With digital transformation in full swing, companies are embracing the advancements while upgrading tech capabilities, business workflow automation, cloud-based systems from in-house servers, and analytics platforms. All this has led to a growing demand for highly skilled IT workers.
As such, it’s important that you can find the right IT experts who can manage development projects and enhance the overall capabilities of your in-house team is a very challenging task. The everyday challenges faced when hiring quality IT professionals have only been compounded by the growing skills gap issue in the IT profession. In fact, according to a recent report from Gartner, IT executives see the talent shortage as the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies.
The ongoing push toward remote work and the acceleration of hiring plans in 2021 has continued to exacerbate the IT talent scarcity. And while there are several options for handling this IT skills gap, the best solution is partnering with the right IT staffing company to implement a staff augmentation solution.
4 Steps to Bridge IT Skill Gaps with Staff Augmentation
When it comes to filling IT skills gaps, gaining on-demand access to the specialized professionals that stand head and shoulders above everyone else is crucial.
Staff augmentation services allow companies to keep their staffing costs under control while giving them the ability to easily scale resources as their needs shift. And companies can enlist the support of highly-specialized talent when needed, without having to pay the premium salary or the high freelancing fees IT pros typically demand.
To unlock the benefits of staff augmentation and bridge the IT skill gaps in your workforce, we recommend taking the following steps…
1. Perform A Skills Gap Audit
Carrying out an in-depth skills gap audit of your IT team will give you the knowledge of exactly where the gaps lie. Skill audits are typically conducted when a company is designing plans for a new project. Obviously, if you’ve decided to turn to a staff augmentation solution, that time is at hand.
The six-step skills gap audit process is as follows:
- List the roles within your organization
- List the skills needed for each role
- Create a survey
- Survey your workforce
- Compile the results
- Analyze 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 – i.e. would these skills be needed beyond their use in specific projects? This will help you to determine which IT professionals should be sought out through staff augmentation.
2. Choose the Right IT Staffing Partner for Staff Augmentation
Once you’ve determined the skills that your current IT team is lacking, it’s time to bring in reinforcements for staff augmentation. Choosing an experienced IT staffing partner, like TechGenies, is essential to access a talent pool with the IT professionals you need to bridge your skill gaps.
Finding a staffing partner that takes a comprehensive and agile approach to staff augmentation is key. This will allow you to retain your valuable resources and rely on the experts to take the lead throughout the staff augmentation process. This is especially true when an IT staffing company employs a “BOT model” strategy to provide staff augmentation services.
Through this innovative build-operate-transfer staffing model, TechGenies is able to help you bridge your skill gaps without compromising your current team’s efforts. This process includes…
- Extensive recruiting and screening processes to build your dedicated IT team
- Actively managing each professional to ensure project success
- Supporting your IT staffing solution indefinitely or seamlessly transferring staffing operations to your in-house team
3. Augment Staff with the Specific IT Skills to Achieve Success
The skills necessary to succeed as an IT professional can vary and change faster than any other area of employment. For instance, if you were to look at the seven most sought-after IT skills in 2021, you’d find half of these job roles didn’t even exist in 2015. This is one of the many reasons that finding the niche IT expertise needed for specific projects is so difficult.
HR leaders aren’t bound by one talent strategy. In fact, there are at least 11 talent strategies that they have to choose from to fill their skill gaps. By combining two of the top talent strategies – hiring permanent talent and staff augmentation – they are able to develop a collaborative IT team with the specific skills needed for success.
When organizations find an in-house project team lacking a specific set of skills or expertise, staff augmentation helps alleviate this issue. By taking the project requirements into consideration when selecting the specific type of talent needed, the aforementioned skills gap is immediately closed. Bringing in a specialized team member, even short-term, can be the difference between project success and failure.
4. Scale with Staff Augmentation as Needed
As we just mentioned, one of the many advantages of staff augmentation is the ability to expand your team when you feel the project requires skills your in-house staff doesn’t possess. You can scale staff efficiently and cost-effectively, gaining access to the top talent available in the IT job market without monetary risk.
The overall value the augmented staff adds to the project is immeasurable as they arrive with a skill set that is directly suited to the specific project. And the ability to increase or decrease the workforce on-demand keeps projects running smoothly and on time.
With an IT staffing partner by your side, you can keep a bench of highly qualified developers who take dedicated assignments to your projects on an as-needed basis. They are already trained in the right technologies, have often worked together before, and they’re ready on short notice. Your talent pool is suddenly much deeper, without the costs that would be apparent if these experts were hired full-time. When your needs fluctuate, so too can the size of your team.
How TechGenies Can Help
Staff augmentation is becoming an increasingly popular concept, especially in the context of macroeconomic uncertainties. It is a highly convenient and effective way to ensure teams are made up of the right talent for imminent tasks.
Whether your business needs a technology partner to provide consultation on the right solutions or a full team of top talent engineers to launch a custom software development project, TechGenies is here to help. Our teams are virtual in many cases, so we know a thing or two about getting the right tools in place. Contact us at info@techgenies.com to get started boosting the resources your business has in place for virtual teams.
