Temp to...?

  Career Development  

Today there are plenty of IT teams out there who are seriously understaffed and have very limited resources in their budget to bring on additional full time staff. Contrary to popular belief it is not just a matter of the manager "making it happen" if they want another person on staff badly enough. These constraints are very real, and the best advice human resources has to offer those project managers has been to use the dollars they do have to bring on talent on a temporary basis. Yes, you heard me correctly: "temporary staff"   as opposed to "consultants." Why not consultants? Well, unfortunately the answer is about as obvious as it gets...it?s about money. You can bring in a temp and pay that technical temp a base pay of $40 per hour through a temp firm (with the temp firm getting 5%) instead of $80 per hour that the consulting firm demands, wherein the consultant still gets $40 per hour.

Now I understand that in the past, this type of situation has only been offered to help desk-level positions and very rarely for seasoned professionals, and even then there was usually a light at the end of the tunnel, if you will. In other words, the project managers were able to offer talent a "temp to perm" opportunity. Now, however, with severely constrained budgets, there is no such opportunity. To that end, PMs strangely enough now find themselves trying to turn possible full time …

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