TL;DR
- 85% of Australian hiring managers say the skills gap is already hurting business performance (Hays 2025).
- Australia faces a projected shortfall of 10,000+ accountants by 2026 and needs 312,000 more tech workers by 2030.
- The businesses building offshore dedicated teams now are solving a talent problem, not just a budget one.
In February 2025, KPMG Australia made headlines. The firm announced it would move approximately 200 of its executive assistant roles to the Philippines - a decision that was leaked to a corporate Instagram gossip page before it reached staff.
The response was predictable. Headlines focused on the cost savings - approximately $17 million in annual wages. The commentary leaned into redundancy, disruption and public perception.
But the more important story got less attention: when one of the four most prestigious professional services firms in Australia decides to build an offshore support team, the argument against doing so becomes very hard to sustain.
The numbers that are actually driving this decision
The cultural debate about offshoring has always sat on top of an economic one. And the economics have shifted decisively.
Australia does not have enough skilled workers to meet current demand - and the gap is widening, not closing.
According to the Hays 2025 Skills Report, 85% of Australian hiring managers report a skills gap that is already negatively affecting business performance. That is not a temporary post-COVID blip. It is a structural condition. A further 94% of finance and accounting leaders told Robert Half in 2025 that they face difficulty attracting and retaining the staff they need.
The numbers by sector are stark:
- Finance and accounting: Australia faces a projected shortfall of more than 10,000 accountants by 2026. Enrolments in Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand's Professional Year program have collapsed - from over 7,000 in 2018 to around 340 in 2024.
- Technology: Australia needs 312,000 additional tech workers by 2030. It produces approximately 7,000 IT graduates per year. No combination of immigration and salary increases closes that gap.
- Across all occupations: Jobs and Skills Australia's 2025 Occupation Shortage List found 29% of all assessed occupations remain in shortage nationally - and 139 occupations have been in persistent shortage for five consecutive years.
- Choose embedded over transactional. Dedicated teams - where people operate as genuine extensions of your organisation - perform fundamentally differently from task-based outsourcing.
- Focus on role alignment, not just cost. Offshore works best for roles with clear outputs and structured processes: finance, administration, data, customer operations, IT support, marketing coordination. Explore the team categories that map most directly to Australian business needs.
- Invest in onboarding. The businesses that report poor offshore outcomes typically skipped this step. Those seeing compounding returns invested in integration from day one.
- Build the team before you need it. The worst time to start is when you are already under pressure domestically. Build capacity ahead of demand.
These are not short-term pipeline problems. They are structural conditions that cannot be hired around.
Why salary increases are not the solution
The instinctive response to a talent shortage is to pay more. And most Australian businesses have tried. Hays reports that 74% of accounting firms have raised salaries in an attempt to attract and retain staff. Companies in tech are paying premiums of up to 19% above market rates - and roles are still sitting unfilled for months.
When you are paying above market for talent that does not exist locally in sufficient volume, you are not solving a hiring problem. You are bidding against yourself.
This is the point at which the offshore team conversation stops being about cost and starts being about access.
The Philippines, where Sourcewiser builds fully integrated teams, produces more than 700,000 graduates annually with particular depth in finance, accounting, IT and business operations. Time zone alignment with Australia is near-perfect, and English proficiency is a well-established structural advantage.
The big end of town has already done the maths
KPMG is not the only name in this story. Telstra routes digital support to the Philippines and India across 18 million subscribers. Qantas offloads Velocity program support - 12 million members - to offshore operations. NAB and Westpac both operate offshore teams spanning customer operations and back-office functions.
These are not struggling businesses cutting corners. They are well-resourced organisations that have looked at the Australian talent market and concluded that building dedicated offshore capability is the rational response to a structural problem.
For mid-market and SME businesses, the calculus is even more compelling. A Big Four firm can absorb a prolonged recruitment process or a 19% salary premium. Most growing businesses cannot. The cost of a role unfilled - in lost output, overloaded colleagues, delayed projects and missed revenue - compounds quickly.
What this means for business leaders
The question is no longer whether to look offshore for talent. The question is how to do it well.
There are real differences between offshore teams that deliver and those that do not - and the gap is not geographic. It is structural. Here is what the evidence supports:
The talent shortage is not a cycle that will correct itself in 18 months. It is a structural feature of the Australian labour market. The businesses that build their offshore team now are not ahead of the curve - they are simply catching up to reality faster than their competitors.
The debate has already moved on
When KPMG made its announcement, the conversation in Australia focused on the 200 people losing their roles. That is a real and legitimate concern. But the broader business story is this: the firm did not move those roles offshore because it wanted to save $17 million. It moved them because building a well-structured, professionally managed offshore team was the more sustainable workforce strategy.
That logic applies to a $50 million business as clearly as it applies to a $2 billion one.
The stigma around offshoring was always partly a proxy for the risk of doing it badly. The firms that have built it well - embedded, structured, accountable - do not have that conversation any more.
If you want to understand what well-structured offshore delivery actually looks like in practice, this is worth reading next.
Read: High-performing offshore teams: lessons from real-world delivery →
Sources referenced: Hays 2025 Skills Report; Robert Half 2025 Salary & Hiring Survey; Jobs and Skills Australia 2025 Occupation Shortage List; Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand; Consultancy.au / KPMG Australia offshoring announcement 2025; Konnect.ph Australia Tech Talent Shortage 2025.
