Every technology leader faces the same question when a skills gap appears: do we grow our own talent, hire it in, or bring someone in temporarily?
The answer depends on more than just budget – it depends on how you see the future.
Corecom Tech Academy · Talent Strategy Series
A conversation I had recently with a client confirmed something I’ve been thinking about for a while. We were discussing how their organisation could close a widening technology skills gap, and they referenced a well-known framework in talent strategy: Build, Buy, or Borrow. Three levers. Three very different outcomes.
It’s a framework that resonates precisely because it’s honest.
There is no single right answer for every organisation. Each approach has genuine merit, and the smartest companies use all three at different points in their growth. But when I look at where technology teams consistently win over the long term – where culture sticks, loyalty compounds and investment returns most meaningfully – the Build route deserves closer examination than it often gets.
The Three Levers of Talent Strategy
| Option 1 | Option 2 | Option 3 |
|---|---|---|
| BUILD | BUY | BORROW |
| Grow new talent from the ground up through structured training and development – the Recruit, Train, Deploy service. | Hire experienced professionals directly into the organisation, bringing immediate capability and market knowledge. | Engage consultants or contractors for targeted expertise on a project or interim basis, scaling up and down as needed. |
Buy: Speed Has a Price Tag
Hiring experienced professionals from the market – is the fastest way to plug a specific gap. When you need a senior cloud architect next month, or a data engineer who already knows your stack, the open market can deliver. There’s no ramp-up on fundamentals, and a seasoned hire brings perspective from other environments that can genuinely sharpen your own thinking.
The honest caveat is that hiring experienced talent is expensive, competitive, and they may not always stay. In a tight technology labour market, you may win a bidder’s war for someone only to find your competitor wins the next one. Cultural fit is also harder to predict in a hire who arrives fully formed – their habits, approaches and expectations are already set. The ‘Buy’ route solves an immediate problem well, but it’s less reliable as a long-term talent strategy on its own.
Borrow: Expertise on Demand
Engaging consultants, contractors, or specialist firms – is arguably the most flexible of the three. For well-defined, time-limited challenges, it is often exactly the right call. A transformation programme, a technology audit, a complex migration: each benefit from specialist external expertise that you genuinely don’t need in-house indefinitely.
The risk, though, is dependency. When the engagement ends, the knowledge can leave with it. There is also a cultural dimension: consultants are solving your problem, but they are not invested in your long-term mission the way someone who sees a future in your organisation will be. Borrowed expertise is valuable, butit rarely becomes institutional knowledge. And lets face it – costs a small fortune!
The companies that consistently outperform on technology talent aren’t the ones who paid the most to hire it. They’re the ones who created the conditions to grow it.
Build: The Compounding Advantage
This is where the conversation shifts. Building talent – recruiting promising individuals and developing them into skilled technology professionals – is the most patient of the three strategies. It asks more of an organisation upfront, but the returns are different in kind, not just in degree.
When you build talent, you shape them. Professionals who come through a structured Recruit, Train, Deploy academy don’t arrive with competing habits from three previous employers. They learn your environment, your values, your ways of working from the beginning. They are, from day one, invested in being part of something – because they know that something invested in them first.
Retention follows almost naturally. People who are given genuine opportunity – who are recruited for potential, trained with purpose, and deployed into meaningful roles – don’t leave easily. The loyalty that is created when an organisation takes a chance on someone and delivers on that promise is one of the most undervalued assets in workforce strategy.
Corecom Tech Academy’s service
Our Recruit, Train, Deploy service is built around exactly this philosophy. We identify individuals with the aptitude, drive, and curiosity to succeed in technology – not just those who already have the CV.
We develop them through structured, industry-relevant training. And we deploy them into client organisations ready to contribute from day one, with ongoing support to ensure they succeed.
| 01 | 02 | 03 |
|---|---|---|
| RECRUIT | TRAIN | DEPLOY |
| Identifying candidates with the right potential, attitude and drive – broadening the talent pool beyond traditional routes. | Structured, role-specific technical training aligned to real client environments and modern industry standards. | Placing trained talent into client organisations with the skills, support and confidence to make an immediate impact. |
This service also addresses something neither ‘Buy’ nor ‘Borrow’ can fully solve: the pipeline problem. The technology skills shortage isn’t going away. It is, by most measures, getting worse. Organisations that rely solely on hiring from a small pool of experienced candidates or on short‑term external support risk limiting their long‑term capability. Building new talent grows the pool rather than competing for a share of it.
Using All Three... But Anchoring in Build
The smartest organisations don’t choose one lever and ignore the others. They buy when speed is genuinely critical, borrow when specialist external expertise is the right tool for a defined challenge, and build consistently as the foundation of their long-term talent strategy. These approaches complement each other well.
But the anchor matters. Organisations that build consistently and invest in growing talent rather than only consuming it, – develop something that can’t be bought or borrowed: a culture of development, a reputation as a place where people grow, and a workforce that is genuinely committed because they know the organisation is committed to them.
That is the case for Build. Not instead of the other two – alongside them. But at the centre of how you think about talent for the long term.
Building talent doesn’t just close a skills gap. It creates an organisation that people want to be part of – and that’s a competitive advantage no competitor can easily replicate.
If you’re exploring what a Recruit, Train, Deploy service could look like for your organisation, we’d love to chat! The conversation about how you build is one worth having sooner rather than later.
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Contact Corecom Tech Academy today to explore our tailored training programmes!
