I think that's a terrible way to look at an any type of career. Any job can be outsourced, the important thing is if the person brings value to the organisation

I think that's a terrible way to look at an any type of career. Any job can be outsourced, the important thing is if the person brings value to the organisation. In sales or sales engineering it is easy to measure your impact. I cost $X and I bring in 10x in revenue. But it is a lot harder to measure the value of someone in a back office or development role, but it doesn't make them less or more valuable to the organisation. Every company defines value differently. I work for a university, we have desktop support engineers who could be easily outsourced if you only looked at them as low level techs, but they care about our mission, about teaching, research and learning and put in 10x the effort that an outsourced low cost tech would from one of the big firms.