SKILL AUGMENTATION

Addresses the basic question - Are you trying to do something extraordinary with special “skills” to plug in to the normal workforce?

Skill-augmentation is an outsourcing strategy by procuring resources in response to a business solutioning project / product. Skill-aug firms promote their ability to recruit and place candidates with specific skillsets that a client company needs for a finite period of time. Although the word “consultant” is often applied to the staff-aug model, this is not consulting in the traditional sense of expert advice and services. The technique consists of evaluating the existing staff and then determining which additional skills are required. Rather, the skill-aug model is focused on sourcing these “special” skillsets by vendors positioned to find the economical resources who “appear” potentially qualified. One possible advantage of this model is that it may leverage the support staff as well as utilize outsourced services and contract consultants thus delivering projects / products, while enhancing their experience.

In Skill-Aug, following rules do apply:
• You have already defined business processes for the task(s) currently
• You’re basically looking for some special skills to help with execution of the project/product
• You’re convinced to manage the risk of project success.

Benefits of Skill-Aug Model:
Skill augmentation focuses on contracting specific IT professionals to complement various client's requirements with regards to in-house staff. This model offers the following benefits:

• Cost-effectiveness – When you’re not looking to hire additional skilled resources permanently, skill augmentation saves you the cost of paying full time wages. You get the support of highly experienced and qualified professionals for the specific period of time your business needs them.

• Adaptability – Depending on the scope of your project, you can easily access rare skills that you can’t possibly find locally or on short notice. Moreover, you can scale your IT team up or down depending on the budget allocation – Many IT companies find it difficult to find and retain permanent staff with skills in the latest technologies. Skill augmentation provides the opportunity to hire resources with those niche and hard to find skills and nurture them within the organization. 

• Learnability – With this model there’s good scope of “continuous” learnability.  Technology life cycle along with applications/tools lead to diverse challenges wherein the scope of some skills may be obsolete in no time.  Hence re-certifications, new certifications are necessary periodically for these resources to keep their skills current and geared up for future challenges.