The global talent shortage is among the most pressing business issues of the decade. According to Forbes, by 2030, enterprises worldwide might lose around $8.4T in revenue due to the lack of an experienced workforce. One way out of the talent crisis is nearshoring. Whether you need to build your dedicated development team from scratch or augment the already existing one, you can look for skilled engineers in neighboring countries.
So, how can nearshoring positively influence your business? And what is the perfect location to relocate your software development to? Learn in our article.
How can nearshoring benefit your business?
Nearshoring is a common way to fill in the talent gap, used by many multinational market giants. Among global businesses that have chosen this approach to team augmentation are PrettyLittleThing, Currencycloud, and many more. But why do these top enterprises go for nearshore software development? Let’s dig deeper into this type of software development outsourcing and explore its advantages.
Save your time and reduce costs
Opting for nearshore software development can help you significantly save on operational expenses. Since your partner takes responsibility for office facilitation and hardware maintenance, you won’t have to deal with additional spending on the required equipment.
In addition, finding talent in other countries is usually much faster, due to the larger talent pool with relevant expertise. Therefore, when nearshoring, you also save money and time on staffing and related HR processes.
Get access to a larger talent pool
While extending engineering teams to other countries, you have an opportunity to hire top tech talent with the required skillset. In this regard, outsourcing engineering processes to Eastern Europe is a way out of the workforce shortage crisis. According to the ABSL report, around 1.1M skilled software developers reside in the region, making it one of the leading destinations for talent search. Ukraine, Poland, and Romania are locations with the biggest engineering potential. Each of them is a hub for large engineering communities: only in Romania there are over 191K of tech specialists. That way, outsourcing to EE countries can help you painlessly solve the staffing issue. In our article, we focus on Poland as one of the distinguished European destinations for outsourcing software development. With around 45% of EE tech talent located in the country, software nearshoring to Poland is an optimal solution in terms of talent availability, service level, and cultural match.
Streamline operations
By definition, nearshoring means delegating your engineering processes to the destinations within the same time zone. However, even when you nearshore to countries with up to three hours of time differences, this won’t affect business management and daily sync routines.
Within this framework, your working hours will overlap with your development team’s schedule. For example, if a UK-based enterprise decides to nearshore services to Poland, they will face only an hour time difference. Therefore, outsourcing to neighboring countries allows you to regularly conduct syncs and standups and settle issues as they occur.
Avoid cultural mismatches
When outsourcing to neighboring countries, you are less likely to face miscommunication issues and cultural discrepancies. To minimize the potential cultural gaps, we recommend researching the peculiarities of your destination’s mentality in advance. You may get detailed information concerning cultural compatibility in Hofstede’s report, where the countries are analyzed according to individualism, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and other criteria. In case neighboring countries appear to have cultural discrepancies, they can be tackled by conducting a series of cross-cultural training.
According to Hofstede’s report, most of the neighboring countries match in two or more dimensions. Let’s take a closer look into the cultural aspect on the example of two neighboring European countries— Poland and Sweden. Both countries have a high level of individualism in the society as well as are similar in regard to a long-term orientation.
However, there are some differences: for instance, the uncertainty avoidance figure in Poland is 93, while Sweden scored only 29. This means that Polish are more likely to follow specific requirements rather than work autonomously. Knowing this, you may painlessly mitigate any misunderstandings with your Polish team by setting up clear goals before the project is launched.
Nearshoring challenges and tips
Though nearshore software development introduces many bonuses for business owners, it also has a number of disadvantages in comparison to onshoring and offshoring. Some of the examples are restricted access to the global workforce and dynamic staff turnover. However, with wise management, all of them can be painlessly tackled. To help you get the most out of nearshore software development, we described these common issues in detail and provided tips on how to avoid the risks.
Limited access to tech talent
When nearshoring software development, you considerably broaden your staffing opportunities. Though this approach to outsourcing allows you to access a larger talent pool, it’s still limited compared to offshoring. Looking for tech talent around the globe will let you hire top specialists with expertise that would best suit your requirements as fast as possible.
Useful hint: Compile the list of tech expertise you need for your project. Look through the relevant studies, such as the ABSL report, to find out about the total talent availability of the potential outsourcing destination. The next step is to assess the number of engineers that have the skillset you require: one of the sources you might consult is LinkedIn. Finally, look through international skill evaluation ratings such as Top Coder and Skillvalue. This will help you decide whether to keep searching for an engineering vendor in this country or continue looking for other outsourcing destinations.
High market competitiveness
One more challenge you might face in the process of nearshore software development is high staff turnover. The destinations with relatively small talent pools are more likely to have high market competitiveness levels. Let’s take Slovakia as an example. This country is home to around 30,000 tech specialists, which is ten times less than in Ukraine. In addition, only around 16,500 of them are involved in IT outsourcing. To compare, this figure is up to 157K in Poland. Therefore, since the number of available talent in Slovakia is relatively small, you may have to deal with fierce market competition for the local workforce.
Advice to follow: Make sure that your destination for the nearshore is rich in the workforce with the required expertise. Otherwise, search for some other neighboring locations to avoid the risk of staff turnover and, as a result, the need for additional onboarding and training.
Eastern Europe— a prominent destination on the IT outsourcing map
Eastern Europe is home to a large number of skilled tech professionals involved in outsourcing engineering services. Nearly 709K of software developers are currently working on IT projects for foreign clients. In addition, the region is well-known for the high quality of delivered services. In addition, some of the area’s most popular outsourcing locations, like Ukraine, Poland, and Romania, take the leading positions in the skill evaluation ratings.
Related: Top IT outsourcing destinations of Eastern Europe: Market report
Why nearshore IT services to Poland?
Large talent pool
One of the most significant pluses of nearshoring to Poland is the large talent pool. The country is home to more than 490K skilled IT professionals, around 157,400 of which are involved in outsourcing software development abroad. Polish software developers have solid knowledge in multiple domains, which is proven by their high position in multiple skill evaluation rankings. Polish developers are placed third on the Skillvalue list of most proficient IT specialists. Moreover, the country’s engineers took seventh place in the global Top Coder ranking, which makes software nearshoring to Poland an alluring option in terms of service quality.
Most of the country’s engineers reside in major Polish IT hubs: Krakow (23.7%), Warsaw (22%), Wroclaw (15.3%), and others. Gdansk, Gdynia, and Sopot are neighboring cities that make up the Tri-city cluster. Around 7.8% of Polish engineers live in this area.
Decent education
Poland boasts 400 higher educational institutions, around 20 of which are public universities that offer CS and STEM courses. Among the best local institutions to obtain a tech degree are Warsaw University of Technology, AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poznan University of Technology, and many more.
The government has created favorable conditions for studying IT-related disciplines that attract applicants from all around the world. According to the Polish Ministry of Education and Science, only in 2020 the country accepted more than 85K international students. In addition, the English language is taught at all education levels. As a result, Poland takes 16th place in the EF EPI rating of English proficiency with its average language level estimated as high. Therefore, when you nearshore services to Poland, you may be sure that no communication issues or misunderstandings occur.
High cultural integrity
Poland is one of the European Union countries, meaning the Polish people share the values of equality and responsibility in corporate space. According to Hofstede’s report, Poland has a masculine society, like most of its Western neighbors. This means that Polish people are motivated by success, appreciate good performance at work, and are goal-oriented.
Moreover, Polish society is individualistic: while outsourcing your nearshore services to Poland, you may be sure that each of your team members will be mobile and able to handle processes without much guidance. However, Poland is also a hierarchical society, meaning that Polish specialists feel an emotional need to be well-managed. To mitigate this contradiction, it is recommended to establish personal contacts with your Polish team members.
Global companies choose nearshoring to Poland: Case studies
1. Ringier
There are many examples of successful software nearshoring to Poland, one of them being the partnership between N-iX and one of the largest Swiss media groups, Ringier. The client needed to augment their team with engineers skilled in Python, cloud development, microservices, AWS, and other domains to accelerate the product implementation. During the project, N-iX engineers built a custom module that could monitor the type of articles that entered the machine learning system for analysis. As a result, the system could be used for defining the topic of the article, related keywords, and many more. This data was later processed, and the software suggested particular articles to users that could be interested in such content.
2. Weinmann Emergency
Another prominent case when delegating nearshore IT services to Poland worked out is the project delivered by N-iX to Weinmann Emergency. This is one of the leading German emergency medicine enterprises in the field of ventilation and defibrillation solution development
The key project requirements were to accelerate the client’s engineering capabilities and reduce time to market for their solution. During the project, N-iX software engineers contributed to embedded Linux firmware implementation with C++ and the Qt framework. In the end, they enhanced the client’s engineering potential as well as released a new version of the solution that adheres to updated security requirements and industry standards.
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Why nearshore IT services to Poland with N-iX?
- N-iX is one of the trusted software development vendors in Eastern Europe with over 20 years of experience in custom software development for manufacturing, healthcare, telecommunications, and other business verticals.
- The vendor’s experts have a robust knowledge of cloud development, big data and data analytics, business intelligence, IoT, embedded systems development, and UI/UX design.
- N-iX has established collaborations with global market leaders such as Gogo, PrettyLittleThing, Ringier, and many other top enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies.
- The vendor complies with the international cybersecurity standards, namely, PCI DSS, GDPR, ISO 27001:2013, and ISO 9001:2015.
- N-iX has earned industry recognition and was included in the Forrester, IAOP, and CRN rankings.
