We have witnessed a decade of increasingly frantic discussion about the global tech skills gap crisis but for all that talk we have yet to see a viable solution - until now with the advent of "elastic teams".
A recent McKinsey Global Survey found that 87 percent of executives said they were experiencing skills gaps in the workforce or expected them within a few years, whilst another study by Ceridian and Hanover Research found that employees with more tech skills would be needed by 80 percent of companies over the next two years. Meanwhile, IBM reported that more than 120 million workers across the world's 12 largest economies may need to be re-trained in the coming years.
The familiar tech skills gap narrative tells us that there is no lack of job vacancies - in fact the demand for technology talent is growing across every industry - yet many cannot be filled because the workforce is leaving university without the necessary skill sets.
But role-relevant training and assessment, heralded as the skills gap panacea, has largely failed to bridge those gaps, which is why the World Economic Forum launched the Reskilling Revolution this year with the lofty goal of persuading employers and educators to foot the bill for providing one billion people with better education, skills and jobs by 2030.
But instead, many companies are realising that it is time to open their hiring doors to a more diverse talent pool. It turns out that the right person for the job is often out there geographically speaking and it is merely a matter of finding, hiring and retaining them in a cost-effective way, which is where the problems begin.
Hiring tech teams already takes too long - five months on average - and it costs too much, typically £24,000 to recruit a software engineer. They are expensive to retain and the average tenure is just 11 months.
In its yearly report on freelancing, Upwork predicted that "Freelancers are expected to be the majority of the U.S. workforce by 2027". This trend is reducing the ability of employers to attract qualified local in-house teams. Many companies are instead considering using freelancers but also realising that, due to the skills gap we are now so painfully aware of, limiting themselves to a local talent search often results in disappointment after a lot of wasted money.
Expanding the search to global remote workers grants access to a huge range of skill sets but the costs can become prohibitive as businesses underestimate the management time, lack of cultural and goal alignment and legal implications that come with managing armies of freelancers.
Distributed has grown during coronavirus lockdown, whilst other companies sadly shrank, because businesses realised that elastic teams provide a better and more cost-effective tech outsourcing solution.
Elastic teams focus on job skills rather than job roles, are available on-demand, cost zero to hire per-engineer, do not have to be retained, and offer remote access to a far richer range of skill sets due to a virtually-unlimited global talent pool. We are just as serious as our clients about quality and rigour, which is why freelancers are managed by our UK project management team. Every project comes with a delivery, technical and quality assurance lead who guide and manage the outcome.
Elastic teams give companies access to top developers they could only dream of hiring locally, with none of the risks that outsourcing typically presents.
This means renting rather than buying specialist skill sets and keeping them only as long as necessary. The result is a significantly cheaper and higher-quality team. Instead of trying to force alignment between the skill sets required and those which currently exist, companies can quickly find the right people for that part of the job. This means a far higher probability of the project being delivered to time, to budget and to standard.
One unexpected result of the pandemic for Distributed has been a growing talent pool looking to pick up high-quality work quickly to supplement impacted income - bridging the gap between a dwindling job role focused workforce and an increasing tech skills gap. We are removing many of the barriers that tech freelancers face on their journey towards a successful and self-determined independent career path.
Until now, the gig economy has existed as a safety net for low-skilled workers - Uber being perhaps the best known example - yet it has been difficult for any company to offer something similar to high-skilled tech workers because they have never been efficiently outsourced.
But by breaking down job roles into required skills and cutting tasks down into smaller components we can outsource them more meaningfully, resulting in work for more freelancers as part of an elastic team.
The World Economic Forum's long term plan to solve the skills gap is admirable but the tech companies hit hard by it cannot afford to wait a decade for solutions, and elastic teams are available right now.
About Distributed.co
Distributed is a tech-enabled startup founded in 2017 on the belief that businesses of the future will thrive without the need for technical development teams-in-residence. Through the Distributed platform clients can work with fully managed, globally distributed teams as easily as local teams, allowing them to build and maintain software faster, safer and with more visibility than ever before. With Elastic Teams clients can scale up and down team activity based on requirements and compose their teams of any programming skill sets. Distributed maintains a workforce of full-time project managers, technical leads and quality assurance leads that are deployed on every client project. This means every project is fully managed from brief to delivery to ensure the most efficient and highest quality result for the client.
