IT industry turns to software outsourcing for talent shortage woes

It’s fairly easy to imagine once you look all around you: the world is becoming increasingly digital. More mobile apps, more web platforms, more devices and household items connected to the web. All of us are growing used to the idea of a highly technological society, to the point where we come to expect digital solutions for almost everything.

Brands across most industries have taken notice and are working to optimize their software development to offer their clients cutting-edge solutions, improve legacy platforms and boost the efficiency of their whole systems. If you’re working for one of those companies, you already know what comes with this: the hard challenge of finding skilled IT developers.

Many executives in these brands are experiencing difficulties in finding the right staff. And a considerable part of them are seeing the IT shortage as a major threat for the success of their businesses. That’s why so many of them are embracing software outsourcing and IT staff augmentation  as their way out – and they like what they see.

Outsourcing your software: why should you look abroad?

Hiring a remote development team to help you with your digital solutions isn’t precisely a new thing. The practice and the term to define it have been around since the 80s. But today we’re experiencing a huge spike in the number of businesses that are using it, mainly to help with IT development.

The reason is quite simple: there are not enough professionals in the US to cover the needs of all the businesses seeking to develop their software. According to LinkedIn, there are 850k open positions looking for people to work on software, performance tuning and SQL. Naturally, the demand doesn’t end there.

Thankfully, the huge tech evolution of the last two decades has made it possible for businesses of all sizes to look elsewhere for those roles without compromising their projects’ success. There’s no longer need for people to actually be working onsite next to you to contribute to your software development.

Better Internet speeds around the globe, new real-time communication tools, platforms to help manage remote teams and the increasing presence of highly skilled professionals abroad have come to breach that shortage. And you know what? They are working.

Outsourcing in the past was mostly seen as a way to cut costs, almost a no-brainer for businesses to save some bucks, especially in scenarios like the recent Great Recession. Today, however, motivation isn’t usually related to cost, but to facing the staff shortage. And IT outsourcing companies have understood this completely.

While some time ago they’d underline how cheap they were, nowadays they emphasize how skilled their software engineers actually are. These foreign companies have understood that businesses looking to outsource are looking for more than just a cheap option – they are looking for quality replacements for the professionals they can’t get at home.

That shift has put these outsourcing companies efforts towards gathering teams of experienced software engineers that can work on a wide array of projects.

Get a quick quality leap for your software projects

The basic idea of outsourcing, then, isn’t to replace your IT staff but rather potentiate it with the help of a remote team. While some people would prefer to just hire new professionals, the IT shortage, the times needed to get them on board and the overall costs it would entail are enough to make them look beyond frontiers.

Instead of going through a lengthy process to find the right candidates (where you’d face fierce competition from other companies looking for the same roles), you’ll be given an already formed staff ready to work alongside you. The time you save in working with an offshore company can prove to be extremely beneficial, as it’d give you an advantage over competitors that only rely on in-house teams.

Additionally, you can work with remote IT engineers for as long as you need. The relationship between you and the outsourcing company can last for a project, a couple of them or for years to come. This allows you to fill the talent gaps in your company without having to fall in a long-term commitment with professionals that might have very specific skills for daily use.

Hire talent capable of working with any language, framework or tech

There are so many types of projects out there that finding all the necessary roles to work on them in-house can prove an impossible task. It’s not just a matter of what you want to do: it’s also about how to do it.

For instance, you might need to develop your new project with JavaScript but – which framework are you going to use? Angular? Ember.js? Node.js? Let’s say you pick Angular. What happens if your next project is better developed in Node.js? You’ll need to either retrain your staff or hire new engineers. You can prevent this situation using an outsourcing model.

Take the mobile scenario as another example. Many businesses resort to outsourcing companies to develop their own mobile apps or, at least, progressive web apps. Customers of different industries have come to expect perfect mobile platforms to interact with their favorite companies. There’s no surprise as to why more and more businesses are looking for mobile developers.

In that context, the costs of developing mobile apps with US developers have skyrocketed while the availability of said developers has plummeted. It’s almost natural for any company looking to make its move in the mobile game industry to look for outsourced developers to help them get the job done.

Since offshore and nearshore companies have teams in place for all kinds of projects, you’ll only have to delegate your needs to them to get what you’re looking for. After the work is done, you can move on either by using a different team with the same provider or just by going your own way.

An option you’ll have to look in detail

The current scenario with the talent shortage in the IT industry is already proving that outsourcing companies have become great allies to overcome the inherent challenges. They can provide highly-skilled and trained teams in almost no-time.

Fortunately, companies are already understanding what’s at stake and the bar is being raised constantly. The whole IT outsourcing industry has changed in the past years to keep up with the growing demand and has been helping US businesses cope with the talent shortage.

Since the IT talent shortage is here to stay, with the mobile boom and the over-digitalization of our everyday lives, looking for remote talent is an option you’ll simply have to consider at one point or another.