How Can Managed Services Address Skill Shortages?

Organizations of all sizes have begun to realize that they must digitalize their operations rapidly to maintain competitiveness. Whether they are upgrading from legacy technologies or venturing into the digital arena for the first time, their survival depends on successful digital transformation.
The biggest contributor to digital success is no longer access to capital. A recent poll of C-suite executives revealed that businesses are more concerned about technical resource shortages. Skill shortages are a clear and present threat to your organization’s digital future, but managed service providers (MSPs) provide a viable solution.
Here are six ways that MSPs address shortages of skilled resources:

• By proactively aligning your technology and business objectives

Continuing to rely on aging technologies and legacy platforms can generate unnecessary skill shortages. The older a technology is, the smaller and more expensive its relevant talent pool will be. If you find yourself in desperate need of a COBOL or FORTRAN developer, there’s a strong possibility that your IT budget would be better spent on platform modernization.
Instead of blindly providing support for your existing IT infrastructure, MSPs continually evaluate and suggest improvements to your digital systems. If there are obvious ways that newer technology can reduce operating costs or generate more revenue, your MSP will let you know. You might not need to hire those expensive legacy platform consultants after all.

• By continually upgrading resources’ skills

As an important corollary to section 1, managed services also helps you avoid skill stagnation.
Suppose you rely solely on your in-house IT department. In this scenario, you need to keep an eye on technology trends to determine when to upgrade your staff’s technical skills. If you fail to do so, then your support staff will remain stuck in the past. This will either hold back progress because you’re reluctant to modernize your digital infrastructure, or it will create new skill gaps if you decide to go ahead with system upgrades. You’ll also be responsible for all training and certification costs.
Your MSP, on the other hand, is responsible for ensuring that their teams are sufficiently trained and experienced, no matter which technology platform you currently use. If your business applications are upgraded or replaced, then it’s your MSP’s responsibility to ensure that the team assigned to you is fully capable of supporting them.

• By sharply reducing resource onboarding time

Sometimes you need to move quickly to capitalize on a lucrative opportunity, but you don’t have the right personnel to get the job done. You could try to find experts with the right skill set and experience in your specific industry, but that might take weeks or months. By the time new resources sign on the dotted line, your window of opportunity would be long gone. You can’t retrain your existing team overnight, either.
Having access to an MSP opens up new avenues for increasing operational agility. Instead of waiting to find and onboard a new skilled resource, your MSP can quickly assign the perfect expert from their large, elastic resource pool. By engaging your MSP’s specialists, your new project can get started in a matter of days. Your MSP will scale down your assigned team once the project is complete, providing higher ROI and lower TCO.

• By providing affordable access to large teams of skilled resources

Highly skilled resources don’t come cheap, and so many companies only have one or two experts on their payroll for specific mission-critical technologies. This is a fairly high-risk strategy. If your resident expert becomes unavailable for an extended period, your organization becomes exposed to business risk. In the event of a service disruption, you would be forced to seek expensive, per-incident technical support by an external organization with a limited understanding of your IT infrastructure.
Reliable MSPs have large teams of experts on their roster who can be assigned to support your applications, hardware, and other digital resources. That way, your business continuity doesn’t rely on the availability of a single expert and you don’t need a large team of highly paid experts on your payroll to manage each major component of your technology footprint.

• By supporting 24x7x365 global operations

If your organization maintains operations in multiple time zones, then having a large support team is especially important. Most MSPs offer remote support options with resources stationed in different international regions. The size of their team and their geographical coverage allow them to provide high-quality, around-the-clock support at a lower price point than you can offer in-house.

• By providing fully managed, flexible team composition

As your organization’s mix of digital tools evolves, so do your support requirements. For example, if you decide to start an enterprise-wide project to optimize your existing digital operations, your existing support crew might not be the best fit for the job. So do you hire new resources on short-term contracts for the duration of the optimization project?
MSPs provide a better solution. Since managed services are proactive in nature, your MSP will seamlessly manage the transition from a support-focused to an optimization-focused team, and then transition back to a support focus when the project is complete. Any adjustment in their team makeup is just another aspect of their full-service approach to addressing your digital needs.

Conclusion

MSPs provide large, agile, and flexible teams of highly trained experts to address your organization’s digital needs. They offer great value by taking on the risks and responsibilities associated with skill gaps and evolving business needs. Partnering with an MSP frees you from many of the complexities associated with recruiting and maintaining your own team of highly compensated technology experts.
To learn more about how managed services can help you optimize your workforce, please contact Visionet.