Skilled staff shortages seen as setback to success

It seems that the telecommunications labor market is always in a state of flux – either too many people and not enough jobs or too many jobs and not enough people. If we had employment surveys centered on the telecoms sector, similar to those that economists use to determine national employment rates, it would be interesting to see what the optimum situation would be and how the industry is fairing.

Commsday reports that in Australia, “diverse sectors of the telco industry are rallying to combat an escalating skills shortage, forecast to worsen in the coming months and years – with the notable exception of NBN Co, which has a backlog of applicants for jobs not yet created yet.” This seems to suggest that skilled people are leaving telcos in favor of ‘greener pastures’ in the form of National Broadband Network (NBN) rollouts. If this is the case, other counties embarking on the same route may find themselves in the same predicament.

Over the years, CSPs have generally taken the route of reducing internal IT numbers in favor of outsourced or contract labor. Software vendors and systems integrators have also been called upon to provide key staff during any new implementations or transformation projects. Post 2000 saw a dramatic culling of ICT staff numbers in an effort to cut costs and protect the profitability of operations in all telco sectors. Many of those disenfranchised, but well-trained specialists, left the industry altogether, many to the banking and finance sector that was experiencing opposite market pressures at the time.

Many of these people have simply not come back, and those specialists left in the market are being wooed to projects all over the world, particularly network rollouts and business transformation projects. These workers are becoming highly transient and often avoid long-term commitments in order to maximize their potential earnings and avoid issues such as ‘transformation lethargy.’

Despite the fact that colleges around the world are pumping out IT graduates at an alarming rate, the specialist skill sets needed can only be provided by experienced staff, and it is they that are in big demand. However, experience can only be gained by working within CSPs or on projects, and neither can afford the overhead of on-the-job training. It’s becoming a bit like a vicious circle or Catch-22.

The skills squeeze looks like being an ongoing problem for the industry. Commsday quoted Rebecca Wallace, MD of Launch Recruitment in Australia saying, “we haven’t worked hard enough [as an industry]... in raising the profile for young people. And that has shown in the amount of young people getting into the industry, and studying telecommunications engineering, for example.” Those younger people yet to join the workforce appear to have no qualms about utilizing the technology but appear to have little interest in embarking on telecoms engineering degree, most likely in favor of the much sexier applications or games programming arena.

Perhaps there is a perception in the broader community that we are not a safe industry and that there is a still a boom and bust mentality to IT and telecommunications, as another recruitment consultant pointed out. After all, most of the telco news that reaches the mainstream press is usually negative in nature, centering on issues such as ‘bill shock’, exorbitant roaming fees, customer complaints on service and, most recently, ‘phone hacking.’

Even though industry organizations, such as the TM Forum, are seeing record numbers attending training classes, they don’t seem to be new entrants that translate into fresh faces on the job market. CSPs, vendors and SIs are doing their best to utilize training grants offered by governments, but those starting degrees are the ones we should be attracting to the ICT sector.

Perhaps the industry, led by its many associations, should highlight the benefits of a career in ICT and even look at ‘recruiting’ students about to graduate from high school, much like the big accounting and consulting firms have done in the past. Perhaps they could look at investing in the education of some in the form of scholarships?

Something needs to be done at an industry level, otherwise, the cost of those domain specialists in such high demand will increase to a point that cannot be sustained and the ‘boom/bust’ cycle will replicate itself again.