One of the beauty of outsourcing is the ability to find skillsets that you may not have on your rolls. I have had several examples trying to find a rare or legacy skill set and the outsourced vendor would find some one either on my own account or outside with other clients that the vendor services and saved my day on the client site.

If you have a lot of legacy apps still in production but you are not upgrading it pending retirement this scenario almost happens now and then when you need a particular skill set when something fails or you need to upgrade a portion of the application. At times the requirements do not permit you to have a full-time employee waiting for things to happen.

The best practice would be have an inventory of skill sets you need based on the applications in production so you wont be caught off guard. Also check with the vendor what kind of broad skill sets they support. Most of them have personnel mapping systems that hold this data. Have a aready inventory both onsite and offshore to look up when you need.

This wont solve all of your skill sets issues, given the average young age group of resources that come out of the outsourcing pool, some skill sets like mainframe or older program and assembly language for example are tough ones to source. Some resources even if they learnt these skill sets wont list them for the fear of being slotted as legacy programmers than cutting edge ones working on latest technologies.

We all know legacy skill sets will die sooner or later and there is very little incentive to work on them.