Q&A: Andela CEO talks about the need for ‘borderless talent’ amid work visa limitations

Editor’s note: This Q&A was conducted by Computerworld Senior Writer Lucas Mearian shortly before his unexpected passing on Oct. 21, 2025. Contributing writer Agam Shah helped complete this story for publication.

On Sept. 19, the US government announced plans to raise the one-time fee of an H-1B visa to employ foreign workers from $65,000 to $100,000.

The fee hike makes it more expensive to employ high-skilled foreign workers in the US and would force companies to rethink talent strategies, experts said after the announcement.

Andela helps companies address talent shortages by providing access to workers with technical skills in more than 135 countries. The company has a private marketplace where corporate customers can cherry pick talent to work on technical and AI projects.

The company champions the idea of borderless talent, which is one way to navigate issues caused by H-1B visas, which can limit access to talent.

Computerworld sat down with Andela CEO Carrol Chang to talk about borderless talent, insufficient and outdated visa programs, and the hiring flexibility and efficiencies the company offers organizations. 

The H-1B visa program has long been seen as a gateway to global tech talent for U.S. companies. Why do you believe it’s no longer a sufficient or sustainable solution? “The demands for tech talent are growing so fast due to AI that no existing visa program can be a standalone solution. Globally, three of four IT employers say they lack the tech talent they need, and the outlook will only get more dire as AI creates a demand for high-skilled specialists like data engineers, senior architects, and agentic orchestrators. 

“Visa programs aren’t designed by the laws of supply and demand. They’re defined by policy makers and are updated infrequently. So, they’ll never truly be in sync with the needs of the labor market. For companies to find the tech talent they need, they need to look at the whole world as their hiring pool. Companies need to look beyond the US and beyond certain visa types.”

Andela champions a “borderless” model for tech talent. How does this model practically address the core issues U.S. and global companies face in hiring skilled tech workers? “Our vision of borderless talent is that the right person can be matched to the right job, no matter where either of them are physically located. When talent skills and client needs are accurately assessed through rich, multi-dimensional data that goes beyond the resume and job description, you can take the gamble out of hiring. Andela has been doing this for 11 years. The best way for companies to create resilient, future-proof teams is to tap into the global, borderless workforce.”

What’s one thing you think most tech CEOs misunderstand about the global workforce today? “They think it is too hard for them to access. Brilliant people exist around the world. It’s why they want to sponsor people for H-1B visas. But hiring outside of those traditional pathways — to work with a brilliant machine learning engineer from Cairo or São Paulo, for example — is…a long, painful process that takes months and is inaccessible to them. They don’t know that they can find the right partner, someone who has sorted this all out and vetted talent and developed compliance with global labor and tax laws, etc. Once they understand that those partners exist, the global workforce becomes instantly accessible to them.”

What specific types of tech roles or skill sets are currently in highest demand from your clients like GitHub and The Weather Company? “We’re seeing a boom in AI-related jobs. We’re talking AI engineers, machine learning engineers, data scientists, and others who can make data ready for AI systems and agents. We’re seeing demand for people who can build entire fleets of agents and then manage and integrate them into larger enterprise systems. It is no longer enough to know how to use AI; you also have to understand how to integrate it into larger, complex systems. This means talent needs to be both AI-fluent and enterprise-fluent.”

Emerging markets like Africa and South America are central to Andela’s talent strategy. What makes these regions particularly promising, and what challenges remain in tapping into their potential? “There are burgeoning tech hubs in both Africa and South America, including Lagos, Sao Paolo, Nairobi, Mexico City, Medellin, and more. The regions are also home to high levels of English fluency and have good time zone overlap with teams based in North America or Europe.”

How does Andela balance short-term client needs with the long-term development of tech talent pipelines in the regions it sources from? “We are a talent marketplace that already has senior AI-fluent engineers to meet immediate client needs. But because AI is evolving so rapidly, skills will quickly become outdated. That’s why we’re investing heavily in continuous training and learning programs and leveraging partnerships with frontier tech companies. For instance, we recently partnered with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to train 20,000 to 30,000 African technologists in cloud native basics — core infrastructure on which to build AI. We also recently launched the Andela AI Academy to create the next generation of AI-native technologists. The first AI Academy program, also recently announced, is to train 3,000 technologists in AI coding skills in collaboration with GitHub.”

Three out of four IT employers globally report tech talent shortages. Is this a supply problem, a training gap, or a mismatch in expectations between employers and workers? “It’s all of those things. Technical hiring still feels like a gamble, even though software development is, relatively speaking, packed with deterministic skills. There are two main problems. One problem is the data problem. There’s not enough reliable data about what a job actually requires and what a worker is capable of doing. Today, we rely on resumes and job descriptions. These are thin, poor representations of what a job actually entails and what a person can do. The way we solve that problem is through continuous assessment. 

“The second problem is the learning problem. You can have all the data in the world tell you what a job entails and what a person is capable of, but what if you consistently see a gap? As AI proliferates faster than human skills, this gap will only widen. The way you solve that is through continuous learning and upskilling on the job, tailored to the individual.”

Remote work opened up access to global talent but also revealed challenges in managing distributed teams. What do you see as the biggest blind spots companies still have about cross-border hiring? “They think that they cannot trust the quality of the person because they feel like the person is better vetted and more successfully managed if they are in person and a full-time employee. Those are incorrect assumptions. But that is the blind spot.”

Looking ahead, what’s your vision for how global tech talent networks will evolve over the next five to 10 years — and what role do you think Andela will play in that future? “Talent networks of the future need to operate like true flywheels. A basic talent marketplace is simply a meeting place for supply and demand, and both sides have to exert a lot of energy to find the right match. In the future, talent marketplaces will have rich information on both the client’s job to be done and the talent’s proven abilities so that it can make matches that feel instant and inexplicably magical. 

“As clients find it easier to find the right team members, they bring more jobs to the platform, and as talent finds it easier to find good-paying, fulfilling jobs, more skilled workers join the platform. This improves the experience for both sides, and the flywheel effect grows. All the while, the network is continually publishing data about the labor market to both sides, which helps both companies and workers set expectations on pay and job requirements. 

“We’re building the best assessment and matching technology in the world. We are solving the data problem on both the demand and supply side. And we’re building the best training and continuous learning infrastructure for talent. We do this because our technologists don’t come to Andela to just find a job, but to grow their skills, career, and earning potential, especially with the demands of an AI-driven world.”