Future Shoring: sending jobs to the future instead of offshore.

At RMIT's WIL project we've implemented an innovative blended-team model where Interns make up 50% of the project team and work alongside experienced consultants and senior staff.

I refer to this approach as 'future-shoring' because we are sending jobs to the future instead of sending them offshore. By employing student interns alongside experienced consultants, future-shoring has achieved a blended resource cost rate on the Project that is competitive with offshoring blended rates, whilst developing the professional capacity of local students. The senior members of the team who provide the mentoring and coaching enjoy a heightened sense of purpose through the supportive relationships they form with the Interns along the way.

When we were setting up the WIL project, to deploy systems and processes to enable Work Integrated Learning, we realised that most of the project team had no direct experience of what it meant to do WIL as a student or to hire WIL students as an employer. We wanted to understand this in as direct a way as possible so, rather than read up on the topic, we decided we would bring WIL students in to work alongside us at every opportunity.

We are evolving this model. Some of the Interns who have been working on the functional team testing and congiguring the InPlace software are leaving us soon to work with Quantum, the software vendor.