Computer telephony integration is here and so is the skills
shortage. Nick Langley examines what the industry and Government
are doing about training
Blame the Eighties. Blame privatisation. Blame downsizing. The
removal of BT's monopoly in 1981 may have stimulated competition
and the development of new communications technologies, but it was
disastrous for the entry of new people into the telecoms industry.
Skilled staff shed by BT quickly found new jobs with the
plethora of new telecoms businesses which sprang up -
manufacturers, service providers, consultancies, cabling and
installation specialists, and competitive telecoms operators. But
as a consequence apprenticeships and training programmes were cut.
Colleges of further education cut their telecoms courses too, not
wishing to add to the pool of newly qualified but unemployed young
people. The result is that by the late 1990s, the average telecoms
engineer was in early middle age.
That's been changing in recent years, with the growth of
organisations like NTO Tele.com, an industry body founded by BT,
Mercury and Nortel, which works on behalf of telecoms employers to
anticipate and meet the industry's skills needs. NTO.tel works with
the Government to ensure that National Vocational Qualifications
(NVQs) and the Modern Apprenticeship and National Traineeship
schemes are properly geared to the industry's requirements.
The new focus on vocational training was long overdue. Christos
Orfanidis, a modern apprentice at Nortel Networks, says he took
City & Guilds vocational courses at college as well as a GNVQ
programme. "Both programmes had little relevance to the world of
work, and have no comparison to what is done within Nortel
Networks."
These schemes are not simply reviving the telecoms industry's
old training programmes. NTO Tele.com warns that having
significantly reduced the size of their workforces, employers
require people who are far more flexible and multi-skilled than was
the case in the past. It's early days for such schemes, however,
and meanwhile the skills shortage has grown acute.
At the same time the demand for telecoms services has been
booming, data networking and telecoms have been moving closer
together. We now take services based on computer telephony
integration (CTI), such as call centres, for granted. With the
development of Voice over IP (VoIP), the convergence between data
and voice communications will be complete, with both kinds of
service running over the same network.
However, while the two communications technologies have been
coming together, the cultural gap between telecoms and IT remains
large. "One common misapprehension in the marketplace is that the
voice network is easy, whereas the data world is where the smarts
are," says Mark Stancombe, a provider of network performance
solutions who is regional manager for Northern Europe at Quallaby.
"This is partly fuelled by the fact that when people pick up a
telephone they always get dial tone, ergo the voice network must be
simple."
Stancombe warns that too many organisations assume that what the
traditional IT department can get away with in terms of service
offerings can be directly translated into the telecommunications
arena.
"The bottom line is that corporate networks, however critical,
are not usually subject to anything like the pressures of a telco
network. This highlights a potentially huge void between an IT
person who has experience within the telecommunications field and
one who has grown up in a corporate IT environment."
Gone are the days when a solid understanding of bridges, routers
and Lan topologies in an IP-centric network were sufficient for
data networking. As voice moves onto the IP network, Stancombe
warns that IT managers will need to be up to speed with the
real-world requirements of voice packets being carried across a
data network. "Things like guaranteed bandwidth, latency, jitter
all come into play most significantly with voice. As other
technologies like video-on-demand and videoconferencing over data
are deployed, the IT person will need to become familiar with all
aspects of traffic engineering rather than purely deployment and
up-time considerations."
Stancombe is not alone in contesting the widespread assumption
that the data networking world is bringing solutions to the
stick-in-the-mud world of telecoms. Robin Russell, IP product
manager for Inter-Tel Europe, which makes Internet telephony, CTI,
voice processing and software networking technologies. "Most
convergent dealers are looking for MCSE accredited engineers. This
enables dealers to install and maintain Microsoft networks. The
downside to this is most IT/data engineers believe that data is
king, and telecoms is not hard to learn. This, unfortunately is
wrong.
"Telephony is as complex as data, and requires a certain type of
engineer to decipher it. The new generation of telecoms engineers
who came of age in the computer era are more suitable to a
convergent role, but with no true apprenticeship to telecoms, such
as BT had in days past, telecoms engineering is passed in an
informal way from senior engineer to trainee engineer. What is
needed is a training programme similar to that for data engineers
to bring more computer literate young trainees into
telecoms/convergence."
Who should take charge of such training programmes? The industry
seems split down the middle. "IT managers with a background in data
Internet working appear to be taking the lead in future
technologies, such as converged networks," says Jeff Bowen,
technical services manager at network and cabling specialist
Syncra. "Telecoms managers are frequently viewed as purveyors of
tried-and-tested technology rather than the more advanced and
progressive solutions that are becoming more prevalent in the
marketplace."
But David Plummer, managing director of IT and telecoms
recruitment consultancy Triage, says control should fall to those
who understand the business and stand to gain the most from the
developments. "In a convergence situation it is the telecoms
managers who take ownership of the projects."
Exactly what skills are we talking about? "Once IT and telecoms
converge, design skills become imperative for the architecture and
infrastructure required to carry them," says Bowen. "Specialists
with skills in the differing areas, such as CTI, IVR (interactive
voice recognition), ACD (automated call distribution) and call
logging and management will become sought-after. It seems that
those with a background in data are more able to embrace the
technologies it is converging with than vice versa.
Companies that currently offer both traditional voice solutions
and data networking products are in a good position to combine the
necessary skill sets, and should already have engineers in place to
offer an end-to-end solution.
At Triage, Plummer finds that the hottest demand is for wireless
application protocol (Wap), IP, packet switching and VoIP, backed
up by more traditional skills like C and C++, Unix and embedded
technologies.
Caroline Crawford, manager of networking and communications
divisions at IT recruitment specialist Elan Computing, says
convergence is leading to increased demand for synchronous digital
hierarchy (SDH) experience. "SDH is fast becoming the standard
technology for companies transferring large amounts of data quickly
between globally-linked sites, and nearly all telcos offering fixed
network services to customers will employ this technology. Typical
skill-sets would include planning, commissioning, design,
integration, network control and technical support. We are also
seeing a lot of demand for 3G and UMTS skills, particularly in
relation to testing and integration."
ISPs and other technology companies increasingly need staff who
have knowledge across the full spectrum of communications
technologies, Crawford says. "Our clients are looking for more and
more 'cross skilling' as the Internet is made more accessible via
mobile phones and hand held devices."
The need for experienced staff - what Rob Wirszycz, the former
director-general of the Computing Services & Software
Association, calls "oven-ready people" - suggests that companies
will expect to be taking the people they need from their
competitors. But poaching is hardly an answer to an industry-wide
skills shortfall. As companies bite the bullet and come to terms
with the need to train, Crawford says they will be taking on more
new graduates. "Companies often benefit from employing graduate
trainees, as they often bring a fresh approach which can aid
problem solving, and have no past work-culture experience to
influence their judgements."
But the prime repository of skills lies in the employees
companies already have. Telecoms and datacoms staff will need to be
trained in one another's disciplines. Suitable off-the-shelf
training may not be easy to find, however. In telecoms in
particular training has often been provided by equipment suppliers,
but Bowen warns that such courses may be too far geared to their
own products to meet the open, standards-based requirements of the
Internet. Plummer says the answer is in-house training, or finding
a suitably matched training partner.
Charles Chambers, senior consultant at strategic telecoms
consultancy Quotient Communications, says, "Where once highly
structured training courses could deliver suitable people to meet
industry's needs, the rate of technology change means that such a
system cannot keep pace with the demands for the new technology. In
such an environment, on-the-job training is virtually
essential."
There's a substantial body of thought which says that the
industry can meet its convergence skills needs by retraining the
people it already has, or even that the skills already exist within
organisations, but need to be better managed and utilised.
"Despite the hype, there are plenty of people out there with IT
skills and plenty also with telecoms network skills," says John
Ford, associate director at CMG's Telecommunications and eBusiness
Division, which has provided services to 80% of European telcos.
"Over the past few years, however, they have all consistently
failed to deliver the kind of integrated applications which
successfully leverage the undoubted capabilities of both
technologies."
This goes against the accepted wisdom. IDC, for example,
predicts a shortfall of 600,000 networking professionals across
western Europe by 2002. This figure is based on an expected
requirement for 1.6 million network staff. If the situation is not
rectified IDC says we could be in for a European slump as
businesses fail to optimise their growing success and existing
assets because of inadequate infrastructure.
"IDC rightly says that training and development needs are
becoming acute," says analyst Robin Bloor. "However, it is well
known in networking circles, as in others, that real experience has
far greater value than the classroom learning by rote that is
becoming commonplace for supplier-sponsored certification
programmes. Street knowledge and management experience tells us
that some individuals, qualified or otherwise, are worth their
weight in gold-plated terminators. Identify these people within
your organisation. Treat them well, pay them well and keep their
skills current. Involve them in infrastructure design decisions and
strategic roll-out programmes. Or leave them in the workshop, but
don't be surprised when your network management policy is
jettisoned because people are too busy fighting fires."
Bloor adds that Internet-based services may provide answers to
the skills "crisis". "It's now possible to outsource services to
companies and individuals literally on the other side of the globe.
Such outsourcing of both systems and services is implicitly cutting
the requirement for local infrastructure, hence the need for
engineering support can be reduced, leaving businesses to
concentrate on their core offering."
Mark Rivington, marketing director of RiverSoft, also feels that
businesses should be looking to technology, not new heads. "Rather
than looking at how to increase the number of skilled workers, the
answer lies in decreasing the number of workers by automating
routine networking functions."
RiverSoft offers network infrastructure management technology
that manages the network without human intervention. "By automating
routine network management tasks, companies are able to deploy
expensive, highly skilled networking staff more effectively. This
has the effect that not as many IT/telecoms specialists are
required, and that those who are employed spend less time
undertaking manual - often mundane - routine jobs."
Barry Bonnett, vice-president for Sonus Networks, a supplier
producer of carrier-class VoIP telephony infrastructure, agrees,
"Operators have two alternatives: to invest in their teams in order
to attract and retain them, or invest in technology which reduces
the level of skilled intervention required. Reliable networks are a
reflection of quality engineering work by motivated personnel,
judged not on the quantity but the quality of their work. It's well
known that poor installation and fault repair establishes a vicious
cycle of network problems which can take years to resolve in large
carriers."
Bonnet says dealing with labour shortages is not simple, and
relates as much to technological and managerial strategies as to HR
issues like recruitment and salary levels. "Happy, motivated and
fulfiled people will do a quality job, and attract friends to a
company, creating a virtuous circle."
Accredited training
Marconi's training centres in Coventry and Liverpool have both
been accredited to standards set by NTO Tele.com the UK's national
training organisation for the telecommunications industry.
Each acts as an international 'telecoms university', providing a
range of 300 courses covering technologies including the latest
access and transport technologies, ATM (asynchronous transfer mode)
and IP (Internet protocol) switching and routing, as well as SDH
and Marconi's radio and optical access technologies.
Last year, the two centres delivered a 23,000 delegate days of
training to Marconi's own people, plus another 9,000 days to staff
of customers from around the world.