

The stubborn rise of inflation has bitten into the costs of almost everything. This includes the costs of hiring, training, and maintaining entire work departments.
As a way to stave off increasing costs, there is one type of staffing model that has been bolstering development teams while keeping costs down.
That model is staff augmentation.
In our current version of the IT world, we have come to expect top quality when it comes to service and professionalism. Yet there still remains a broad gap between ambition and reality.
With a trusted and dedicated workforce, this ambition can be tied to reality.
Yet it’s difficult to bring in tech specialists that have both capabilities and experience. This includes broad disparities in the qualifications of professionals depending on each country.
That’s why an increasing number of businesses are searching for these types of workers through staff augmentation, which is becoming a valuable strategy, given that optimization has been a key concern among companies for a long time and is even more so for startups and SMS businesses.
Staff augmentation
The term staff augmentation is associated with another term, outsourcing. Yet staff augmentation is a relatively new offshoot of outsourcing.
Augmented staff have the necessary skills and experience to fit into businesses that are in need of short-term additions to their workforce. And they can revitalize the goals of businesses.
The benefits
The most common reason to implement staff augmentation is the savings – both in terms of money and time. Augmented staff have the right credentials and experience to fit the needs of businesses’ specific projects and tasks.
This means less time spent on recruitment and getting workers up to speed and gives them more time to get stuck into the project.
A second benefit is risk mitigation. When it comes to issues such as testing, cybersecurity, and coding, they can be resolved swiftly and cleanly. That’s because agencies carry out their own process to provide the right workers for the right business, having the experience of dealing with issues such as cybersecurity in previous projects.
Thirdly, infrastructure investment isn’t a necessity with staff augmentation, as its workers don’t use all tools and resources within a business and instead use their own resources that are provided by the management agency.
Fourthly, staff augmentation offers greater flexibility in terms of scaling. Because augmented staff are temporary workers brought in for specific tasks and projects, businesses can quickly scale to their needs, with augmented staff leaving the company after a specific target or project is met.
It’s important to note that the positives of staff augmentation do not exclude a hybrid approach that also includes hiring full-time employees. Both models can fit within the same organization and complement one another.