Overseas recruitment likely as NBN skills shortage looms
Appeared in: The Australian
Date: March 9th 2010
Author: Fran Foo and Jennifer Foreshew
AS NBN Co begins to hire in earnest, it will shy away from poaching top telco talent and could face a shortage of skilled IT professionals this year. The company charged with rolling out Kevin Rudd’s ambitious infrastructure project wants to triple its headcount from 100 to 300 by the middle of the year.
While recruitment experts warn of shortages, key technology suppliers disagree.
As the national broadband network project evolves, field construction staff will be in high demand. In the long run, the eight-year project is set to create about 25,000 jobs.
NBN Co human resources officer Kevin Brown said a five-year, $23 million deal with Accenture announced last week would allow the company to focus on hiring while Accenture took care of administrative tasks related to the workforce expansion process.
NBN Co is on the hunt for systems engineers, network planners, testers, systems architects, project managers and IT professionals.
Recruitment specialists within NBN Co are confident the massive project will be able to attract top local talent.
According to Trevor Hoggan, NBN Co workforce planning and sourcing general manager, the company will formalise a panel of recruitment firms starting from the second quarter of 2010.
In the past it has used up to 18 recruitment firms, including executive search firms Egon Zehnder and Korn Ferry International, on an ad-hoc basis.
As revealed in The Australian today, NBN Co’s anti-poaching policy discourages it from pinching staff from Telstra and other “potential customers”. Should a top-level executive at these companies apply for a job at the broadband builder, NBN Co would inform their employer of the application. With numerous large-scale broadband network projects all over the world, the grab for talent could leave Australia in a bind.
Peoplebank chief executive officer Peter Acheson said detailed, strategic workforce requirements had to be established before the hiring spree began.
“Given the size and the scope of the NBN project and the speed they’ll need to implement, it’s prudent to be clear on all of these issues before they start hiring in volume,” Mr Acheson said.
He said the federal government’s $43 billion NBN project would be one of the reasons IT would return to a candidate-tight market this year.
“Place a project like that into an already improving IT market and demand will exceed supply by the second half of the year,” Mr Acheson said.
Telecommunications analyst Paul Budde said more emphasis should be given to training, especially the “upskilling” of copper network engineers to fibre.
“If you look at China and India they are pumping out engineers. We need a strategic hiring plan to make sure we get the best and the brightest for the NBN project and that may include retraining some workers and those that have even retired,” Mr Budde said.
Telecommunications equipment providers such as Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson disagree with the recruitment industry.
“Huawei has had no problem with expanding its local Australian team,” Huawei Australia spokesman Luke Coleman said.
“As our business grows in Australia, we will continue to expand and do not foresee any future problems with getting experienced staff with the required skills to deliver to our customers.”
Ericsson Australia broadband strategy manager Colin Goodwin said the largest number of people required for the project were field construction staff for the fibre cable deployment and not technology specialists. “In the area of skilled telecommunications and IP engineers the number is much less than the number of required field construction staff,” Mr Goodwin said.
“Ericsson continually invests in strategic competence development both locally and globally and has the requisite resources and skills to meet the challenging needs of such projects.”
Alcatel-Lucent Australia, which also sees physical construction and deployment forming the biggest demand, said the skills shortage debate lay outside the telecommunications realm.
“We actually think the largest skills challenge around the NBN is enabling people in industries outside of telecommunications to understand how broadband could be used to drive their own innovation and new business models,” an Alcatel-Lucent spokeswoman said.
I think Paul Budde is absolutely right in saying that currently retired telecom engineers and copper network engineers should be given to training. There are lot of matured under employed talent since Telstra privatisation exercise took place. The existing Telco organisation are short of technical people need for the roll-out of the fibre cable deployments as well IP and ATM Engineers as most of the equipment knowledge has been left with the Supplier like Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent. So there is very little equipment specific knowledge out there because non of these Supplier have any public accessible courses so that anyone can up skill or get themselves “shovel ready” for the federal government’s $43 billion NBN project. This is nothing new ! This nation keep on repeating the same mistakes every year and yet we have no funding or university and TAFE courses in this country !
Workplaces of the future will see more frequent transitions between work, education, family and retirement. As our economy grows, employers will need to source labour from all productive sectors of the community to meet demand. With people moving in and out of the workforce in more flexible ways the experience of older Australians can add to productivity and fill some of these labour gaps.
Consultative Forum on Mature Age Participation, ACCI Chief Executive Peter Anderson said that industry should come forward with practical ideas on how the skills and experience of older Australians can be better harnessed for the benefit of our economy and society.