How can you stop the digital skills gap stifling your company’s growth? Our latest whitepaper, Bridging the tech skills gap, answers this question.

A supply of talent still remains the number one challenge facing digital technology businesses in the UK. Where organisations would like to hire more full-time staff, they are unable to find the talent to fill the roles.

The shortage of skills is also beginning to be reflected in wage negotiations with over a third of digital technology businesses reporting that candidates are asking for money they can’t afford to pay. In our cities where talent exists, it’s in short enough supply that the most senior skilled employees can almost name their price in terms of salary and benefits packages – so turnover of staff is greater as they jump from role to role. In more isolated geographic areas outside of our major towns and cities, the skills simply don’t exist, and salaries aren’t large enough to attract them to relocate, so the skills gap must be addressed in other ways.

In the domain of software development, contractors and freelance developers have been used to fill the gap, but increasingly organisations are looking to reduce their reliance upon them. Contractors often end up working full time for long periods and become part of the in-house development team, but they are being paid a premium wage over and above those of the full-time employees which can lead to resentment and a further turnover in staff. Contractors are not a long term, sustainable solution.

In all cases, these fast-growing organisations have a common objective – they must to be able to sustain the rapid growth they are experiencing in order to get the funding they need to scale to the next level, which means putting long term, cost efficient and effective solutions in place to address the increasing problem of finding the right talent.

We live and operate in an increasingly digitised world where customers expect to have access to products and services around the clock, and as such there is growing reliance on finding the right software development capabilities and being able to scale them rapidly in line with market demand. As the business grows and snowballs in size and momentum, digitisation must keep pace and ever more digital talent is needed. Demonstrating that the business can deliver on these demands is fundamental to investors financing and is intrinsically linked to the overall success of the business.

Nearshoring

The software development skills gap has been recognised by many of the UK’s largest brands. Some have begun creating talent hubs outside of the UK to aid recruitment and retention of talent, choosing to work closely with a nearshore partner.

If you’d like to know more about how nearshoring can help solve your skills gap issue, read our latest whitepaper, Bridging the tech skills gap.