Building New Tech Talent

Whats the right mix for the IT team? When it comes to building the technology team we normally think of three sources Contractors; Partner Organisations and Permanent Hires.

?Many businesses try and structure this into guidelines with percentages of teams being drawn from each area. With the global IT skills shortage forecast to be 82 million people by 2030 we need to start thinking more creatively about the sources we use to build our teams of the future. Just going to the contract market is clearly not sustainable, and unfortunately getting the balance right between permanent colleagues and contractors is frequently misjudged by senior leaders with negative impacts on engagement levels and reducing the core knowledge of the permanent team. Many organisations are still struggling to find the right balance between outsource and insource services. With service provision from outsourcers frequently stagnating and reducing overall service quality usually caused by a continuous drop in investment.

Organisations are now starting to look into building their own talent. Investing in developing existing staff or finding people with transferable skills. Using existing staff within the organisation has the advantage of people with knowledge of the core organisation. This can be an attractive option but overcoming the bridge of capability means this is not an easy journey. Finding individuals with the attitude and ability to handle change becomes more important.

Many partner organisations are recognising this challenge and opening up their own training and development services to the their clients. Taking advantage of this becomes a win-win as the quality of tech training offered by Partner Organisations can be of far higher quality than that generally available. The Partner Organisation benefits from being able to build more tailored training that overlaps directly with the business. This would enable a provider to become more relevant to the business they are providing service to. They can also bridge a temporary gap whilst the business builds the new team and develops its own retained staffs skills. ?

Clearly none of this is easy. But with the massive headhunting and recruitment fatigue that is being suffered across tech leadership this isn’t something that can be ignored. The pressure on cost whilst simultaneously delivering new digital services at pace are combining to create further pressure on the existing tech resources. The solution has to be growing the internal team and this needs to be high up on all IT leaders to do lists.