The U.S. Labor Department estimates that the global shortage of software engineers may reach 85.2 million by 2030
A shift towards network virtualization and software-defined networking is one of the telecom trends that Corning’s Director of Wireless R&D and Chief Technologist Shirish Nagaraj believes is most impacting the workforce landscape, particularly in the way that it changes how code is developed and written.
The basic idea behind network virtualization is to decouple software from hardware, and to run network functions, like a firewall or encryption, for instance, on virtual machines (VMs). As soon as the network functions are managed by a hypervisor, services originally installed on hardware can be performed on software. Virtualization enables speed and agility, making it possible for service providers to create and deploy services at an unprecedented rate.
All of this, though, said Nagaraj means that software engineers have to become familiar with cloud technologies. But more than that, a software engineering skillset is perhaps emerging as the most glaring gap in the telecom workforce. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS), 1.2 million software engineer roles in the U.S. are to remain unfilled by 2026, and the US Labor Department estimates that the global shortage of software engineers may reach 85.2 million by 2030.
Telecom companies are exceedingly aware of this need. “Do we have that talent today?” Verizon Chief Technology Ambassador Nicki Palmer questioned. “There are pockets within our organization in those critical job families where it is difficult to hire today. I’m not talking about fueling our growth ambitions for talent for the future; I’m talking about today. We have businesses that are 100% software, and that talent is highly sought after.”
She was careful to dispel an idea that is becoming popular in some circles, which suggests that because of the headline-grabbing layoffs occurring at big tech companies like Microsoft and Meta, this is no longer a problem. “We can just go hire them, every company is saying that,” said Palmer, adding that this simply isn’t the case. Here, we return to her earlier comments about the fact that every company is a tech company, from Verizon itself to Walmart to manufacturing facilities, and therefore, they are all looking to hire individuals with technical and software engineering skills. The demand for these skills, she summed up, is off the charts.
Verizon is not the only one feeling pressure from this growing skills gap. Vodafone in 2021 announced plans to add nearly 7,000 software engineers to its workforce by 2025 as part of its increased investment to meet surging demand for digital connectivity. Its software engineer recruitment efforts, said Vodafone, will “complement the existing 9,000 employees already working in this area.”
“Obviously, that then leads to the conversation of supply and demand,” Elizabeth Rumsey, senior global product manager at Vodafone Business, acknowledged in a conversation with RCR Wireless News. “It’s not like all of these people are sitting around without jobs, so how do we fill those roles?”
She explained that Vodafone has launched a brand-new program in which the company internally reskills its current employees to train up as software developers. “You’ve got the angle of going out into the external market, bringing in those skills you didn’t have before, but the thing I really like is retaining people that are already part of the company and the culture,” she said. Externally, she continued, software recruitment efforts are centralized around Vodafone’s two new skill hubs, located in Malaga, Spain and Dresden, Germany.
“Vodafone is rapidly shifting up the gears to support the dramatic digital transformation that businesses and society are undergoing,” Johan Wibergh, chief technology officer of Vodafone, said in 2021. By 2025, the operator anticipates that more than 50% of its employees will work in software engineering. Vodacom, part of Vodafone Group, also adopted a similar strategy, said the company.
