Telecommunications is rapidly evolving: Providers are migrating to the cloud, increasingly rolling out fiber and wireless and private 5G and expanding coverage to rural or otherwise underserved areas.

This new environment demands a workforce with a diversity of skills — but experts say the telco talent pool is alarmingly drying up in an industry that is expected to hit $2.47 trillion by 2028.

“The telecom industry is at the heart of a digital transformation,” said Anand Swaminathan, EVP and global head of communications, media and technology for Infosys. However, “market growth presents a talent shortage globally, which will snowball in the next five years unless addressed in an effective and efficient manner.”

A myriad of converging factors impact telco talent shortage

So why does this talent gap exist?

First, according to Swaminathan, is an aging workforce in a shifting technology landscape. While long-tenure full-time employees are experienced in traditional telecom settings, the rapid shift to SDN/NFV in areas such as 5G and IoT requires a different set of skills. These include knowledge of cloud, virtualization, Open RAN, network protocols, big data, analytics, containerization such as Kubernetes and Docker, among other technologies.

To that point, Vodafone anticipates that by 2025, more than 50% of its employees will work in software engineering.

“The need to leverage these new age technologies and security considerations have gone up multi-fold,” said Swaminathan. “The traditional talent supply often does not have the appropriate level of base knowledge on both new wireless 5G and new age technologies at an appropriate level.”

Telcos are also competing for talent with industries including the rapidly growing areas of artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI and machine learning (ML). Companies in these areas are seeking skills possessed by those in the existing telco talent pool, while at the same time gen-Z and millennials are attracted to new age technology companies and startups that are perceived as “more agile and fast moving than the mature telco industry,” said Swaminathan.

Add to this the fact that peer industries typically provide much more lucrative pay, IT career advancements and benefits.

“The talent pool available is highly sought after across industries,” said Swaminathan. “For example, a worker with relevant AI/ML skills to work on newer business use cases for telcos are few in the market, and can go anywhere from tech giants to hyperscalers to financial services.”

Partnerships, upskilling and reskilling

Considering these wide-ranging factors, telcos should actively be looking outside the current talent pool, Swaminathan advised.

They can also consider partnering with universities, up-skilling in-house and collaborating with the wider industry to address their talent shortage. Working with higher ed can bring “talent grooming” closer to new skill necessities, he said. For example, Infosys has entered into a five-year agreement with Purdue University to provide classes and training for relevant talent, and also offers online courses for existing employees looking to advance their careers.

Internship programs offering potential career opportunities is another key step. Also as an example, Infosys offers InStep, a global internship program that attracts professionals across disciplines — including management, technology and even liberal arts — who partake in a variety of projects ranging from ML to best practices for humanity in leadership.

Offering upskilling, reskilling and certification programs, similarly, can incentivize existing employees to learn newer technologies and potentially reinvigorate their interest and passion in their work.

“This will motivate employee champions to pursue new opportunities,” said Swaminathan, “and the telco will benefit from a ready context of their business.”

Putting competition aside, telcos could partner up for such initiatives as a talent exchange that can “nurture, enable and offer a shared talent pool for use by the industry,” he said. Also to this point, companies can tap into partners’ talent (such as consulting companies).

Alternatively, investing in the tech stack and leveraging new technologies that incorporate AI and ML can streamline enterprise operations and lower costs.

“This will reduce the talent pool required for these functions and enable the existing talent pool to be deployed for higher value activities,” said Swaminathan.

Tap into different tech talent pools

As is the case in all other industries, diversity is a critical factor to consider in recruiting telco talent.

Tap into talent pools at different cross-section of their lives, Swaminathan advises. This can include gen Z branding on the “cool opportunities” in telecom and application-centric scenarios of using new technologies including AI or ML.

Companies should also encourage and support opportunities for women — as, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, women accounted for 37% of the global telecom workforce in 2022.

Another often overlooked population are those with career gaps. “There is good talent who have opted for a career break for family, social initiatives or other reasons,” said Swaminathan.

They can quickly be set on a career re-skill path to bring them up to speed with the latest in the industry. Swaminathan pointed to his company’s “Restart with Infosys” program.

Furthermore, he said, telcos can reach out to existing contractors they have relationships with, as well as the many retired professionals with telecom experience.

Meanwhile, for telecom industry job seekers…

What about those on the other end of the spectrum (that is, job seekers)?

As discussed, telcos are seeking out a range of skills, starting with contextual and industry knowledge. A “definite plus,” according to Swaminathan, is experience in 5G, SDN/NFV, SD-WAN, Open RAN and internet of things (IoT).

But backgrounds in areas such as data analytics, data infrastructure (such as data lakes and lakehouses), software engineering, DevOps, product management and sales are also in demand, as is knowledge of the cloud and its architecture. Given that “the telco and cloud worlds are fast merging,” knowledge of migrating legacy stacks to the cloud as well as hybrid/poly cloud is particularly attractive, Swaminathan noted.

Meanwhile, a background in AI/ML can help provide constant analysis of network performance and tailor content for specific customers and also improve customer experience via such tools as automated closed loop assurance and multi-channel interactions.

Furthermore, expertise in the security domain — firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), network and data security, to name a few areas — is important given the copious amounts of consumer data that the industry works with, Swaminathan pointed out.

“Showcasing experience in the security domain, including lateral domains — such as financial industry IT security experience — will be keenly welcomed by telcos,” he said.