Engineering Talent Options
Updated: Sep 29, 2021
Traditional enterprises in the pre-digital era had few options for talent scale-up. It was either an Employee, contingency staff or Interns. These options, were aligned or dependent around the location of operations.
"In tech alone, the US could lose out on $162 billion worth of revenues annually unless it finds more high-tech workers" - Korn Ferry
In today's digital era and post Covid-19, the governance and collaboration processes have evolved beyond the constraints posed by geographic locations. The traditional location-constrained enterprise has now transformed itself into a digital or social enterprise. With this development, the options of talent acquisition have logically evolved along the 3 dimensions
LOCATION: Enterprises have moved their operations to locations where the required talent is available. This option provides an additional benefit of cost if the location is a low cost geography leveraging labor-rate arbitrage.
PARTNERS: Enterprises partner with organizations who have the required talent with them. This option enables in-Time Talent ramp-up theoretically. But reality may vary based on the employee utilization parameters of the partner.
TECHNOLOGIES: Enterprises leverage technologies to solve their talent gap challenges by automating the tasks performed by such employees. This is a fast evolving option with the advent of AI tools and is a cause for concern with technologies replacing humans.
Enterprises, now have the ability to either leverage the above dimensions individually or in a combination thereof, to solve their talent acquisition challenges. And the combinations in the right ratio can be custom-designed and would be of compelling business value to the enterprise.
The key to success for evolutionary models, is a strong program management layer - Talent Scale-up PMO, which can leverage the options optimally in the right ratio to deliver value to the enterprise. Current HR structures are evolving fast to fulfill this gap either by themselves or leveraging external help.
External help in the form of a Managed Engineering Teams is fast evolving as an attractive option, as the engagements can be on-demand and there is no risk exposure for the enterprise. Essentially pay-as-you-go option to reduce the operational costs and commitments.