NBN skills shortages due to lacklustre training and marketing, says NECA

The National Electrical and Communications Association (NECA) cites a report in The Australian (Tuesday 25 May - NBN rollout short 8000 skilled staff) to reiterate its call for an urgent strategy to address the training required to deliver an NBN project on time and on budget.

According to NECA's Chief Executive, James Tinslay, this is the skills shortage we had to have: “The current shortfall of personnel with base-level skills required in a number of areas dictates that the Australian telecommunications industry will struggle to deliver the proposed NBN. In particular, the cabling industry will need to have people skilled in the deployment of fibre and fibre-ready infrastructures. This includes tasks from placing the conduits in the street, known as ‘pit-and-pipe’, through laying and terminating the actual fibre cables themselves.

Tinslay suggests, however, that there may be something of a silver lining around the looming cloud of uncertainty: “There are currently more than 60,000 ACMA-registered cablers around the country managed by five registrars on behalf of ACMA. This huge labour force provides a latent opportunity for upskilling that NECA believes has not been fully explored.

“The nay-sayers will tell you that many of these people are not up to the required standard. The fact is that if installers hold an ACMA registration, they have a good base level of regulatory knowledge, safety and basic electrical theory. If we can refresh this labour force, along with some short courses that already exist for industry endorsements in pit-and-pipe and fibre, these workers would be well on their way to being NBN-ready installers. NECA provides training for these endorsements.”

This thinking is confirmed by conversations within industry, including carriers. There may also be a time buffer for upskilling, courtesy of the delay of the release of the Fibre Deployment Bill in Parliament. This will mean that developments that are up to Stage 3 approval by 1 January 2011 will be required to be ‘fibre-ready’ or have fibre deployed. Fibre-ready means the pit-and-pipe infrastructure will be in place, whereas fibre-deployed means that fibre is installed and terminated at the premises.

NECA states that reports from the market suggest that some developers are already undertaking to complete the pit-and-pipe work without a carrier’s licence. The issue here is one of life cycle and ownership. A carrier will build this infrastructure to last for several decades. Over the service life of the infrastructure, the carrier is ultimately responsible for maintenance. The focus of a subcontractor working on behalf of a developer may be driven by different imperatives.

NECA contends that upgrading this requirement to insist that only correctly trained workers are used in this infrastructure deployment will remove a lot of the issues that could surface later.

Design skills are also extremely critical in ensuring a good outcome. Again, there are globally renowned, generic certifications for infrastructure designers that have been around for many years. These programs would satisfy the requirements of any carrier deploying FTTP in Australia. At this point we already have an industry bank of highly qualified and skilled designers who can contribute to an NBN rollout.

“The other untapped resource is our school-leavers who, over the next few years, could easily make up the labour shortfall,” said Tinslay. “For whatever reasons, the industry has failed to promote itself effectively as a viable career choice for school-leavers. This is ironic, given the high level of public uptake and interest in technological devices and platforms.

“A solution to the problem faced in the upskilling program would require an attitudinal change towards training and a halt to the continual slide in technician wages, caused by a tendency of government departments and carriers to award many bigger contracts on price, where the larger companies cut their costs by pushing all of the responsibility down the line to subcontractors.

“This removal of profit all the way through the chain does not make the industry appealing when compared to other industries, like the mining sector.”