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.

Launch Recruitment, whose local client base includes Macquarie Telecom, Vividwireless and Huawei, sees challenging times ahead for telcos looking to recruit. “There are skill shortages on the horizon; actually, there are some shortages on the market right now,” MD Rebecca Wallace told CommsDay. “We get orders from clients [for] highly skilled specialist roles where there are only a handful of people on the market.”

Areas where the skills dearth has begun to bite, she added, include OSS/BSS, core and IP network design, and engineering roles.

Some sections of the industry are already feeling the pinch. “Since Huawei was awarded the contract to rebuilt Vodafone’s national mobile network, we moved to double our local staff numbers from 300 at the end of 2010 to 600 by the end of 2011. As we’ve moved to bring on such a large number of new local staff, the skills shortage has made it a tough recruitment market,” a Huawei spokesman told CommsDay.

“With the Vodafone rollout happening nation-wide, the skills shortage has been particularly noticeable in WA, South Australia and Queensland, possibly due to the mining boom.”

An Optus spokesperson, on the other hand, cast the skills squeeze as an ongoing problem for the industry.

“The IT and telecoms talent pool has always been competitive, with quality candidates in high demand regardless of the market environment,” said the spokesperson. “The challenge is finding candidates with the right cultural fit and niche skill-set in a continually transforming telco industry.”

But what’s causing the skills crunch? “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,” said Wallace. “We do have a bit of an image problem as an industry,” added Launch recruitment consultant Timothy McCluskey. “The amount of [high school students] who use next-generation technology is quite high – but when you ask them whether they actually want to be an engineer or a software designer, the answer is no.”
“The perception out in the broader community is that we are not a safe industry, there is a still a boom and bust mentality to IT and telecommunications,” he continued. “We are seeing a steady decline in graduates coming out, graduate salaries are getting higher in telecommunications, and across ICT in general.

And we’re going to have… a greater problem in coming years if we’re not getting enough people enrolling in the courses.”

THE NBN EFFECT: However, Wallace did note that the high-profile NBN project was helping to raise interest in the industry. “There’re a lot of jobs that will be created through the NBN that we haven’t even thought of yet,” she said. “I think young people will want to be a part of that… I think all the media coverage has helped.”

Certainly NBN Co itself doesn’t seem to be having any problems with recruitment – quite the opposite.

“We have not encountered any particular difficulty recruiting for roles. Possibly because of the profile of the project there is a high level of awareness among recruits,” a spokesperson told CommsDay. “We have also had thousands of people pre-register with us via our website for future positions, creating a recruitment pool for potential positions.”
COMBATING THE CRUNCH: Meanwhile, a number of industry players have already committed to fighting against the skills squeeze. “We continue to work constructively with government and the industry to meet the future skills needs in this sector,” said a Telstra spokesman. “Telstra continues to invest in recruiting and developing trainees and graduates to meet our future business and customer needs.”

“Huawei is actively tackling the skills shortage, having partnered with RMIT University to contribute $250,000 to the Next Generation Technology Training Centre… [which we hope] will be used to train between 1,000 – 2,000 students nationally over the next three years, on a range of fixed and mobile broadband technologies,” said the Huawei spokesman. “A key focus of the NGTTC will be on products and hardware for the National Broadband Network and new mobile broadband technologies.”

Launch, for its part, is speaking at schools and universities, and looking to help skilled workers in other markets like utilities transition into telco; it is also exploring ways of bringing in overseas talent, including applying for 457 visa on-hire rights. “First and foremost, our clients do like us to make use of Australian talent,” said Wallace. “But sometimes, depending on the uniqueness of the role and how new the technology is to the market, we do need to go offshore… we want to be able to sponsor [offshore talent] internally, they become Launch employees, and then we can on-hire them to our clients.”

“The people that we’re hiring have to be on the Migration Occupation in Demand list… the amount of telecoms jobs on that list is actually quite large now. So government have recognised that there are going to be shortages in that market.”

However, Wallace still suggested that the wider telco industry could market itself more effectively. “The media campaigns that other industries do to attract talent have proven to be really effective,” she said. “I feel that maybe the communications industry as a whole need to invest a little bit more in educating young talent on the exciting opportunities within the industry, because the telecoms industry does have a fantastic story to tell right now.”

Commsday 13 July 2011