As schools grow through higher pupil enrolment, increasing staff or expansion of facilities, the managements of these schools must increase their investment in IT support in order to meet the higher demand. At this point, school management teams are faced with a choice, do they hire additional technicians, or do they outsource all the IT support function to an external service provider?
For over six (7) months now, there has been a worldwide lockdown to varying degrees but which have unanimously found schools shut, in order to contain the spread of the coronavirus, thus schools around the world have had no choice than to resort to virtual classrooms (where able) to keep them operational. Educators need support, but it is an arduous task, nearly impossible and very expensive to put together an IT education support team.
Nevertheless, with schools all around the world gradually opening, adequate tech support is crucial. Outsourcing IT support functions gives you access to expertise without complicated and costly recruitment and ongoing staff costs. Large upgrades and maintenance can be time consuming and your IT support team should not have to deal with all that if you outsource those responsibilities to a third party.
Additionally, when there is not any grave-need, layoffs of the excess hands become necessary – a new term, “right-sizing” is currently the appropriate euphemism for downsizing. Nonetheless, it is necessary otherwise, there would be too many people drawing salaries and benefits for almost no work done.
Outsourcing presents the appropriate solution to integrate a professional third-party company into your existing staff structures, only when needed. Today, a lot of schools constantly depend on their in-house IT staff to maintain the online infrastructures to ensure online learning is seamless and effective.
By eliminating the distraction of the general day-to-day tasks and handing them over to a third-party company, the staff can best focus on ideas that will improve teaching, learning and educational needs. Most often, the IT staff outsourced to you would be more experienced than you can typically afford to include in your recurring monthly payroll.
Furthermore, with demands on educational technology growing, having a fully functional team able to respond to small and large-scale emergencies quickly grows too expensive for even larger schools. Thus, how can smaller schools possibly keep up?
The reality is that many tried-and-true methods and educational tools simply won’t cut it anymore. The world is changing, including the field of education. Schools generally must find cost-effective ways to keep up. With schools’ budgets often being tight, it’s important for school managements to find a way to keep ICT support at a high level while controlling the costs of doing so. When hiring additional, internal technical staff, it’s more than just salaries that should be considered.
The true cost will always include net salary and statutory deductions like PAYE, pension contributions, NSITF, ITF and the likes, and even more so intangible essentials such as; management time, professional development, sick leave and the additional cost of recruitment to replace team members who leave.
Using an ICT service provider that bears all these costs is undoubtedly the best most prudent approach to ensuring business continuity through your school system. It is always going to be the best approach to leave the tech stuff to the Tech experts. It’s much more effective that way and keeps you concentrating on your core business of educating future leaders.
Our Outsourcing Programme, which covers either or a combination of HR, IT, CRM, Secretarial Services, Tax Compliance & Accounting is run under our SME Faculty. For more information on our Outsourcing Tech Support, send an email to smeblock@cr8careers.com
