New network technologies and mobile devices are altering the
telecoms skills market at an exponential rate and staff can benefit
from the skills shortage as firms vie for their talents. Bill
Goodwin reports
There has never been a better time to be working in the
communications sector. The telecoms industry is expanding at
break-neck speed, and new technologies such as Wap, Bluetooth and
third generation (3G) mobile phones are creating exciting
opportunities for comms personnel.
The past 12 months have seen a significant shift in direction
for the industry. After decades of talk about the convergence of
voice and data it is finally beginning to happen. Demand for the
voice telephony skills that were once the foundation of the
industry is showing signs of decline. Employers are crying out for
engineers with data communications, mobile communications and
Internet expertise.
The story is unfolding through the jobs pages. Over the past
year the number of adverts for specialists with Wap and Internet
skills has grown dramatically. For the first time, Wap and XML
feature in the top 25 of the Computer Weekly/SSP survey of the most
sought-after IT skills. The demand for staff with Internet
experience has doubled, and Java has shot up from 10th to second
place. Wan, Lan and TCP/IP skills are also still very much in
demand.
Recruitment companies are reporting record numbers of requests
for people with expertise in Voice over IP, network engineering,
and wireless Internet. And, according to Phil Wareham, fixed and
mobile recruitment specialist at MSB, demand for people with mobile
communications skills is going through the roof.
The need for telecoms and networking staff with these hot skills
is already exceeding supply. Research by Cisco and IDC suggests
that by next year there will be 600,000-person shortfall of staff
with the necessary skills to design and manage networks in
Europe.
A survey by telecoms training organisation NTO tele.com adds
weight to Cisco's findings. It shows that 10% of UK telecoms
employers are having difficulty recruiting both technical and
non-technical staff.
Telecoms engineers, cable installers and people with expertise
in opto-electronics, radio telephony and network skills are in
particularly short supply, says Peter Hounsome, research manager at
NTO tele.com. Half of the companies reporting recruitment
difficulties claim that skills shortages are damaging their
performance.
Regional variations only serve to make the problem worse. In the
UK as a whole the need for telecoms engineers is expected to grow
by 17% next year. But the NTO tele.com survey predicts that demand
in Yorkshire, Humberside and Wales, where recruitment problems are
already acute, will grow by up to 33%.
Recruitment is already a major headache for telecoms
manufacturers and operators that hire hundreds of staff at a time.
"There are probably 10 jobs for every person out there. Companies
are scrapping to find the right people," says Graham McKean,
recruitment specialist at MSB International.
Even big name employers such as BT say it is becoming
increasingly difficult to find the right people. "There is a
general shortage of people with good technical skills, IP and IT
generally, particularly coupled with good commercial and
interpersonal skills. You can find one of them, even two of them,
but getting all three in the same person is like finding gold
dust," says Harvey Nash, manager for strategic skills and
capabilities at BT. "Frankly," he adds, "the position is going to
get worse."
Andrea Grice, recruitment consultant with Cable &Wireless,
agrees. "All the skills we need are hard to come by. To get someone
with all the technologies and all the specialisms we need is very
hard." But she says it is digital skills that pose the greatest
problem.
There are fears that the introduction of IR35 could make matters
worse. IR35 is a new tax regime that forces contractors to pay
higher national insurance contributions. New rules also mean that
contractors can only offset 5% of their expenses and training costs
against tax. Contractors claim that IR35 will force them to seek
work overseas, leading to a potential exodus of skills. However,
opinions are divided as to whether IR35 is having a real impact on
the skills pool.
Wareham believes IR35 is certainly having an effect. With new
telephone networks developing worldwide, contractors can afford to
pick and choose where they want to work, he says. GSM specialists
are turning down offers of work in the UK for placements in Africa,
Morocco and Saudi Arabia, where taxes are lower. "One of the
biggest reasons why these guys won't work in the UK is because of
IR35. It is as simple as that," he says.
In contrast, Chris Eldridge, director of recruitment at Harvey
Nash (no connection with BT's Nash), says that IR35 has yet to have
a noticeable effect on the contractor market. "You have a better
chance of filling a vacancy in the short-term with a contractor
than with a permanent member of staff," he says.
Employers are responding to the shortages by offering
increasingly generous salaries. Research by recruitment consultant
Robert Walters shows that pay for people with the skills most in
demand has risen by 20% since 1999. However, other recruitment
agencies are more cautious. Harvey Nash believes that 10%-15% is a
more accurate figure.
An entry-level signalling engineer can currently expect to earn
at least £30,000 a year. At the other end of the salary spectrum,
consultants and senior sales staff can expect to earn £80,000 (see
table, p42). Self-employed contractors, particularly those with GSM
experience, can look forward to earning £500 to £600 a day. But it
pays to shop around. According to MSB, some well-known employers
are still offering yesterday's salaries.
Sadly, there are losers as well as winners in the pay stakes.
Old-fashioned network staff have seen their pay rise by just over
the rate of the inflation during the past year. Like the rest of
the IT industry, they are still feeling effects of the post-Y2K IT
spending slow down.
But pay is not the only consideration. Employers are adopting
some ingenious strategies to find the personnel they need. Energis,
for example, has brought in workers from South Africa and is now
looking to recruit in Australia and New Zealand. Cable &
Wireless employs communications specialists from Malta, Germany,
the Netherlands, Australia and South Africa.
A relaxation in immigration laws announced by the Government in
September will make it easier for companies to get work permits for
skilled overseas staff, provided they are genuinely in short supply
in the UK.
The armed forces have also been a fertile recruitment ground for
some companies. MSB, for instance, recruits between 30 and 50
ex-service people a month for clients including Ericsson and
Nortel. They make good recruits, says Tracey Abbott, head of
personnel recruitment at MSB.
"An awful lot of them have been working in signals for the
forces, so they actually have the telecoms skills that companies
require. They can be cross-trained extremely easily because they
understand the system," she says.
The best candidates tend to be non-commissioned officers and
ordinary servicemen who have spent a few years in the military.
Those who have been in the services longer can find it harder to
adjust to civilian life. "An awful lot of people find it hard to
adjust from having done six tours of duty in Northern Ireland.
Working in an office can cause a lot of issues," says Abbott.
BT has begun a series of initiatives to create its own supply of
skilled staff by cross-training workers from other areas of the
business. "We are retraining our own people and skilling them up,"
says Nash. "We are shifting people from voice to data, providing
them with greater awareness of what the Internet offers."
BT is also working with the Communications Workers Union and
Queen Mary & Westfield College to create an online degree
course. It could eventually allow up to 40 BT employees a year to
complete an IT degree over the Internet.
Other initiatives, such as equipping field workers with
Internet-enabled laptop computers, and insisting that job
applicants apply over the Web, are also encouraging staff to
develop Internet skills.
Training also plays a key role in Nortel Networks' recruitment
strategy. Although some skills are in extremely short supply Nortel
has realised that it is often possible to find people with skills
that are closely related to the ones it needs. A few weeks'
training can be enough to convert a person with related skills into
an employee capable of hitting the ground running.
This approach has successfully filled gaps in Nortel's sales
force, and is about to be adopted for technical staff. A person
with four to six years' experience in electronic engineering, for
instance, could be retrained in network technology within about six
to eight weeks.
Another programme, called Go-Hire, is also making a big impact
on Nortel's recruitment figures. The scheme, which has been running
since July, turns every member of staff into a potential recruiter.
"If you introduce a friend or associate that we hire, we will pay
you up to $5,000," says Wendell Sherrell, director of talent
acquisition at Nortel. "To date, globally, we have received 15,000
CVs."
Once you have found staff, retaining them in the current climate
is not easy. Poaching is rife, says McKean. "More and more clients
are looking for agencies that are actively headhunting. They give
you a list of clients they want you to headhunt from. They are
specifically targeting other organisations to pull out their
staff."
But poaching also occurs within companies. For example,
contractors have been lured away from contracts with a firm in
Portugal to more lucrative contracts with the same company in
Spain.
For employers such as Cable & Wireless, there are two key
reasons why staff remain loyal. One is that the company ensures
they get to work on leading-edge technology. The other is that it
invests heavily in their training. "For a lot of technical people,
it is the excitement of working with new technology, being able to
innovate," explains Grice. "That can retain them and motivate them
a lot more than giving them an extra £5,000 a year."
Cable & Wireless makes a point of moving engineers around to
increase their experience. Staff working for the company's Internet
hosting centres can expect to have a stint in one of 20 overseas
sites as part of a fast-track career development programme. Cable
& Wireless also has reciprocal arrangements with its suppliers
so that its telecoms engineers, for example, can spend time working
for Ericsson.
BT takes a similar line. "Assuming that you match the market
salaries, what is probably more important to a lot of people is
that they have exciting and challenging work, the nature of the
company, and their colleagues. That's how to keep people," says
Nash. "BT has an advantage over smaller companies, in that we are
in so many different areas and we can move people around."
Nortel has created a talent management team to ensure that its
most valuable employees remain happy. "We look at them on an
individual basis, at what we call their value propositions, whether
it be salary or career growth, and we develop customised programmes
to support those people," says Sherrell. "You have to appeal to
people's career aspirations and their personal life."
The telecoms industry is partly a victim of its own success, but
it must also share some of the blame for the current shortages.
Many companies have a poor track record at hiring and training new
staff, preferring instead to poach qualified staff from
competitors. The careers information provided to schools and
universities in the past has been poor quality. And there have been
concerns that the universities are failing to produce the sort of
graduates that employers need.
Since these problems were highlighted by the recent Alan Stevens
report on Information Communications Technology, things are
starting to change.
Employers such as BT, Cable & Wireless, Energis, Motorola
and One2One have begun to collaborate to raise the profile of
telecoms in schools and colleges. They are working on career packs
and are planning "network days" to educate children about
opportunities in telecommunications.
They are also running summer camps for children interested in
working in telecoms. One features a datacoms talk from a Nasa
astronaut. In addition, for the first time, employers are beginning
to collect accurate labour market statistics. NTO tele.com, the
Department for Education and Employment, training bodies and
employers are planning regular surveys of skills demands. They
expect to produce the first detailed survey by the end of the year,
with quarterly updates to follow.
The work will provide employers and universities with the first
accurate country-wide research on the changing skills needs of the
telecoms industry. The data will allow employers and training
organisations to respond much more quickly to the introduction of
new technologies. This should ensure that universities will not be
producing voice telephony engineers when the rising demand is for
digital communications engineers.
What's in a title?
The growing importance of corporate networks to the business has
led to the need for serious support from staff with expert
knowledge. Here are some of the most common job titles and the
tasks that are assigned to them:
Network Consultants
Network experts working for computer suppliers and specialist
consultant firms.
Senior Network Engineers or Analysts
The job involves the high level design and installation of
networks, including hardware and software. Senior network engineers
advise on the security of corporate networks and recovery
processes. They normally report to a network manager or a computer
services manager.
Network Engineers or Analysts
Network engineers focus on the installation of communications
hardware and software of corporate networks. They generally report
to senior analysts in a large organisation but may form part of the
overall support function in a smaller organisation.
Senior Network Support Technicians
Senior network support technicians are responsible for the
maintenance of networks, hardware and cabling. They normally report
to a network engineer or network technician. They are sometimes
called communications technicians.
Network Support Technicians
Network support technicians are responsible for the
implementation, training and development of networked PC systems.
They have a good working knowledge of applications such as word
processors, spreadsheets, databases and networks. They normally
have a minimum of two years' experience as a PC technician.
Network Controllers
Network controllers are responsible for the general operation of
communications within a company, including hardware and software.
They monitor overall performance and direct recovery
procedures.
Network sales support
Responsible for support of network configurations, including
voice and data communications. They will support associated
software, hardware and installation together with post-sales
trouble shooting.
Source: SSP/Computer Weekly
Networking pay rises 1999-2000
| Job | Advertised Salary
(average Q2 2000) | Percentage Rise from
last year |
| Network
Consultant | £60,732 | 1.6% |
| Senior network
engineer | £38,747 | 3.5% |
| Network
Engineer | £29,890 | 3.0% |
| Network
controller | £28,251 | 4.3% |
| Senior network
technician | £26,761 | 3.4% |
| Network support
technician | £21,944 | 11.1% |
| Network support
sales | £40,213 | 3.4% |
Source: Computer Weekly SSP Survey
Rates of pay
| Job | Salary
(£) |
| Analyst | £35,000 |
| Junior project
manager | £30,000-£35,000 |
| Systems
tester | £30,000-£35,000 |
| Transmission
engineer | £30,000-£50,000 |
| Product
specialist | £40,000 |
| Switching
engineer | £40,000-£45,000 |
| GSM
specialist | £40,000-£45,000 |
| Capacity
planner | £40,000-£45,000 |
| IN
specialist | £40,000-£45,000 |
| Project
manager | £40,000-£50,000 |
| Account
manager | £45,000 |
| Programme
manager | £50,000-£60,000 |
| Business development
manager | £50,000-£60,000 |
| Consultant | £50,000-£80,000 +
bonus |
| Senior product
specialist | £60,000 |
| Senior
sales | £60,000-£80,000 +
bonus |
Source: Robert Walters
What does it take to get into telecoms?
With new technologies coming along with rapidly increasing
frequency, it is almost impossible for employers to predict what
skills they are going to need more than two years in advance. As a
result, employers are beginning to focus more on the innate
abilities of job applicants, rather than their technical
skills.
Flexibility, adaptability, initiative, problem solving,
communication skills and the ability to work in a team are by far
the most important attributes, says Peter Hounsome, research
director of NTO tele.com. "Employers are not really planning more
than two or three years ahead, probably 18 months maximum," he
says. "Because of the uncertainty, there is a requirement to take
on people with generic abilities that show adaptability and
flexibility."
Lisa Shortland, recruitment consultant at Cable & Wireless,
says,"We are looking for a very disciplined work approach, people
who can plan and organise their own time. We are also looking for
people driven by the technology and who are driven by learning new
skills."
There are a number of routes into telecoms for school leavers. A
degree in electrical engineering or other technology subject can be
a useful stepping stone.
Another approach is to join a firm as a trainee, perhaps through
a modern apprenticeship programme. However, places are limited. In
the past five years there have only been 1,800 telecoms modern
apprentices in the UK. But NTO tele.com expects companies to hire
another 2,000 apprentices over the next two years.
Apprentices learn through a mixture of classroom teaching and
on-the-job training. A new programme launched this month will
provide graduates with the same practical on-the-job training as
that offered to school leavers.
For older workers, switching to a career in telecoms from
another discipline is less straightforward. Some companies, such as
Nortel Networks, are prepared to retrain people from other
technical backgrounds, providing they have the right skills, and BT
has been recruiting and training ADSL technician engineers from
non-telecoms backgrounds in large numbers for the past year or so.
NTO tele.com generally advises people who want to make the switch
to telecoms to book themselves on a training course with their
local college as a first step.