The telecoms sector is booming once again following five years of relative dormancy. The evidence is everywhere. In the U.K. alone there's BT's 21CN, which will see over 4500 exchanges swapped out in the coming years. Over the summer of this year, we saw the rollout of the U.K.'s first HDTV-ready, 10GB Ethernet infrastructure for Sky's triple-play services. And these ambitious projects are mirrored across Europe, as telcos and operators look to replace or upgrade the 1980s technology in their networks.

But there's a catch. Where are the skilled telecoms engineers and support IT staff that are going to implement and deliver the new networks? Without the people to build them, these ambitious new projects run the risk of delays, of going over budget, and of unreliability once they are up and running.

Moving on
Since the dotcom bubble was punctured in 2001, the comms engineers that were building ISP infrastructure simply moved on to other sectors. After all, these are skilled people, who were able to transfer their knowledge and technical expertise easily to other sectors – some in other IT fields, others in industry at large. Some simply left IT altogether.

The problem is, due to the low demand for engineering services over the past four to five years, there's been little training and investment in replacing those lost engineering skills – a fact recognized by industry and government alike.

So what's the solution to the rapidly widening skills gap? I believe that there are four key steps that can help to bridge the gap, attracting both fresh faces to the sector in the first place, and old hands back into the fold.

Convergence matters
As the telecoms and networking sectors converge, there's also a tremendous opportunity to help networking engineers and other skilled IT staff to transfer their IP skills across to telecoms. Where previously the two worlds would keep apart from each other, IT professionals now typically do not aspire to linear career paths based around a single technology.  So we should encourage the interchange and cross-training of skills and ideas from networking to telecoms.

Expert input
Finally, the telecoms sector should look to specialists in support and installation, for turnkey delivery of engineering capacity as and when they need it. After all, one of the reasons for the move to offshoring engineering jobs is to reduce overheads – but this has also introduced issues with quality assurance on work done, and has led directly to the skills gap we're experiencing.

By partnering with the right specialists, telcos and operators can have the in-depth deployment and maintenance skills put at their disposal, flexibly.  So before we build the networks of the future, there's a little engineering needed to bridge the skills gap.

ADORESOFT

ADORESOFT help our clients build long term resource strategy and they adore us for our commitment to quality. We at ADORESOFT are always striving to be innovative and provide the best human resources and services in the industry.