A seller's market: Skilled and experienced wireless engineers have become a scarce commodity for a rapidly growing industry

On a shuttle bus last June from the Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans to the Supercomm '97 show at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, an overheard conversation between two fellow riders offered a sharp insight on the wireless industry job market.

One was relating a story about a friend who was an executive at a wireless company. The friend's company was looking for an RF engineer to fill an open position. The company had hired a search firm tohelp find just the right person. After a thorough search, the company found someone. It made an offer, and the engineer agreed to work for the company.

On the day the new engineer was scheduled to start work, there was no sign of him. The company later discovered that in between the time the engineer had accepted its offer and the start date, another company had made a more lucrative offer. The engineer had accepted it and gone to work for another company without bothering to notify the company that thought it had him in the fold.

That story serves not only to illustrate the demand for RF engineers in the wireless industry, but also to underline the fact that demand is so strong-that it is such a job-seeker's market-that a highly qualified person wouldn't hesitate to risk burning bridges to accept an offer. It's a safe bet that if someone is the best person for a job-especially with the shortage of qualified candidates and the importance of building networks quickly and correctly-a somewhat checkered past with regard to treatment of employers won't outweigh the value of the individual's expertise.

As 1998 gets underway, expert personnel is becoming more of commodity than ever throughout the telecommunications industry, and the influx of new PCS companies is making this especially apparent in the wireless arena. It is the network that creates value for customers, whether they really understand that or not, so whether a company is building out a network or expanding or upgrading, the experienced engineers who make the crucial design decisions will continue to be in high demand.

"Quality RF engineers are very hard to find," says Ed Dort, owner and president of search firm E.J. Dort & Associates, Alpharetta, Ga.

Dort, an engineer, has been conducting searches for wireless companies for 15 years. In that time, he says, the only period when enough qualified RF engineers existed to meet demand was when the defense industry turned loose numerous highly skilled people in the wake of defense spending cuts after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

Since then, the proliferation of wireless companies and the emergence of new wireless technologies have sapped that surplus of expertise.

"The greatest demand I have to deal with is for anybody with experience with [code division multiple access]," Dort says. "There are very few people with even one year of experience with design and [network] optimization in CDMA. We're having to bring people from Hong Kong and Korea."

The demand isn't only for engineers. The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association's Web site (www.wow-com.com) includes a career center, where job listings are posted. Although many of the listings are for engineers, companies also are seeking people with expertise in finance, sales and marketing and management. The listings in early January even included one from a company specializing in cellular-site real estate looking for a site-acquisition specialist.

Opportunities for top-level executive spots in wireless also have been picking up over the past few years. W.J. Sooter Associates, Solana Beach, Calif., has had such success recruiting strictly director-level and above positions for wireless that owner Will Sooter was able to buy a lot and build his own headquarters. Sooter was just setting up shop in his new digs in early January but already had been hired on retainer for 1998 by a Midwest client.

Sooter, who works exclusively on retainer, says he's familiar with the shortages in RF engineers from conversations with the people he works for and within his business, but in his end of the business, there is no shortage of talent.

As in the wireline side, venture capitalists have in the past few years become increasingly active in wireless investment, meaning increased business for executive searchers such as Sooter. But while wireline companies are turning to talent from outside the industry to fill spots, that isn't happening yet in wireless, Sooter says.

"[Hiring companies] want very specific skill sets related to the industry, [such as] engineering, budgeting, hiring, recruiting and leading teams," Sooter says.

Wireless companies also are hiring increasing numbers of sales and marketing people, but the characteristics of the industry's sales force are changing, according to Dort.

While many wireline carriers are just gearing up for the coming era of wide-open competition, wireless companies have required a more sales-oriented approach from the beginning, and this has been even more evident among the new PCS companies. However, now that wireless is well-established in the consumer market, a new breed of salespeople is required.

"It's very easy to sell voice communications," Dort says, "but all PCS and cellular carriers need people who'll get on the phone, stay on the phone and use the network."

The way to reach those kinds of markets is to sell wireless for fleet communications and data applications such as remote meter reading for utilities or remote vending-machine management, Dort says. There's also a need for development and sales of smart phones that will offer e-mail and Internet connectivity. Selling those kinds of services calls for technical knowledge as well as salesmanship, he says.

"Those people are very valuable," Dort says. "You need to have a good technical grounding and be able to sell."

At the executive level, wireless companies also are looking for similar characteristics in the people they want to hire. But available talent is far from scarce, according to Sooter.

"It's such a different world in executive search," Sooter says. "Executives are always looking for that golden opportunity to get equity in a company. They're willing to accept a small base salary in exchange for pre-IPO stock. That's what guys at the executive level are looking for."

While his business focuses on executive-level personnel, Sooter points out that some wireless companies are anteing up to help alleviate the shortage of qualified personnel at all levels.

With funding from several wireless companies, the University of California San Diego has established a Center for Wireless Communications devoted to ensuring that it is producing graduates trained in the skills that wireless companies need. The center also intends to help those students make pre- and post-graduation contact with real-world companies and situations. In addition, the program is beneficial to companies in the San Diego area because it also aims to draw promising talent from around the globe to the region, perhaps giving nearby companies participating in the program first crack at the people they've helped train.

The overall work force demand in wireless is illustrated in the growth of the career center at CTIA's wow-com site. CTIA launched the Web site in June 1996 and the career center the following September, says Kerri Naughton, coordinator for the career center.

At its launch, the career center carried listings from Bell Atlantic Mobile and Ericsson. Since then, more than 100 companies have posted jobs on the site. Job postings, unless otherwise requested by a company, are posted for four weeks. With jobs moving on and off the listings daily, the site usually has about 60 to 70 jobs listed.

And judging from the hits the site receives, quite a few job-shoppers are out there. The career center averages about 3000 hits a month, with visitors performing 13,000 job searches, a bit more than four each.

Job postings come from various companies-some large and seeking to fill several positions, others small and looking for a single new hire. The postings also may either come directly from a company or may be placed by recruiting firms. Most companies post between one and five listings at a time, but some may post as many as 10 or 20, Naughton says.

Even though opportunities on the whole are growing throughout the wireless industry, some windows may be closing. Dort, who pointed out that opportunities for foreigner engineers in the U.S. are ample, says the same is not true for U.S. engineers looking abroad. He says the best opportunities are in Latin America, which is seeing a lot of new activity, and Asia, where moving in while the times aren't good can lead to profitable relationships when things turn for the better. But on the whole, it's best to look at home.

"I get buried with guys that want to go overseas," Dort says. "They think they're going to make double the money, but those days are gone."

However, with the pressures of building and expanding PCS networks in the U.S. at hand, the wireless industry is probably a long way from having another full well of experienced personnel. For now, the industry hopes to maintain high standards for network design and performance, and this will keep generations of engineers busy for years to come.

The ongoing shortage of experienced engineers, technicians and other skilled professionals may be creating a seller's market for job seekers, but new technology tools and practices also are emerging to help carriers make the most of their sometimes slim work forces.

These solutions most often fall under the heading of work force automation or asset management, and they have been picked up to some degree by wireline carriers who are re-engineering their operations. However, they can also be extremely useful for PCS carriers trying to run lean-but also mean-operations.

PrimeCo Personal Communications has used an asset management solution to survey and inventory its PCS sites since November 1996 while planning, building and perfecting networks in 13 markets around the country.

The software-based product, AssetPAC by Future Horizons, Marietta, Ga., employs a hand-held scanner that quickly reads bar codes on network equipment and other assets, and stores pertinent information for retrieval later.

PrimeCo's commitment to building out all its markets quickly meant that its work force was under the gun to simultaneously launch, manage and finish multiple projects-some with unique needs.

Asset management was an important part of these projects. Carriers need to keep precise inventories of equipment and other materials at their PCS sites to control their network costs. Because many carriers start out in debt, this function can be especially critical in the early going. Also, proper asset management means better service management and reliability because equipment problems are easier to pinpoint and decisions about replacing equipment are easier to make.

Automating access to this information helps short-staffed or less experienced work forces do their jobs more quickly and effectively.

"It saves us time because it speeds up our ability to scan assets. We can inventory an entire site in 20 minutes. Otherwise, we'd have to use manual entry, which would create the possibility for numerous errors," says Patrick Lynch, network analyst at PrimeCo.

He says 50 field and maintenance technicians in all 13 markets have used AssetPAC and have logged more than 100,000 inventory entries.

Besides AssetPAC, Future Horizons also has a product called FieldPAC that automates and distributes work orders and pertinent repair information (such as parts availability) to field technicians, again making things easier for a busy or less-experienced technician.

"We saw the downsizing trend happening among the [wireline] carriers, and you could see there was going to be a need for more automation. Manual processes are expensive and time-consuming," says Joseph Mediate, president and CEO of Future Horizons.

Asset management and work force automation are among the hottest trends in many industries, and the market for these products will expand in telecommunications as older carriers revamp operations and new carriers get started. In addition to Future Horizons, Toronto-based Arkipelago, which started in the architecture and computer-aided design industries, is targeting asset management needs with its Relational Object Management Environment. Also, Accugraph, El Paso, Texas, which partnered with Arkipelago and bought its Bay and Cable Management System from the company, is among other firms in the market.