Submitted By: Robyn Bowie

Well if you do all you need is a digital pen and palette and an Internet headset.

The latest trend in outsourcing to India is consumer services, and tutoring is one such service. The company is called TutorVista, a company that employs about 600 fully trained tutors just waiting to help your struggling student. With focus on standardized tests increasing in our elementary and high schools, more and more children are turning to well-known places like Sylvan and Kaplan for tutoring, but places like these can run up to $60 per session. TutorVista, on the other hand, offers monthly fees of $99 for all the 45-min tutoring sessions you need. This is much more economical for families like the Thams from Arcadia, California who were interviewed for the New York Times article “Hello India? I Need Help with My Math.” And other families seem to be catching on to this trend because TutorVista’s U.S. clients now number at 10,000.

But tutoring isn’t the only consumer service from India gaining in popularity. A new service called Ask Sunday will order your take-out food as well as a number of tasks formerly done by a personal assistant. And in fact, that’s exactly what Ask Sunday is – a remote personal assistant. The difference is this assistant will cost you just $29-$49 a month and is available 24 hours a day without complaint.

With all the outsourcing being done today, I wonder where we draw the line in what can and cannot be outsourced. Certainly we will still have demand for such things as hospitals and doctors. However, there is also a new trend of flying all the way to India to be treated for surgeries that are just too expensive in the United States. It’s called “medical tourism” and it is actually generally less expensive to fly all the way to India, have the surgery and fly back. And most patients still have the luxury of being treated by an American educated doctor who speaks perfect English.

So what job can’t be outsourced? Are we to say goodbye to all American jobs forever?

Obviously not, but I do think we will be surprised to see the types of jobs that will eventually be outsourced in the future. As more and more jobs are outsourced I wonder whether or not this is such a good thing, particularly when it comes to such consumer services.

Many of these services, like the two mentioned above, used to consist of face to face real live human interactions. Using such devices as the Internet to communicate is very useful, but we miss out on important aspects of live communication such as nonverbal cues. These cues may include facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice and can be up to 75% of communication between people. Most people don’t even realize how important nonverbal communication really is or that they are even using it in their everyday conversations. Because of this, nonverbal communication gets tossed to the side without a thought when the price is right. How much value does that low price have when we realize what’s truly being lost? I think we will find that some things are just worth the extra money.