The beauty of outsourcing is getting the skills you want temporarily so you are not saddled with those skill set that you don’t need permanently. This has helped save on precious IT budgets.

Not infrequently, you will need those skill sets that even your vendor cannot find right away. You will come across an outsourced vendor selling you skills that don’t match with your requirements. This happens more so in cases where the position has been open for quite sometime or where skill sets are not available with the vendor forcing him to resort to give alternatives. Most often they come with some kind of assurance that this will work or at times padded up so show some experience.

Example if you ask for a Adobe CQ a vendor could offer flex resources saying that they can pick it up easily and not to be concerned. similarly for .NET trained resources you could get Java instead saying they will pick it up in few weeks. Who is paying for this training – consider that, also how this is going to impact your efficiency and deadlines.

Some common technologies are fairly available in the market so there is no need to compromise on taking those that are not closer to it. Rarely you will find skill sets that are impossible to find given that most of the resources from outsourced vendors are in the average age group of 25 to 30 years and some of the skills are much older than that.

Assess the opportunity costs while making decisions. Not just money is at stake here, there are deadlines and quality issues to be looked into as well.

In large outsourcing arrangements when you change the underlying technology on a large-scale there is reason to persist with those that can adapt if they have significant business knowledge and have a fair compromise to leverage their SME skills and less of technical skills while they pick up. Also the technology has to be similar not entirely different to bridge and be able to adapt quickly. Also some level of training paid for the vendor is extremely helpful as well. Verify what kind of training is being offered, the depth and length of the training and how that would be helpful to the job on hand.