Workforce strategy / 3 min read
You cannot hire your way out of every skills gap
External hiring is necessary but not sufficient. The people already on staff hold product, process, equipment and customer knowledge that cannot be replaced quickly. The strongest workforce strategy combines selective hiring with focused upskilling and internal mobility, allocated deliberately.
The operating reality
The demand curve is steepening. Demand for AI, cloud, machine learning and cybersecurity capability is widening the workforce challenge. Leadership, analytical thinking and technology literacy remain essential. This reaches beyond the tech team to engineers, planners, quality and maintenance.
Allocate across build, buy and borrow.
Build internally where the capability depends on company-specific knowledge and can be developed in a reasonable window: process engineers using analytics, data engineers on your platform, business data stewards, product owners, AI literacy for operating leaders.
Buy through hiring where you need experience you cannot grow fast enough: a Head of Data Platform who has built the operating model, a senior data-platform architect, an MLOps leader, an IT/OT architect, a leader who can reset a stalled program.
Borrow through partners for specialized capacity or a short-term gap, with knowledge transfer built into the engagement. If the partner leaves and you cannot operate the capability, it did not build internal strength.
Tie upskilling to real work. Generic training builds awareness, not delivery. Attach it to a role and an initiative: a data engineer learns the data platform while building a governed pipeline, a reliability engineer learns ML while building an asset health use case, a steward learns governance while fixing material master issues. People gain skills and the company gains output.
Hire multipliers. A strong external hire should raise the people around them: built teams and mentored, created reusable standards, transferred knowledge from partners, developed successors, made complex technology understandable. The best leaders leave the organization stronger than they found it.
The Sebastian Group view
We help determine which skills to hire, develop or access through partners, so every gap does not become another requisition. When hiring is required, we prioritize candidates who deliver now and build the next generation of internal talent. The goal is not a larger technology organization. It is a more capable manufacturing organization.