DevOps. Emerging cloud. Machine learning. Over and over, in my meetings with professional services execs across the country, I hear about the shortage of expertise in these emerging technologies. These execs tell me on a weekly basis that there are simply not enough skilled IT workers to fill these demands.

OpsTalk — look for us.

In a 2016 state of the market report, Gartner said that 2016 was the year that DevOps would move from a niche strategy from large cloud companies to a mainstream strategy in both SMEs and the enterprise. This is evident in the Docker adoption rate, which more than doubled year over year from 13 percent in 2015 to 27 percent in 2016.

But this is a double-edged sword for IT decision makers out there. They need more people to tackle particular challenges or add expertise, like transitioning monolithic applications to micro service architectures, that doesn’t exist in-house, yet when they go to some of the largest temporary employment agencies, they find little to no capacity to produce skilled consultants in these emerging cloud technologies the promises fall short of reality.

According to one of our clients in the software industry, “Sometimes our technology sells faster than our capacity to train our own staff to implement. We need a reliable partner who can train and certify people as well as we can, but who can move more quickly to bring the skills to the marketplace.”

Now more than ever, there is no “one size fits all.” One of the biggest benefits of today’s gig economy is the deep and highly skilled IT talent pool. It isn’t random or happenstance due to layoffs, mergers and acquisitions. Smart, passionate, and highly skilled technologists have chosen the independence and challenge of tackling complex assignments without the harness of working for one large organization. They aren’t looking for their next career move — they are living it — free from administration, red tape, and politics.

Here at the Stone Door Group, we have leveraged our extensive tech networks and hand-picked talent to turn the IT consulting world on its head. Our secret sauce? Not only do we vet our IT consultants thoroughly and collaborate with them to keep their skills fresh, but also we understand our clients’ needs and ensure our IT consultants deliver the “right stuff” every day.

And by the right stuff, I mean the stuff that’s so tip of the spear that there’s a shortage of expertise in the market: DevOps, cloud transformation, application containerization, and machine learning.

There’s more to it, of course, but the end result is that clients AND our consultants are very engaged in delivering the best outcomes possible for every tech challenge.

Here in OpsTalk in the coming months, you’ll hear more from the Stone Door Group, our consultants and our clients about the tech gig economy and how the talent and drive of extraordinary IT consultants are transforming tech teams large and small. We are solving some of the business world’s most pressing tech challenges such as the massive transformation to the cloud, and we invite you to come onboard.

Visit back often here or at the Stone Door Group. We welcome you to share your experiences, contribute a comment. These tech times are a ‘changing, and we are with you every step of the way.