Nation-wide scarcity of telecom staff: New HR initiative to kick off in Kerala

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The bullishness about India’s mobile connections breaching the 500-million mark and projections of it touching a billion by 2013 have an Achilles’ heel: There aren’t enough top-line technical staff in the telecom domain, a serious irritant that could dent India’s telecom performance in the near term.

A small but significant step towards bridging the burgeoning gap in technical staff requirement and supply will begin here next month, with BSNL joining hands with a private learning company, Faith InfoTech.

The first batch of trainees will be chosen through an aptitude test and interview in major south Indian cities, aiming to pick the best young engineers: Only those with a first class engineering graduation need apply.

According to BSNL chief general manager KS Srinivasan, the nationwide roll out of 3G by multiple operators and new operators entering the industry will further aggravate the shortage for competent workforce in the industry.

BSNL general manager and HR head George Mathai says the training programme is
therefore being launched on a national scale, with BSNL tying up with HCL to take the training programme pan-India, besides arrangements with other private players.

The existing network of its training centers across the country has also come in useful for BSNL. Says R Renga, BSNL DGM in charge of its regional telecom training centre here: “We have 45 training centers across the country, many of which have not been fully used in recent years because of a fall in number of direct recruits and the quick pace of change of technology”.

Trainers at these centers will now lend their shoulders to the effort to have a team of graduate engineers who are well-versed in areas ranging from basic telecom switching and GSM/CDMA fundamentals to transmission technology, optical linkages and IP routing, to 3G architecture, 4G, Wimax and next-gen networks.

FaithInfotech director and CEO Saji Joseph says the scarcity of competent and appropriately trained engineers in the telecom domain in the country is in stark irony to the existence of “an entire telecom ecosystem, comprising system operators, equipment makers, managed service operators, tower operators and mobile operators”.

According to Joseph, a unique problem confronting the HR scarcity in the telecom domain had to do with the high cost of equipment, which prevents private training institutes from establishing training facilities. He says BSNL’s leveraging of its equipments and trainers who have hands-on knowledge will be the key differentiators as BSNL and FaithInfotech begin training for graduate engineers in the telecom domain.