Demystifying Next Generation Fiber Workforce Development

When strategically planning your workforce development programs, it is important to connect your employees to the mission and vision of your organization. Employees want to know that the skills they are acquiring serve a higher purpose. Focus on the importance of connecting people instead of industry metrics. People need purpose and are eager to support good causes. According to McKinsey & Company, Inc. (2021), employees want more than transactional relationships. They seek meaningful work, not just another job. The industry might be missing a great opportunity by focusing on metrics instead of offering newcomers purpose and meaning. Making connections between the technical and the human is especially important in trades that are technically oriented, as it helps workers make more sense of their work and their lives.

Employers that fail to identify and meet new employee demands are not only missing out but also putting their businesses at risk by not meeting their demands for autonomy and flexibility (McKinsey & Co., 2021). Though for some may see fiber jobs as only about installing cables, connectors, and serving antsy customers, we must focus on why telecom industry jobs are meaningful and critical for sustaining and furthering our modern way of life. Our industry offers people access to education, jobs, healthcare, and connection to loved ones, as well as to critical services that we need access to for day-to-day living. 

Interpersonal abilities are just as important as technical proficiency for organizations that want to retain talent and outperform their competition. Therefore, digital natives must also learn the skills and dynamics required to work together as a team. Technical proficiency will allow young workers to continue to grow their competencies. However, the future of work will continue to be team centric. Therefore, improving young professionals abilities to communicate with intent, actively listen, collaborate, co-create, and provide mutual support are vital in today’s world of work. Developing these abilities encourages employees to influence and support each other, which are behaviors you want in leaders. 

Strategy 3. Foster Lifelong Learning

Don't only focus on standards-centered training and memorization. There are too many standards to remember, and they are constantly changing. Instead, encourage excellence, teach how to find credible sources, research skills, and promote lifelong learning!

Developing a culture where learning is as important as the results you achieve will enable your employees to strive for mastery instead of merely performing to a standard. As time goes on, standards change, the need for different abilities evolve, and a team that prioritizes a growth mindset will have the advantage. Offering and promoting learning through a variety of forms will enable your team to have access to content that is relevant and timely. Cultivating the environment where learning is happening all around will allow your team to ask better questions, share information, and increase cohesion through learning from each other.

Learning should be interesting, intuitive, personalized, and mobile. Modern EdTech (Educational Technology) enables taking the classroom experience to the learner’s place of work and empowers them to learn and apply on-the-go or at their convenience. Leveraging EdTech also lowers spatial limitations from traditional classroom delivery, allowing instructors to be more creative, teaching from where they are, and even providing more opportunities for content creation from the instructor’s place of practice.

Though EdTech has been proven to be an enabler for learning experience enhancement, the method can fall short because many traditional technical instructors are not fluid at using modern EdTech to share their expertise virtually. For technical instructors to be effective in the online space, they must have experience that comes through online teaching training and experience. That will allow them to be fluid in a virtual environment just as they are in face-to-face settings. According to Wieland and Kiollias (2020), passion and confidence also need to translate from the in-person classroom to the virtual learning space for the experience to be comparable.

 Strategy 4. Approach Training with a Long-Term View

Go beyond the week-long cramming session. Make training ongoing, relevant, contextualized, and personalized! Workforce development should be viewed as a continuous cycle that occurs over time. Training events should not be one and done. Knowledge is acquired through training but is captured and improved through application. Conducting experiential learning and having continuous access to technical and interpersonal training will allow the cycle of learning and application to be continuous. Learn, apply, assess, repeat. This is known as the learning curve.

Unfortunately, there is also a forgetting curve, which describes the phenomenon of knowledge becoming useless if not applied within days of acquisition. One strategy for avoiding the forgetting curve is to design training that takes place over time and on-the-job, so learners can apply new information and knowledge immediately to their work context.

Instead of solving for technical labor gaps, let's develop the next generation of leaders who share a passion for continuous learning. Let’s encourage them to learn from a variety of methods including traditional classrooms to hands-on to EdTech. Let’s approach training as an ongoing and never-ending endeavor, not a finite event ending when learners pass a test at the end of a class. Let’s commit to ensuring training programs allow for knowledge assimilation, application, and retention so that can translate into work performance gains and quality.

The four strategies we’ve shared are just a few of the ways we can innovate the telecommunications industry space to make it welcoming and friendlier to a digitally native generation. While it demands a more human-centric approach, these strategies will help us build the next generation telecommunications and fiber optics workforce.

REFERENCES AND NOTES

• Wieland, N., & Kollias, L. Online Learning Before, During, and After COVID-19: Observations Over 20 Years, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/67d6/cb290e155260a59774f032d8ff00ae21220b.pdf
  

• De Smet, A., Dowling, B., Mugayar-Baldocchi, M., & Schaninger, B. (2021). ‘Great Attrition ’or ‘Great Attraction’? The choice is yours. The McKinsey Quarterly, https://www.proquest.com/openview/d5d8bac592a6b5fbbd46ef0d6452378f/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=30375