dominica. And for that, we need to make it worth their while to give up the lifestyle that they are accustomed to in order to make it happen in Dominica. And that is perhaps the single most difficult piece of the puzzle.