Is Staff Augmentation Your Lifeline?
As the world, with cautious optimism, is preparing to reopen after challenging times, we are seeing that some changes are here to stay with many activities having proved more convenient in an online environment. Therefore, every organization properly represented on the web has a strong competitive advantage.
New opportunities bring new challenges — where to get specialists to cover this growing demand? True IT talents have always been hard to find, and software development technologies have always been extremely fast-changing. However, today it’s more challenging than ever before for organizations to find experts who can provide the most relevant and up-to-date digital solutions.
Moreover, while searching for talent, organizations also need to think about optimizing their expenses, minimizing risks, and maintaining flexibility in these uncertain times; it’s a difficult balance to attain.
What is staff augmentation and how does it work?
Staff augmentation is often misunderstood to be the same as outsourcing. However, outsourcing is more associated with entrusting the whole project to an outside team, while augmented staff work side-by-side with the in-house team.
When it comes to software development, staff augmentation usually means the allocation of technical resources such as web developers, QA engineers, designers, and others, to supercharge in-house development teams on flexible cooperation terms. It enables companies to “fill in the gaps” in their current personnel’s skill sets or cover the workforce shortages based on their current situation without changing their development team on a permanent basis.
Cooperation based on staff augmentation can be both short-term and long-term. Short-term cooperation is meant to resolve a temporarily increased demand, including situations when the permanent workers are on vacation. Long-term staff augmentation contracts are great for longer development projects when full-time in-house hiring is not economically feasible or has been frozen for a period of time.
Demand for developers is extremely high
Staff augmentation seems to perfectly fit into the formula of staying competitive in changing circumstances with an ongoing demand for web development experts. Companies can cover their labor shortages while cutting expenses and staying flexible. So what does the demand for developers really look like?
According to TechRepublic’s blog post “Hiring developers is going to be your next big problem” in which they share the results of the CodinGame survey, 61% of HR specialists admit that finding skilled developers is likely to be their biggest recruitment challenge of 2021. The survey also found that 64% of companies were looking to hire up to 50 developers in 2021.
According to a report by iCIMS, employers are only able to hire 60% of required talent for tech positions in the U.S., and it takes 50% longer to hire for tech roles than any other position.
The State of Engineers Report by Hired found that in 2020, average salaries for top engineering roles went up by 7% in Toronto, 3% in New York, 5% in the SF Bay Area, and 6% in London, with increases continuing to grow.
The Indeed career guide website includes the role of software developer in the list of 15 most in-demand careers with an average salary of $105,090 per year in the United States. CNBC also lists “web developer” among the 15 roles that will be in highest demand over the next 5 years, specifying their average salary as $72,040 per year. Glassdoor sets the median for a web developer’s salary based on all vacancies at $68,764 per year.
A report by the International Labour Organization on the labor shortage issues in the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) sector in 4 countries, including Canada, discovered severe shortages of software developers and programmers.
Over 50% of respondents stated that the specialists who were most difficult to find were those with three to six years of working experience. The report also states that the number of job openings in this area is projected to increase by 40 percent between 2018 and 2028.
Specific demand for Drupal developers
When it comes to staying on the competitive edge in the digital field, both the team and the software you choose to utilize matter a lot. Drupal follows the key technology trends, so the latest version, Drupal 9, enables developers to create websites that are responsive to mobile devices, fast, multilingual, open to third-party integration, friendly to content editors, and so much more.
The learning curve for Drupal development is higher than with some other CMS options, but the opportunities are truly endless to create features that exactly match each customer’s specific requirements. Drupal is used by 2.3% of all the websites whose CMS is known globally.
Benefits of Drupal staff augmentation with a reliable partner
With all this demand for developers and difficulties in finding them, Drupal staff augmentation is able to give you a helping hand.
Required skills at the right moment
Your internal team does not have to possess all the required skills needed for a specific project in the fast-changing technology world — you can augment your staff with developers who have already mastered the relevant technology. With staff augmentation, you have quick access to a huge pool of talent across the globe whose expertise will be verified by your staff augmentation provider.
Scalability of staff
Augmented resourcing is easily scalable both up and down. You are free to increase and decrease the number of developers based on your current business needs and budget. This is very flexible compared to full-time in-house hiring — a great advantage in times of uncertainty!
Cost savings
Developing in-house skills for rapidly changing needs can be too costly an investment. This gives the staff augmentation approach a competitive advantage. In addition, you can avoid expenses on recruitment, internal training, idle time between development projects, as well as many other costs and liabilities associated with hiring in-house developers.
Time savings
Similar to cost savings augmented staff allows you to save time on skill development, onboarding, recruitment, and more. Your “extra” staff is ready to help you based on their specific area of expertise with far less time investment.
Faster project delivery
Augmented staff can help reduce time to market for your project, or help meet challenging project deadlines. This is especially helpful in situations where project delivery is being delayed due to unexpected resource shortages.
Integration and control
As we mentioned in the definition, staff augmentation involves resources working side-by-side with your existing team, and you remain fully in charge of all the operations. All this is great for integrating extra staff with internal processes, as well as for communication, transparency, control, feedback, and skill sharing. Staff augmentation provides this at a higher level than outsourcing either parts of or an entire project to an external team.
Easy adoption
If you need extra hands, staff augmentation may be the easiest and quickest decision for your team to make. It gives you flexibility with minimal obligations when compared to permanent in-house hiring, and at the same time is easier to adopt than outsourcing your entire project.
A trial for prospective employees
You may not need specific experts as permanent employees today but this is subject to change tomorrow. Staff augmentation can give you the opportunity to trial someone who can potentially become your full-time in-house employee sometime in the future.
The benefits of staff augmentation are certainly attractive. However, trusting the workers you select is critical to ongoing success, so consider reaching out to a reputable partner to help to source them.
Sound like something you need?
There are many benefits to utilizing staff augmentation, if you think this is something you may want to explore at your organization, get in touch with our team and we can talk through your unique situation and options.
ImageX has been selected among the top agencies for Staff Augmentation Services by DesignRush.
