[Market Paper] Combating the Australasian talent crunch with offshore teams
The pandemic and its related restrictions have hampered software development in many leading markets, yet was particularly acute in Australia and New Zealand, where economies heavily reliant on overseas software talent faced a sudden shortfall. Without access to highly talented engineers, businesses in Australasia can’t innovate at the speed they want, despite being ‘innovation ready’.
Digital transformation is high on the agenda of many forward-thinking companies across the world, as diversification has become a necessity and placing software centrally to their customer offerings is a vital part of excelling in a digital age where customer centricity is key.
A fight for top talent in Australia
With digitalisation high on the agenda, software centricity is crucial. However, the problem arises when you can’t find software engineers with the level of skill to manage this digital-first shift successfully. That’s exactly what’s happening right now in many leading markets, including Australia.
Because there’s less engineering talent to choose from, local salaries have increased enormously, with major players pricing smaller and medium sized companies out of the race. In addition, there’s a struggle in retention as engineers are tempted away by larger competitors. Additionally, Australian businesses typically have a large percentage of their IT and engineering workforce employed as short-term contractors — further increasing margin squeeze when companies are forced into turning these into permanent employment contracts.
New Zealand’s tech talent crisis
As with Australia, NZ is a leading economy in the Asia-Pacific region. It’s high living standards have meant it’s long been a magnet for skilled migration. Unfortunately, the regulations introduced around skilled-migration visas and ANZSCO codes have left some CTOs, CIOs, and other IT decision makers feeling restricted, unable to innovate at the pace nor scale they’d like. Ultimately, an increasing number of businesses are fishing for top talent in the same pool, with rising salaries in a scarce market hindering their growth.
Adapting to a changing landscape
Australia and New Zealand’s IT decision makers say the digital skills gap is becoming a digital skills crisis. Ultimately, it’s a case of supply and demand — there’s an imbalance between the need for a digitally savvy workforce and the number of people trained and experienced in specifically required skillsets such as AI and machine learning, cloud computing, platform services, and cybersecurity, among others. Put simply, organisations from retailers to banks to automotive giants are becoming software-first businesses. But to achieve that shift successfully, they need world-class engineering talent in their ranks.
A new way to hire elite development talent?
The talent shortages described not going anywhere soon. Even with pandemic restrictions lifted, the region’s educational institutions aren’t producing enough graduates with the skills needed. And, the number of engineers that are qualified is simply not high enough to dampen the shortfall — new methods of obtaining and retaining talent are needed. That’s where dedicated offshore teams can provide a solution.
How businesses Down Under can combat the skills crunch with offshore engineering teams
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Developers are the lifeblood of your organisation in the race to software-centric business, so it’s important to find, assess, and hire the right talent. With the right development partner and the right offshoring model, you can cast your net into global talent pools and access the skills you can’t find at home in Sydney, Auckland, or other major metro areas in the region.
A custom-built offshore development team is an integrated extension of your existing setup; you work with the developers the same as you do with your engineers at home — they’re full-time, value-adding colleagues, not outsourced support.
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What will you learn?
- How the inability to fill key tech roles has been exacerbated by a large reduction in skilled migration.
- Why ‘innovation-active’ companies are being prevented from unleashing their full potential.
- That to grow tech teams at the pace required in a post-Covid world, hiring only locally is no longer viable.
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To find out more about building your tech teams beyond borders, and how CTOs, CIOs, and VPs of Engineering can leverage global talent pools to scale at speed, download our latest report.
If you’re looking to build an engineering team offshore to plug the skills gaps in your business, feel free to reach out to us. One of our senior executives will get back to you shortly and help you move forward based on your requirements.
