“The IT industry is growing at an unprecedented rate. Revenue in the IT Services market is projected to reach US$1,204.00bn in 2023.
The market’s largest segment is IT Outsourcing with a projected market volume of US$430.50bn in 2023. Revenue is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2023-2027) of 6.86%, resulting in a market volume of US$1,570.00bn by 2027.” ~ Statista Market Forecast
The talent crisis in the IT industry has resulted in an extreme skill gap for companies to find the right candidates. Resultingly, businesses are competing to hire and retain the best talent and offer high salaries and incentives.
But is it feasible to practice this strategy in the long run? The answer is no. So, businesses are relying on subcontracting options like staff augmentation.
If you are thinking about the meaning of IT Staff augmentation and how does it work? Or how can you hire offshore developers using the right augmentation model? This article will answer each query.
What is IT Staff Augmentation?
“IT Staff augmentation means an outsourcing strategy that helps businesses expand and augment their in-house team by hiring temporary employees from the outside”.
This model is the savior for business leaders who are not very tech-savvy and wish to concentrate on the core business processes rather than hiring and retaining skilled talent.
Moreover, it provides the flexibility of immediately finding the right fit for your hard-to-fill positions, saving you from aggravation.
Staff augmentation is a flexible, cost-effective, and strategic approach that start-ups specifically utilize in the tech field. As in-house recruitment doesn’t always work in cases where people with specialized skill sets are required for time-bound projects.
Filling the Skill Gaps
Augmentation is a powerful model that enhances the agility of an enterprise catering to changing corporate needs. Are you a business looking for economizing while maintaining the quality of your technical skillset then here is all you need to know:
1. Perform A Skills Gap Audit
Carrying out a detailed skills gap audit of your IT team gives you the knowledge of exactly where the gaps exist. Skill assessments are typically essential when a company is designing plans for a new project.
The six-step skills gap audit process is as follows:
- List the duties within your organization
- List the skills needed for each role
- Create a survey
- Review your staff
- Assemble the results
- Evaluate the data
Once you’ve completed the audit and examined your current skill gaps, decide whether they need to be filled on a long-term or short-term basis. For example, would these skills be needed beyond their use in specific projects? This helps you to determine which IT professionals must be hunted out through IT staff augmentation.
2. Choose the Right IT Staffing Partner
Once you’ve determined the skills that your current IT team is missing, it’s time to bring in support for staff augmentation. Choosing an experienced IT staffing partner is essential to access a talent pool with the IT professionals you need to bridge your skill gaps.
Thus, finding a partner company that takes an inclusive and agile way to augment staff is key. This allows you to retain valuable resources and count on the experts to take the lead throughout the augmentation process.
This is especially true when an IT staffing company employs a “BOT (build-operate-transfer) model” strategy to provide staff augmentation services.
Through this innovative BOT model, your partner helps you bridge your skill gaps without compromising your current team’s efforts. This process includes:
- Wide-ranging recruiting and screening processes to build your dedicated IT team
- Actively managing each professional to ensure project success
- Supporting your IT staffing solution endlessly or transferring staffing operations to your in-house team
3. Augment Staff with the Specific IT Skills
As an IT professional, the skills necessary to succeed can vary and change faster than any other area of employment. For instance, the job posts or IT skills you are looking for in 2023 may not even exist in 2018.
So, this is one of the reasons that finding the niche IT proficiency needed for specific ventures is so tough. No one can bound HR leaders by one talent policy. There are numerous talent strategies that they have to choose from to fill their skill gaps.
Hence, by merging two of the top talent strategies – hiring permanent talent and staff augmentation – they can develop a combined IT team with the specific skills needed for project achievement.
Moreover, when organizations find an in-house team lacking a specific set of skills or expertise, staff augmentation helps lessen this issue. By considering the project requirements when selecting the specific type of talent needed, companies can instantly resolve the aforesaid skills gap. Also, bringing in a specialized team member, even short-term, can decide the project’s success and failure.
4. Scale with Staff Augmentation as Needed
As discussed before, one of the many benefits of IT staff augmentation is the ability to expand your team when you feel the project requires skills your in-house staff doesn’t hold.
You can scale staff efficiently and cost-effectively, gaining access to the top talent available in the IT job market without financial risk.
The overall value the augmented staff adds to the project is endless as they hold a skill set that is suitable for the specific project. Also, the ability to increase or decrease the workforce on demand keeps projects running smoothly and on time.
In addition, with an IT staffing partner by your side, you can keep a stack of highly qualified developers who take devoted assignments to your projects on an ‘on-demand’ basis.
Furthermore, they are previously trained in the right technologies, have often worked together before, and they’re ever ready for sudden tasks.
Conversely, your costs would be much higher if you hire full-time employees. Also, you can change the size of your team, when your requirements fluctuate.
Final Thoughts
In the context of macroeconomic qualms, staff augmentation is becoming an increasingly popular concept. It is a highly convenient and effective way to ensure teams consists of the right talent for forthcoming tasks.
Hence, whether your business needs a tech partner to provide consultation on the right solutions or a full team of top-talent engineers to launch a custom software development project, your partner SaaS development company is here to help.
