The telecom sector is going through a major transformation enabled by emerging telecom technologies (network automation, connectivity, and virtualization) and digital technologies (RPA, AI, and IoT), and it is increasing demand for the right talent to drive these changes. (Please read our reports for details on the state of telecommunication operations and major trends in telecom industry).

Telecommunication players depend on their technology partners to source quality talent to lead their outsourcing projects. But, customer feedback shows that having issues with talent quality and resource attrition in telecom engineering outsourcing is a common thread. In 2018, we published the HFS Top 10 Telecom Engineering Service Providers 2018 report, which outlines client buying behavior in the telecom engineering services market. This report process involved interviewing several company leaders from a wide variety of telecommunications companies on their experiences around telecom engineering. In this PoV, we discuss the engineering talent management issues faced by telecommunication clients and how service providers can step up in this space to mitigate them.

This report helps the service provider leaders who have responsibilities in building out telecom engineering service delivery capabilities understand what their customers are saying about them and what talent management capability they expect.

Skill development and retention are the biggest worries for telecom engineering services providers

We asked telecom engineering services clients to identify the main strengths and challenges of their service providers. Exhibit 1 presents the primary strengths and development opportunities mentioned by these clients.

As technology is becoming a differentiator in the telecom engineering space, clients are most concerned with the talents that outsourcing partners provide. We are also looking into clients’ innovation concerns, and we are authoring a separate PoV on that topic.

Clients indicated they are not satisfied with professionals’ level of experience and domain knowledge. Exhibit 2 outlines some of the most common issues clients mentioned related to talent management.

Exhibit 2: Talent management issues faced by clients in telecom engineering services

 Source: HFS Top 10 Telecom Engineering Service Providers 2018

An insufficient number of senior resources and training hours are evident in telecom engineering services

In the HFS Top 10 Telecom Engineering Service Providers 2018 report, we evaluated 12 leading service providers as shown in Exhibit 3 and Exhibit 4. Exhibit 3 shows that nearly 70% of the telecom engineering workforce has less than eight years of work experience. Though service providers are using more emerging technologies, the projects lack senior resources.

We found that service providers spend an average of 60 hours per FTE each year on telecom engineering related training. Assuming an average of 2,000 total work hours per year per FTE, this is about 3% of work hours, as shown in Exhibit 4. This low number of training hours is not sufficient because the junior resources have no background in telecoms.

Three things service providers need to do for effective resource planning in telecom engineering services:

1. Revisit the talent hiring and retention strategy. The technology landscape is changing very quickly in the telecom engineering space, so finding and retaining talent is a major issue. There is a need for overall organizational alignment and more collaboration between employers and resources to improve growth prospects.
2. Continue to invest in training and certifications. Upgrading knowledge is of paramount importance; service providers need to invest in augmenting resource capability. Service providers are focusing on developing telecom domain courses with e-learning modules and collaborating with external vendors for niche skills development.
3. Keep an eye on project staffing. As most telecom projects use a time-and-material pricing model, resource visibility becomes prominent to the clients. For fixed-price projects, service providers sometimes deploy less-experienced resources to increase the margin, impacting the quality of project delivery. Service providers need to look into the project resource management based on the strategic priority of the clients.

The Bottom Line: Service providers must focus on recruitment strategy and resource capability augmentation to meet client expectations

Service providers are dealing with the talent management issue with different mindsets. Some are recruiting more educated resources, some are hiring talent on a per-requirement basis (just in time), and others are focusing on training to make their resources future-ready. The goal of all of these strategies is to continuously educate the workforce in emerging technologies in the telecommunications domain. Sometimes this continuous effort is a cost burden for the organization, but this exercise is for a greater good, as this thought-provoking dialogue suggests:

CEO: What happens if we don’t, and they stay?

CFO: What happens if we train them, and they leave?