NSN Reshaping its Work Force

Nokia Siemens Networks has embarked on an internal retraining regime aimed at turning its telecom and wireless engineers into IP experts who can help NSN navigate the transformation of the industry from one founded on legacy telephony infrastructure to the universal world of IP.

That change has put NSN at a crossroads in which it has to support two equally complex but vastly different skill sets at once. It must maintain its expertise in technologies such as TDM and circuit-switched voice and support its existing wireless and wireline product lines. But it must simultaneously prepare its staff for a new network environment populated by routers and servers and driven by voice-over-IP, session initiation protocol (SIP) and IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architectures. Eventually NSN will have recruit outside of the company and even outside of the telecom industry for pure IP talent, but in the interim it is taking advantage of the stored-up knowledge within its own ranks through a retraining and re-education effort intended to turn radio frequency and telecom engineers into “IP Engineers,” said Todd Wilson, head of care services in North America for NSN.

“We're seeing our customers focus a lot on IMS-type platforms that might accompany or be tied to a subscriber management platform,” Wilson said, who oversees the engineers and technicians that maintain, repair and support NSN customers' networks. “Those are different types of solutions than we've sold in the past, and those platforms require different type of skills from classic TDM, circuit-switched expertise. With [long-term evolution] you're going to see the ultimate IP-on-the-edge, everything-as-a-pipe transformation. That will be a huge change for us, and we will need a different set of skills — whether it's in routers, registers or different types of databases — as things move from being circuit-driven to data driven.”

NSN has developed a four-tired training program for its product engineering and professional services staff. At its most basic level the training program provides knowledge of basic IP fundamentals, and at its most advanced level the training is highly specialized, designed to make staff experts in a particular field, Wilson said. At the first level, an employee may go through a few months of classes, designed to give them a familiarity with newer technologies and protocols such as VoIP, HTTP and HTTPS, mobile IP and SIP, as well as provide them with the fundamentals of routing and switching.

“At entry level, we're just looking at Web-based or light training, giving people fundamental knowledge of how these components work,” Wilson said. “So if you're a career RF engineer, dealing in radio waves interference, now you've got fundamental knowledge of how SIP works and what the end user's terminal is doing other than receiving radio waves. You'll understand how it's also dealing with an IP network in the back end.”

EMPLOYMENT OF WAGE AND SALARY WORKERS IN TELECOM BY OCCUPATION

(projected change 2006-2016)

PERCENT CHANGE