Onshore and Offshore Together: How Australian Businesses Are Mixing Their Teams

News · 2026-09-04 · 5 min read

If you follow news about jobs in Australia, you may have noticed that talk about offshoring has become very divided. Some stories focus on big companies sending hundreds of back-office roles overseas. Others treat every offshore hire as a danger to local jobs. What often gets lost is how most Australian businesses really work. Many are not picking one side. They are building teams both at home and abroad, on purpose, because they need more capacity and that need is not going away. For workers who have built careers overseas, whether in the Middle East or back home in the Philippines, this is a useful picture of how employers think.

A Gap in Skills, Not a Hunt for Cheap Labour

Fresh research by the workforce provider ConnectOS backs up what business owners and recruiters have sensed for a long time: a shortage of skills is now a problem for income, not only for HR. The employers it surveyed described real business damage when roles stayed empty. Service quality dropped, customers left, deadlines slipped, and some businesses even said no to new work because their people lacked the time or know-how to handle it.

This point matters. The businesses in question did not simply want cheaper workers. They tried to hire in Australia, could not fill important roles quickly enough, and then saw the cost of that gap appear in their accounts.

Small Firms Face a Different Reality from Coles or Qantas

Much of the recent public argument has focused on major corporate offshoring deals, the kind that involve hundreds of roles and large outsourcing partners. For the small and mid-sized businesses that form most of the Australian economy, though, the maths looks nothing like that.

Picture a founder hoping to hire a first local admin or operations helper. Once superannuation, leave entitlements and overheads are added, the full cost of that salary can run well into six figures. For a young business, that is often beyond reach rather than a simple hiring choice. Here, offshoring is not replacing a local job that would otherwise have existed. Very often it is the only way the role is filled at all. It frees the founder or current staff to spend time on higher-value work that grows the business, and in time that growth can support hiring locally too.

Treating a ten-person business setting up its first support team in the same way as a national retailer reshaping its back office misses the point. It may also put off the very businesses that most need flexible workforce choices from even looking at them.

How AI Is Reshaping Offshore Roles

Many people assume AI will one day make offshore hiring unnecessary. The data points another way. Offshore teams are taking up AI tools as quickly as onshore teams, or faster, and some of the fastest-growing offshore jobs today are in AI and automation itself: data analysts, automation specialists and AI engineers.

It is the routine, rule-based tasks that are being automated. What remains and keeps growing is work that needs good judgement, such as making sense of information, understanding a customer's situation and using AI tools wisely inside a particular business. That is a more skilled offshore role than the old image of offshore work as simple back-office processing, and it is a trend businesses should keep in mind when planning offshore hiring over the next few years.

Many Employers Still Feel Unsure About Compliance

One of the most interesting parts of the ConnectOS data is not about hiring plans but about managing risk. Most employers say expectations around compliance for offshore set-ups have jumped in only a few years. Yet only a quarter feel truly confident about where they stand, and a noticeable share are unsure which standards even apply to them.

This is where many businesses stumble. The problem is rarely the choice to offshore; it is how the arrangement is set up. Worker classification, data handling duties, contract terms and the way local employment law applies all need to be correct from the first day. Any business looking at an offshore arrangement should build compliance in from the start, and the Fair Work Ombudsman's guidance on employer obligations is a good place to begin where local and offshore arrangements overlap.

Start by Listing the Work

The best first question is not whether to offshore. It is an honest look at what the team really does each week. Which tasks are repeatable and lower in value? Which need local market knowledge or judgement in front of clients? Which are holding back growth just because nobody has enough hours to reach them?

This exercise usually points to a mixed set-up rather than an either-or decision. Core roles that face clients and rely on judgement stay in Australia, while support, operations and specialist capacity, including newer AI and data roles, is built offshore. Done properly, this does not compete with local hiring. It pays for it, giving the business room to grow until hiring locally becomes realistic.

What This Means for Leaders and Workers Alike

Skills shortages are not fixing themselves. The businesses handling them best are not taking sides in the onshore-versus-offshore argument. They are building connected teams with clear role mapping, strong compliance foundations and a realistic sense of how AI changes the value of offshore work. That is a question of workforce strategy, not politics. For job seekers, the message is encouraging: judgement, customer understanding and comfort with AI tools are the skills these blended teams value, so keep building them wherever you work.

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