The UK has experienced a persistent shortage of IT skills over the last decade, posing significant challenges for businesses and startups across all sectors.

The scarcity of skilled candidates, especially in a dynamic market situation where the demand for rapid product launches and a high need for engineering expertise, makes recruiting skilled IT and engineering staff an increasingly painful headache for CIOs.

As the effects of IT skills shortages on businesses grow, CIOs are looking at new ways to overcome the issue with strategies that include upskilling their current, over-stretched engineering workforce with training, or else loosening their recruitment criteria to remove barriers to entry.

CIOs know full well that a lack of skills hinders companies’ efforts to adopt AI, cyber, data-driven strategies and green technologies, crucial for future business success. Alongside the pressing need to innovate, whilst working with a reduced workforce, causes several business problems such as product delays, quality issues, missed revenue goals, lack of competitive edge and declining customer satisfaction.

Reduce complexity

Software development projects are complex and often require a significant amount of expertise and resources. Getting the right people with the right skills into the right roles has never been so difficult. Gartner’s CIO Talent Planning for 2024 Survey revealed that cybersecurity, blockchain, AI, machine learning (ML), and generative AI – some of the most critical technologies needed for business success, made the top five list of skills ‘difficult to hire.’ This is where team augmentation, and having access to a large and diverse talent pool, makes a big difference.

Team augmentation involves engaging external software engineers from a partner company to complement an existing in-house team. This approach provides companies with the flexibility to quickly scale their technical resources up or down, depending on the project’s needs, and plug any capability gaps inside their teams. It can be crucial to the success of businesses whose product is software, or relies on software, as it enables businesses to scale their team and projects flexibly without the risks involved with growing an in-house team.

Onboard expertise quickly

A team augmentation approach is commonly used to on board expertise quickly, engaging project managers, scrum masters, business analysts, and product or UX UI designers in addition to software developers and automation testers. It allows companies to access a diverse range of skills and expertise that may not be available in-house. Companies can quickly ramp up their technical resources and tackle projects that require specialised skills or knowledge whilst onboarding engineers that can bring fresh ideas and perspectives to the project. Having access to this expertise quickly is often of paramount importance as companies compete to grow.

For instance, if a company needs to design, develop, and support a mobile app, but its in-house team lacks the necessary skills and experience, it can quickly engage a team of engineers who specialise in mobile app development to work on the project. This approach can help companies save time and resources and ensure that their projects are completed on time and to a high standard.

Minimise costs

Hiring an in-house development team can be expensive, especially when considering salaries, benefits, office space, and equipment. Team augmentation, on the other hand, allows companies to save on all these costs by engaging with external software engineers from a partner company on a per-project basis. This approach provides companies with the flexibility to allocate software engineers to projects only when needed, rather than having to maintain a full-time in-house team.

Software development projects can take months or even years to complete. However, companies that employ team augmentation can quickly scale up their technical resources and accelerate the entire end-to-end software development process, enabling them to bring products to market faster and gain a competitive edge.

Think global

To implement a team augmentation strategy, it’s best to work with a company with offices located around the world. By engaging a combination of local and internationally based engineers, delivery speed can be increased by taking advantage of different time zone locations and development can continue around the clock.

It affords companies the flexibility to quickly adapt to changes in the market or project requirements and to quickly ramp up, down or pivot the capabilities of their development resources, depending on the project’s needs, ensuring that their development teams are always aligned with their business goals.

As demand for tech implementation outstrips the supply of relevantly skilled workers, analyst firm IDC predicts that by 2026, that the global IT skills crisis could amount to some $5.5 trillion in losses. Team augmentation is the future as it helps solve this challenge by providing companies with a flexible, cost-effective, and efficient way to scale up their technical teams to tackle complex software development projects. It offers a flexible and strategic approach to efficiently broaden operational reach while maintaining control and flexibility over core business activities.

By leveraging the expertise of external software engineers, companies can gain access to a wider, global talent pool of the best technologists who can be placed into companies quickly and seamlessly. This can reduce operational costs by up to 30 per cent compared to building an in-house team.

Andrew Radcliffe is the CEO and founder of Spyrosoft.

Read more

Skills gap – 28% of the UK workforce is underqualified – Jobbio’s Aoibhinn McBride explains why the skills gap is the real problem in the technology hiring landscape

Essential skills for becoming a CTO – Essential skills for becoming a CTO go beyond being a JavaScript virtuoso or a Scrum Master. Soft skills such as being an encouraging manager and explaining solutions to the wider business are equally important

Want a new fintech job? These are the skills employers want now – Here are the most in-demand skills for fintech companies recruiting fresh talent, and some advertised tech vacancies open this week