Why offshore - can't we find the people?

I had a response from a past colleague who raised a very good point which is we need to consider the availability of the relevant skills in both numbers and ability. Graduates are not interested in COBOL and if you need 40 J2EE developers for 6 months its quite a challenge trying to find them. Hence the appeal of the scale of these large offshore companies.

I must admit my thoughts were primarily around those companies that were moving whole operations offshore on a permanent basis. In such a situation there is normally a large training process to handover the knowledge which could be done just as easily (if not more so) somewhere closer to home.

This lack of availability does worry me. Does Australia not have the foresight to produce the right candidates from its education system? Do our graduates think they are too good for the old tools?

Maybe it is a bit of the chicken and egg syndrome. Until someone has the capital base to setup an operation with some of these skills readily available there will not be a local option and hence the work moves offshore. I wonder what is happening to all those people being put out of work!