When you need software, you have to find software developers. That alone can prove challenging. Developers tend to be in demand, and they can be expensive. The search for affordable, high-quality options leads to many interesting ideas, and one of them is known as nearshoring.
A nearshore company helps to save money while improving output quality. What’s potentially more surprising is that nearshoring creates all new professional development opportunities.
Nearshoring vs Offshoring vs Onshoring
Before we dive into professional development, let’s clarify a few ideas. In software development, onshoring and offshoring are long-used, standard ideas. Onshoring development happens in the same country as the company ordering the software. This is common because it reduces international barriers and makes many aspects of the project more predictable. With stronger communication, onshoring shines for custom, business-critical projects.
Offshoring is when you hire or contract developers from another country to work on your project. It’s a common practice in many industries, and it comes with a few advantages. First, you gain access to a much wider talent pool, and that can help you find great developers faster and easier. Second, offshoring labor is often cheaper. It’s one of the primary motivations.
The problem is that offshoring often puts you in the hands of someone halfway across the world. Communication is challenging, and the differences in time zones alone can create a ton of challenges that impact outsourcing.
Nearshoring is a somewhat newer concept that sits between these ideas. You still seek international talent, but you aim for countries close to your own to minimize time zone differences (and in many cases language barriers too).
Nearshoring typically offers reduced labor costs (although maybe not as much as offshoring) while improving communication, consistency, and predictability.
Professional Benefits for a Nearshoring Company
With that concept in mind, nearshore technology solutions lead to unique situations that create interesting advantages for companies. Many of those advantages also create professional development opportunities for workers in the country.
By exploring the convergence of these ideas, we can see that a nearshore company can improve its own bottom line while creating a positive, often superior working environment.
Affordability
At a business level, nearshoring offers more affordability for many development products. This allows the team to tackle a wider range of challenges more aggressively. As the company saves money, some of that gets rolled into the next set of projects, improving productivity at a faster pace.
For professionals in that business, the affordability translates to working on a wider range of projects on faster timelines. That translates to greater experience in less time, leading to growth for each individual.
Talent Acquisition
Nearshoring also improves talent acquisition. Partly because of the affordability of this strategy, businesses can hire more developers for any given project. Perhaps more importantly, companies can pull talent from more regions.
Now, some of these benefits also apply to offshoring, but nearshoring speeds up the acquisition process. Many hiring or contracting delays stem from time zone differences. Nearshoring removes this obstacle and speeds up the acquisition process.
This means individuals working in development roles have a more diverse set of peers. Allows for greater exchanges of ideas and information, and it expands personal, and professional growth.
Development Cycles
Nearshoring also helps speed up development cycles by providing the best of both worlds. With offshoring, you gain access to more talent at affordable rates, but time differences can create communication gaps and general delays.
With onshoring, you clear up the communication gaps and delays, but you probably have a smaller team due to costs.
A nearshore company hits the sweet spot and often yields the shortest development cycles because teams are large and communication is strong.
White that’s great for most businesses, it offers professional development benefits as well. Any individual developer gets to work on more projects in less time. It grows experience faster, while bolstering that experience with the other benefits mentioned before.
Professional Growth
Each general benefit of nearshoring leads to professional growth opportunities, but there are specific skill sets that blossom in nearshoring environments.
In many cases, nearshore companies recruit across language barriers, and much of the work is done remotely. For managers, this forces development in organizational skills, communication, and learning additional languages. All of those skills add value to the resume, so to speak.
These benefits hold true for developers not working in management roles as well. Nearshoring makes real-time communication easier and more consistent, but since so much collaboration is remote, it requires every participant to develop good habits in terms of meticulous and understandable communication.
Nearshore workers on both sides of the operation gain important skills from the very nature of the collaboration.
Networking
Lastly, anyone working in a nearshore environment gets amazing networking opportunities. Once again, this applies to some degree with offshoring, but the time zone differences create more barriers than is always obvious.
In offshoring, time zone barriers usually diminish professional relationships. It’s harder to communicate, and people usually don’t work together in real time.
Nearshore workers collaborate more directly and consistently with their remote partners. Even with language barriers, developers gain access to professionals in new regions and markets. And, because nearshoring often leads to larger task groups for each project, the number of connections grows.
Nearshore companies offer some of the most valuable and unique networking opportunities for software developers.
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