Wanted: Telecom technicians with extensive IP background

With all the discussion of next-generation networks, there has been relatively little public discourse about next-generation jobs. In fact, when Telephony tried to talk to major telecom service providers about the challenges of finding new talent and skills for the IP-centric world, some of them declined to provide any insight.

But many within the industry admit that in a world where voice revenues are shrinking, data revenues are growing and the technology shift to an all-IP infrastructure puts a premium on skills in software, applications and quality of service, telecom service providers have been challenged to find new talent and retrain existing workers.

“It's a wildly different skill set that you need to support IP than you need for TDM,” said Betsy Gibson, director of global customer premises equipment (CPE) for Verizon Business, which began in 2006 to assess the skills of and retrain every one of its 2200 CPE technicians. “The work is very much different, it's more server-based, and instead of looking at red lights and green lights, you are writing programming instructions.”

Telecom technicians traditionally worked with large, monolithic systems such as Class 5 central office (CO) switches that had established diagnostic routines, said Walt Mansell, CEO of Watershed Networks, which develops online training materials for the telecom industry. “You run them, and they identify which circuit pack is bad, and you replace that,” he said. Now there are many more items — routers, switches, bridges and hubs — whose function is determined by the software loaded into them.

“It's a much different network — you are not going to have red lights flashing, saying ‘change me,’” Mansell said. “You can't fix software problems by changing a board. In a software-defined network, you are going to have a lot of troubles related to quality of service (QOS), the interaction of applications, or changes to the provisioning or transport systems or WANs — that creates a negative impact.”

UNIVERSAL PROBLEM

Routers are being fitted with optical components. WANs are being permeated with Ethernet — often in the same box with legacy and optical traffic. Switches are taking on storage and computing functions. And carrier COs increasingly are resembling data centers.

“You have to sort of re-do the job functions to take full advantage of this kind of equipment,” said Michael Kennedy, managing partner and co-founder of Network Strategy Partners, referring to the convergence of switching, routing and optical technologies. “To plan for and select and buy these systems, you're being forced across all kinds of multidisciplinary lines because so many functions are built into every device.”

Mansell believes the industry in general, and particularly smaller service providers, are underestimating the training needed to run IP networks and may find themselves in dire straits going forward.

Industry sources, speaking off the record, agreed there is something of a talent shortage and point to the lack of North American university-level training that combines IT and telecom skills — and to immigration laws that are limiting the import of that talent. “If we knew where to find more people with the networking skills we need, I wouldn't tell the media about it,” one source said. “The competitive market for this talent is too great.”

Among those talking publicly are Ibrahim Gedeon, chief technology officer for Telus, who said in a 2008 Telephony interview that academia needs to start producing a different kind of telecom engineer.

“We have what we call ‘subscriber convergence’: You are using multiple services which entail technologies that are a bit new and involve people who know IT technologies but have network DNS, which is a small breed of people at Telus and at other companies,” Gedeon said. “We need people with different sets of skills than we have had in the past, and the universities are probably 10 years behind what we are doing.”

Telus has used “a lot of IT technologies to bring the price down, like we use Ethernet, and a lot of technologies are being leveraged across multiple platforms, some of which are IT-based,” he added. “We are not getting dedicated hardware; we are getting generic hardware with custom software. There is a small breed of people that do understand these things, so we have a people challenge.”

That people challenge is universal, said Susan Miller, president and CEO of ATIS, which develops U.S. telecom standards and business solutions around those standards.

“When I look across the around 700 experts we have access to in all of our work, there are a small handful who really stand out as understanding and embracing the new technologies — and boy, everyone wants to have access to them,” Miller said. “They tend to bring large groups with them in learning and understanding what needs to be delivered in the future.”

Miller also points to efforts by two different groups — the Education Committee of the American National Standards Institute and the Institute for Telecom Learning at the University of Oklahoma — that have recognized the need for a different type of telecom training and are working to engage universities in providing it. Miller sits on the boards of both organizations.

“We do, in fact, interface with the university community to make them aware of what standard needs are relative to this particular sector,” Miller said. “We actually sat down and penned requirements documents over the last two years that say, ‘This is what you need to be thinking about as you develop your curriculum.’”

Miller cautions that it may be too early to assess the impact of those requirements. Most ATIS members are addressing this by adding more IT/IP/Ethernet experts to their staff, she said.

“What I am seeing in our member companies — it is in fact there is a new body of experts with all this understanding and expertise just down the hall,” Miller said. “You walk from the old wireline group to the 50 new people who now understand service-oriented networks. There are some innovative minds in these companies. They are growing with the needs of the company in terms of delivering services.”

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