Crossing
the Skills Gap
By
Matthew
DeMartino
T
he telecommunications industry is
a fascinating one. As it continues to
evolve, the requirement for skilled
and experienced technical employees
has grown exponentially.
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The demand for individuals with spe-
cialized certifications and advanced
degrees seems to have outgrown the
supply, and this leaves companies
struggling for answers.
For the better part of 10 years, I have
worked on the agency side of the re-
cruitment process with Competitive Tele-
coms Group focusing on the telecommu-
nications and data center space for both
national and international companies. I
have witnessed the ebbs and flows of
the industry. I have seen what appears
to be an almost weekly announcement
of new mergers and acquisitions.
With all this change, there is a con-
tinuous cycle of new and marketable
candidates flooding the market. Com-
panies, now more than ever, feel the fi-
nancial burden of having to meet man-
dated revenue numbers set by senior
officers and board members and need
to hire the best talent to achieve these
goals. The problem is, this is not such
an easy task. A number of factors dur-
ing the years have contributed to the
difficulty in finding top technical talent
in the market. In particular, the three
main trends we see are as follows:
education, unreasonable expectations
and salary requirements.
I grew up in the generation where
parents emphasized that you need
to go to college and earn a degree.
Degrees from vocational schools were
generally frowned upon in comparison
to the almighty four-year degree. It
did not matter what that degree was
because it was assumed your future
employers would teach you the skills
you would need to gain experience
and nurture your career.
Unfortunately, during the last
few years, technology has rapidly
advanced, and the need for “highly-
skilled” and specialized labor has
grown with it. Now more than ever,
companies expect recent college grad-
uates to hold a significant amount of
experience with a premium placed on
those who have some form of technical
certifications. To succeed in the future,
we need a well-educated workforce that
specializes in innovative thought. We
need students who possess the techni-
cal literacy to be contributing members
of an organization from day one.
The question is, how do we meet
the demand of these companies for
qualified employees? For starters,
directing students toward technical de-
grees is absolutely critical to the growth
of an advanced work force. We don’t
need to graduate more students with
degrees in liberal arts. Colleges and
universities need to work on offering
more certification programs. If a student
can go through a five-year teaching
program and come out with a master’s
degree, why can’t a school offer an ad-
ditional semester workload that grants a
CCNA or CCIE certification or Six Sigma?
On the other hand, companies need
to do a better job training and developing
the talent they already have. Headcount
reductions in the industry have led to a
significant reduction in training. Compa-
nies need to step up technical training to
help support their growth. The more you
work to improve your staff, the more pro-
ductive and contributing they will be to the
long-term development of an organization.
Why hire from the outside when the talent
is there but only needs to be cultivated
further? Building training and continuing
education platforms within corporations
would go a long way toward giving indi-
viduals the ability to succeed in their cur-
rent roles while developing them for future
advancements within the company.
Another issue we face is unreasonable
expectations from hiring managers. Now
more than ever, companies have been
asked to produce more with less. With that
said, the requirement for candidates to
possess a multitude of certifications has
increased exponentially. Companies now
expect individuals to be cross-functional in
different business segments and be a “jack
of all trades.” In theory, that sounds great,
but finding those types of individuals plays
into the other big issue organizations face.
Salary requirements have been a
major stumbling block and have only got-
ten worse over time. The expectation for
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