One of South Africa’s most strategic industry sectors – telecommunications – could be heading for collapse unless urgent steps are taken to train more telecoms engineers and technicians who understand today’s rapidly changing telecom environment, as quickly as possible.
So says Graeme Victor, CEO of telecommunications solutions company Du Pont Telecom who points out that there are no degree or diploma courses in South Africa for telecommunications engineers.
Virtually every higher education institution in this country offers some kind of Information Technology training. Add to this the wide range of internationally recognised and accredited IT qualifications that are provided by vendors and manufacturers of IT systems.
“Now contrast that with the fact that almost all training for telecoms technicians is provided in-house by telecoms companies. Telkom and Neotel in particular have good training programmes in place. However, their focus – of necessity – is on skilling individuals to deal with their specific products and solutions – rather than to provide a broad understanding of all aspects of telecommunications,” he adds.
According to Victor, the skills challenge in the telecoms sector is being exacerbated by technology convergence – voice and data are increasingly being run over the same network.
Most of today’s telecoms technicians have been trained to work in an analogue environment – and that skill is still required today. However, they don’t understand the data world.
At the same time, the IT technicians and engineers who are trained to design, implement and maintain data networks and systems, have virtually no in-depth understanding of the telecoms/voice world.
“The result is that converged voice/data systems are not being designed properly, are not maintained as they should be; and when things go wrong, no-one knows how to fix it because they don’t know what is causing the problem,” he says.
“We urgently need the various institutions that offer technical training to revise their training programmes and equip their students to function effectively in today’s and tomorrow’s converged telecoms world.”
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