New report from Eightfold AI – What Telecoms Need to Build a Future-Ready Workforce – outlines how telecoms can strengthen talent readiness to accelerate innovation and new offerings
The report contains the findings and insights from the Eightfold Talent Intelligence Platform, a deep-learning platform powered by the largest global talent dataset, to determine talent readiness for addressing innovation trends in the telecommunications industry.
For this analysis of talent in the telecommunications industry, Eightfold analyzed approximately 500,000 publicly available profiles from top telecoms.
With a constantly evolving skill mix due to automation, emerging technologies, and new business models, familiar telecom roles are undergoing a transformation of their own. The analysis by Eightfold found that:
- Many of the most common roles and skills are not currently addressing innovation trends. When it comes to technician roles including Switch Engineers, Network Technicians, Network Administrators, and BSS Engineers, 33 percent of the top network engineering and operations roles are not yet equipped with future skills to address trending innovations.
- However, by evaluating skills adjacencies, these common network engineering roles can follow alternative career paths to transition into rising roles such as Cyber Security Engineers, Cloud Engineers, and Performance Engineers.
- While the industry is better positioned to build out capabilities for cloud and edge computing as well as big data, the analysis identified the industry’s lowest talent readiness is in areas such as 5G and Open RAN.
- Telecoms have a short window of one to two years to build 5G capabilities, as providers accelerate 5G expansion and even prepare for 6G capabilities that will contribute to making emerging trends like the metaverse phenomenon a reality.
“Speed and scalability are everything in the race to deliver the next big thing. This sense of urgency is only compounded by the fact that telecoms constitute a backbone for all other emerging technologies to function and evolve,” said Kamal Ahluwalia, President of Eightfold AI. “Now is the time to upskill the existing workforce, build a skills-based employee experience, and attract the brightest minds in the industry that will accelerate this digital reinvention for telecoms.”
Eightfold Talent Insights Report is available here: What Telecoms Need to Build a Future-Ready Workforce
Marin Ivezic is a Cybersecurity & Privacy Partner in PwC Canada focused on risks of emerging technologies.
