Broadband Workforce Development: Is Investing in Employee Training The Key? - ETI
X

Want to take a Self-Guided tour?




April 7, 2022

Broadband Workforce Development: Is Investing in Employee Training The Key?

Understand how Broadband workforce management and training can help handle the rapid broadband growth.

Pete Pizzutillo:

Welcome to the Broadband Bunch, a podcast about broadband and how it impacts us all. Join us to learn about the state of the industry and the latest innovations and trends. Connect with the thought leaders, pioneers, and policymakers, helping to shape your future through broadband. This episode of the Broadband Bunch is sponsored by ETI Software, your zero-touch automation experts, by Calix, simplify, excite, grow, by DXTel, creators of the Harper broadband marketing library, by ITK Solutions Group, the process first, technology second, and by Utopia Fiber, building a more connected nation.

Pete Pizzutillo:

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Broadband Bunch. My name is Pete Pizzutillo, and I am joined today by Steve Harris. Steve is an Executive Director of Education and Technical Sales for SCTE, which is a subsidiary of CableLabs. Steve, thanks for joining the show [broadband workforce] today.

Steve Harris:

Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to it.

Pete Pizzutillo:

We’re going to dig into some interesting topics around [broadband workforce] and education. I know there are a lot of people in our marketplace that are scrambling to figure out, now they have money and a plan, how are they going to get it done, and you guys have definitely got a perspective in working with a lot of folks in our community. But before we do that, I’d just love to unpack how you Steve, ended up in the role that you are today.

Steve Harris:

I’ll give you a little background because it was an interesting road that I never saw happening, my career path. I had a plan, but it did its own thing. I was over at Camden County College. I was a teacher at Camden County College, ran a computer lab over there, teaching continued Ed courses and a lot of the technical stuff that was new coming out, probably stuff like the Cisco certifications, Microsoft certifications, and we got involved with Comcast. We actually wrote a grant and the grant was to train all these technicians in advanced networking. That was my introduction to cable, which was really cool because I didn’t really realize what cable was and what telecom was until I got involved. We had an awesome time. We trained hundreds and hundreds of technicians at Comcast and on the side, I had a side hustle, fixing TVs and VCRs back then too.

Steve Harris:

I was on the electronic side too, so it was really a great place to geek out. , shortly after, I left the college and went to work for Comcast. With Comcast having a big background in training, teaching, and developing content, in the first year of Comcast, I wrote 18 courses and it was in all types of topics. We had a back-office network, so we created a course for that. We were training technicians on how to wire a cable mode termination system in a classroom and do the wiring for phones. At the time, there were all types of activities. All the work I did at Comcast, led to an LND award. I was asked by Comcast to attend an SCTE cable tech expo in Orlando, and I said, “Oh, I would love to go to that.”

Steve Harris:

Well, here they were given out the fast learning and development award for SCTE and I’m like, “Oh, I wonder who’s going to be, this is interesting.” and they called my name because I created these 18 courses. That was really cool. Then my sites turned from Comcast and said, “Well, what’s this SCTE all about?” because I didn’t really know much about them and really dug in deep. Started participating in SCTE events and speaking at SCTE events, and that led to me leaving Comcast and coming over to the SCTE, where I’ve been for the last 12 years.

SCTE’s Broadband workforce requirements

Pete Pizzutillo:

Wow. A lifelong tinkerer/teacher ends up taking into places you never thought you’d go, that’s pretty interesting. Just a little bit about SCTE, just so we get everybody up to speed before we dig into that.

Steve Harris:

Sure. The SCTE’s a Society of Cable and Telecommunication Engineers. We’ve been around for over 50 years, many people don’t realize that. We can dive into all the piece parts of SCTE, but in the last year in four months or so, we became a subsidiary of Cable Laboratories, and Cable Laboratories is the RND arm of the industry, while SCTE is the operational arm and standards of the industry. We’re both nonprofits. That’s important to understand because we reinvest everything back into the society and everything gets reinvested in the CableLabs.

Pete Pizzutillo:

In your role, you’re dealing with a lot of the cables and telecoms in the current situation, and there’s a ton, right? As you mentioned, CableLabs is on the RND side. There’s a lot of innovation coming down the pike. There’s a lot of pressure now that there’s money flowing to get new broadband, to new areas, or to upgrade it to acceptable levels, and there’s just a massive shortage of labor and resources. How’s that impacting the folks that you’re talking to and what are some of the ways that they’re trying to solve those problems?

Steve Harris:

That’s a great question. Let me look at each one of these parts because there are three things you have there. Definitely on the innovation side, with CableLabs and SCTE and the operators, we’ve been very innovative and there’s a flurry of innovation going on right now. SCTE, what the industry has been working on distributed access architectures and distributed CCAP architectures, and this is really evolving the network that brings the services to the customer. Between a cable operator and the customers is the access network, and there’s a lot of transformation that’s happening. We have digital fiber now, that we used to have analog, so that’s more innovative and that’s going to be coherent in the next four or five years.

Steve Harris:

Ethernet performance testing, fiber deep architecture pushing fiber, very, very close to the customers. We’re doing fiber to the home, and not just any fiber to the home, we’re doing the latest ones, ethernet passive optical networks, there’s XGS pond, there are technologies for 25 and 50-gig ponds, and beyond. On the rural side, there’s fiber indexing, there are new fiber splicing techniques, there are new fiber standards, and these are just a few things on the access network side, but then you also have new technologies like Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6e, wireless convergence with mobility, citizen’s band radio spectrum. All right. I’m going to stop. Plus it’s on the innovation side.

Steve Harris:

There’s a lot going on there. For accelerated deployments, I think we really saw COVID-19 as a catalyst for that, because everybody’s working from home. My daughter was doing school from home, like so many others, and we all had to pivot really quickly to be able to do what we did in the office or in the classroom. We had to do that at home. My wife was a teacher at the time, and so she was teaching her classroom from the house, I was working, everybody was working, and so that drove the operators to make sure the networks were performing at the proper level, delivering the bandwidth requirements, the capacity requirements, latency requirements.

Steve Harris:

We responded I would say the best that any operator could respond, meaning that we were ready. I think that’s on the accelerated deployment side. We haven’t stopped, like I said, on the innovation side, there is so many new technologies that we’re working on, to take the network to the next level. There’s an influx of three times, more federal funding that’s out there, so that’s really getting the operators to rethink. I just talked to several operators this week that are saying, “Wait a minute, do I really want to go fix wireless access, or now that I got this new funding, how about I start looking at fiber to the home?” There are a lot of those types of questions going on, and then you take a look at the labor shortage, the last part of your question. It’s a big problem.

Steve Harris:

There’s a recent survey from Real-Time Insights, that this is affecting 40% of U.S. organizations. Well, a lot of the members of our society are part of these organizations and it’s a significant issue for us as well. The good news is, we knew this was coming. We’ve been out in front of this and we’ve been developing a lot of programs to address this and working very closely with the operators and contractors to make sure that we still drive that return on investment for the customers, while also focused on the operational priorities of our members.

Steve Harris:

From my perspective, I think the right training is a big deal and that’s going to really drive the workforce development. Another study IBM conducted that… And you could see a lot of these studies, 62% of new hires intend to stay with their companies when training is provided. We see that. That was a really good question.

Training the broadband workforce is the real digital transformation.

Pete Pizzutillo:

You mentioned just a couple of points on that. It’s really interesting because, the technology innovation, is we all want to do things faster, better, cheaper, and the term’s been overused for many years around digital transformation, and a lot of people point to the friction around digital transformation as really due to people issues, culture, but I think you put your finger on it. A lot of is, that people may want to do things better, faster, cheaper, they just don’t know how to do it. Right. If you’re not as an organization bringing the people along and having the training prepared to help people to re-skill them or to onboard different types of resources that you’ve never had to deal with before, that’s going to be an impediment to all that great progress. Does that make sense?

Steve Harris:

Absolutely. When you look at tools, if you think about a fiber technician, you think of the physical tools, but there are also a lot of soft tools that a person needs, whether that’s change management, whether that is the right courses that you mentioned. If I don’t have the right education, well, then my job satisfaction might suffer. I talked to an operator in the Caribbean. They said, “Look, I’m having a problem with job satisfaction, and morale.” We put a training program in place. Those two things were off the table. Like, “Wow, I feel much happier now that I’m actually understanding the job and the recommended practices.” SCTE does this. If you get training, not all training’s the same, and it could lead to frustration if it’s not the right one.

Pete Pizzutillo:

Well, you put your finger on training the folks that are in the industry, but there are a lot of national shortages. We’re going to have to reach into other industries or untapped areas of resources. How do we get people to understand the potential? We, inside this industry seat is a generational opportunity, but young kids coming up, they may be thinking about going to working at Amazon warehouse or whatever else that they may be doing, buying, selling bitcoin that type of thing. How can we do a better job attracting talent to have their say, “Hey, there’s something really interesting here.” And this isn’t just a trade, there’s a profession. We see in a lot of folks coming up the operational ladder from management to ownership, that type of thing. How can we do a better job telling that story?

Steve Harris:

I think exactly what you said is, telling the story of cable. When I was at college, I didn’t think of cable in telecom as a career. For me, I learned that through, I would say accident. I just got involved in this grant for the college, and the next thing, I was introduced to Comcast, “Wow, this is really cool.” So what I think it is, is us working together, which we do, is really telling our story, “Hey, this is what cable’s about.” Most people think, “Oh, it’s cable, telecom.” No, it’s also cloud, it’s virtualization, it’s networking, it’s all these other cool things, programming.

Steve Harris:

There was just a recent article about that, that came out in the industry, where programming is huge. We can tell people, “Hey, these are all the different things that you can do in the cable industry.” And it doesn’t have to be the installer. Most people think, “Oh, it’s an installer.” SCTE trains, not just installers, but we train all the way up to engineers. We train leadership, whether that’s the executive level or management level. There’re so many aspects to the industry and I think once people step into it, they’re like, “Wow, this is so cool. I never want to leave.”

Pete Pizzutillo:

Well, I think your case is a good example of where you don’t know where certain decisions are going to lean. You don’t necessarily have to have a mapped out plan, but you need to be open and curious, and I think you, as a tinker, an educator, led you down a certain path, and I think one of the things the broadband industry needs to do a better job of, is helping people understand that it’s so broad-reaching the foundational technology that we provide. Anywhere from telehealth, to gaming, to computer science.

Pete Pizzutillo:

You never know what’s going to spark somebody’s imagination and curiosity to get them to say, “Oh, that is interesting. How do I do that?” There are different programs that I’ve seen where they try to illuminate those with, to the students and kids to say, “Here, if you care about this stuff, let me show you how this stuff is actually possible.” They spend so much freaking time on their phones, wouldn’t you want to understand what’s going on back there, and some of them will and some of them obviously won’t.

Steve Harris:

We partner with the U.S. FIRST, and these were kids that build robots we brought U.S. FIRST to the cable tech expo and highlighted the kids, and they were amazed. At Cable Tech Expo, they’re looking around and, this is a whole new industry that I didn’t even know was on my roadmap. Getting involved in things like U.S. FIRST, and getting our chapters, do a great job. We have 60 plus chapters and they do high school programs. They go out and speak to high schools, trade schools, and stuff like that. Those types of outreach programs are going to allow more and more people to understand what this industry is about.

The Future of the broadband workforce according to broadband industry giants

Pete Pizzutillo:

Robotics is really interesting. People don’t know this, but our brand manager for the podcast is actually Joe, he’s actually a robot. He’s the first podcast manager robot, which is really cutting edge for us. On a serious note there, you talked to a lot of folks up and down the food chain, let’s learn from the big guys. You mentioned Comcast and some of the other folks, how are they investing in the future workforce? They get a lot at stake, you see anything interesting coming from them?

Steve Harris:

Yeah. If you take a look at the big guys, the big guys had to do a lot of innovation. They have a lot of labs where they are testing the latest and greatest. We’ll take Comcast, as you’ve mentioned as an example. Comcast works very closely with my parent company, Cable Laboratories, on standards like DOCSIS 4.0. These technologies are what’s driving the innovation in the network. I mentioned a lot of other technologies, but DOCSIS 4.0, is really getting to symmetrical upstream and downstream and a 10 gig, but we label it as 10G in the network. Comcast has a lot of investment in technologies. They work very closely with SCTE and their corporate Alliance partnership program, and this is a program where it allows Comcast to participate on all levels of SCTE, whether that’s the membership, they do a great job with our chapters.

Steve Harris:

They have a Comcast ambassador program where they assign individuals to SCTE chapters across the country to get folks involved in SCTE, and get involved in the society. One thing when you’re in society versus taking a training course, a society there’s so many components networking and membership and all that. We work very closely with Comcast, making sure that the workforce has hands-on. We did a huge investment in virtual network simulations for folks that do all online training, but we also have a huge investment in in-person boot camps, where we go out and we teach people, how do you splice fiber, what are the wifi metrics needed to perform a wifi install or troubleshooting and we have many, many folks from Comcast that sit on CableLabs specification, working groups, as well as SCTE antsy, accredited standards working groups, driving the evolution of technology and standards and specifications.

Learning Standards and Certifications for the broadband workforce, useful or not?

Pete Pizzutillo:

You mentioned a lot there, but I think, in terms of how do you do more with less fast, you put your finger on a couple of things, standards, and certifications, what’s the value of somebody who’s certified versus somebody who’s not certified in terms of the return on investment. Can you speak a little bit about the types of standards and certifications that you guys see are the most effective right now?

Steve Harris:

Our flagship certification, it would be the installer. We call Broadband Premise Installer. That represents a huge portion of the workforce for the operators. Having an individual that’s properly trained, not one that we send in the truck with someone else and say, “Okay, go learn that job.” That’s not a training program. What we’re able to do with the installer level, is leverage our standard best practices and deliver a technician to the industry that has all the proper skill sets and abilities. Every one of our certifications are aligned to job roles and we do job task analysis, making sure that everything that people are supposed to be doing is addressed in our certification program. When an operator has an SCTE-certified installer, they could say, “You know what? I know that’s going to be the one that performs better than folks that are not certified.” And I’ll give you a couple of examples.

Steve Harris:

One example is an operator that had a hurricane come through and ripped down most of their aerial lines. I was talking to them, that week and they said, “Hey, Steve, I wanted to let you know that the SCTE certified people are outperforming every one of my other workers.” and that was very important because they were trying to restore connectivity. As soon as we lose connectivity, it’s like electricity, we need to have it. Even larger operators, we can show SCTE-certified individuals are performing in a much higher level, so that’s one area. The other would be fiber optics. There is a mad rush for SCTE and in the U.S., as well as Latin America to get folks fiber certified. This had a great call with the state of California yesterday, and they can’t get enough fiber folks in California. We’re going to help them do that.

Steve Harris:

I would say wifi is another important area because you can’t do anything without wireless. Think about your home network or think about your business network or anywhere you go, wifi is there. Those were probably three of our focus areas right now, that the operators are really looking at. We have 13. The last one I would mention is the construction with all the influx of federal funds, there’s operators doing much more construction, so we came out with a best practice program for construction engineering.

Pete Pizzutillo:

It made tons of sense. A lot of these folks don’t work full time or they work on a contract basis. You’re going to hire somebody, a contractor that’s certified or somebody who’s not certified. Why not have the same discernment for your own people? You mentioned a couple of other things too, and I’ve been to a couple of events where some of the tier ones are presenting architectural designs and decisions, providing some data.

Pete Pizzutillo:

I think you’re right. I think being a part of society is a good way to think about it. We are a community and what I’ve really enjoyed about this community is everybody’s willingness to share. It’s going to these meetings, having lunch with somebody that just presented to get that next level of detail, or a follow-up conversation. I would suggest that, as well as certification, there’s also the informal learning of being in the middle of the ecosystem and being connected to people that have been there and done that.

Steve Harris:

I would say that for me, and for many others is this, once you’re in that society and you can get into the society for less than a hundred bucks, it’s $85 for a membership right now, and that puts you in with everybody else and you can network with like-minded individuals. If you’re a fiber optics person, or you’re an engineer that works on the outside plant, or you’re a video engineer, there are other people just like you, and you can engage with them in multiple levels. If it’s just the membership, you want to engage that way, or you want to come to Cable Tech Expo in the fall and engage, I think you hit the nail on the head. It really helps you accelerate your career when you’re in the know.

Pete Pizzutillo:

Talking to the audience, and I think we’ve hit on a lot in terms of what they’re dealing with, how do they get started What are some recommendations from you, other than becoming a member for folks to start tackling the workforce issue, the learning issues that we’ve talked about?

Steve Harris:

I will reiterate what I shared, is get involved in society and you can do that on multiple levels and with multiple time commitments. Everybody said, “Well, I don’t have enough time.” Well, to get involved, it could be reading the SCTE magazine, which highlights all the innovations that are happening in the industry. I always felt that if I understand what the industry CTOs are working on, or the industry engineers are working on, it keeps me ahead of what’s happening. You could be reading our magazine, we do monthly webinars within scte.org, that you could take advantage of. We have 60 plus chapters, and a lot of them do webinars. Even though you might belong to a chapter in New Jersey, where I’m from, you can attend any of the virtual events and they’re archived.

Steve Harris:

You can go onto our website today and consume 25 hours’ worth of fiber optics, or if you want to work on the outside plan, we have tons of content. There are so many ways to get involved, just step into society. You can participate in our standards program. Any CableLabs member has the ability to join the SCTE standards program. Many of the operators in the United States, do, they take advantage of that. Contractors, same thing. We have a vendor connect program where you can go in and look for different vendors, if you’re doing a deployment, or if you’re looking to post a job to drive some more employees your way, we have things like that. I think the other part of that question is how SCTE is working with the operators to make sure people are well educated.

Steve Harris:

To tackle these issues, you have to have a well-educated workforce. You have to have a workforce that is retained, and we talked about that early on. Job satisfaction, those are key, I would say performance indicators for making sure that you’re ready for tomorrow in the industry. I’ll mention it face to face, if you can, joining SCTE and others in the industry at a Cable Tech Expo, this is where all the innovation happens. We have a hundred plus hours of education that are available to you, and it’s in Philly this year. That’s another way to accelerate our industry forward.

Pete Pizzutillo:

Yeah, it’s in September, I believe. What I like about the content that you guys provided is that, you guys are teachers at heart. There’re so many people coming into this industry that are starting from square one, that have just been pulled into it. A lot of the content that’s available and there is a lot of content available is either pointed towards specific vendors or movements, that type of thing, but from a pure educational perspective, I think you guys do a nice job of just helping people understand the fundamentals without any point of view in there. I do invite folks to take a look at the newsletter and some of the other resources you have in there, just using your crystal ball. I was just wondering, there’s a lot happening in the next 24, 36 months, any thoughts about what society and what the industry looks like in a couple years from now?

Steve Harris:

Yeah. I’ll see how good my crystal ball is here. Well, I can tell you this, SCTE is the applied science leader for our industry, and we’re going to be a big part of the vision of the future. We are the ones that are driving that vision of the future, and now that we are with CableLabs, we can continue to drive all this innovation, research, and development. I think in the next five years, we’ll have, I believe more of the brightest minds in the U.S., driving the future of connectivity for us. We are working on the coolest things like network convergence. We’re working on fiber networks today. I expect those networks to be 10 times as faster five years from now. Now, so what we’re saying is, I got one gig or two gig network today, what we’re saying is that’s going to be 10, 20, 25, maybe even more for those access networks, wireless, multi-gigabit.

Steve Harris:

We’re going to constantly expand that. We’re already seeing folks starting to talk about wifi 7. If you just got your gateway in your house, you’re probably running wifi 6. If you haven’t touched the gateway a couple of years, you need to go visit your local store, your local provider store and upgrade. We’re doing a great job with predictive maintenance in the network. We’re actually using more software to look at the network and I think that’s going to expand as we start adopting more artificial intelligence and machine learning, and we’re doing that in a big way, lots of investment there.

Steve Harris:

We are really making sure that the networks are going to be even more reliable than they are today. Very low latency networks, networks where it’s all converged. We don’t care if I get my internet wirelessly or fiber or coax or whatever it is, it’s all going to be low, late, and sea networks and highly reliable and full of capacity. I think our networks, we’re going to be much more sustainable than they are today. We, through our energy 2020 program at SCTE, we’re very focused on energy consumption, not just at the facility level, but all through the access network, because we’re using more passive devices, which is driving down energy consumption, and then looking at devices that actually consume energy, how can we have them consume less.

Pete Pizzutillo:

That’s interesting.

Steve Harris:

Finally, I think where we are starting to move in a big way and I’ve seen this over the last couple of years is, adopting more open standards versus proprietary standards. That’s what makes the SCTE NC program so great, is because they’re open. Anybody can use them, and what’s happening on the mobility side, that’s happening in the network with more software-defined networks and open virtualization standards, open cloud standards, and with CableLabs and SCTE, we’re going to be the gateway for all these open standards in the future.

Steve Harris:

Finally, looking ahead, I think that the workforce, we are very focused and I shared earlier on as a nonprofit, we put back everything into our systems. We have the greatest learning management system out there. We have big data on the learners to really show the operators, where are those gaps? Where are those weaknesses? Where are those opportunities? So we can drive the workforce even further, making them more efficient, deliver on those priorities of the operator. You’re going to see SCTE driving those educational programs in a bigger way to make sure people have all the, not just the knowledge, but all those skills and abilities required for the future. There’s a lot there, but that’s some of my-

Pete Pizzutillo:

No, I love it. Just a couple of things that near and dear to our heart is the openness, which I think is huge, but also talking about soft define networks, so more convergence and more the hardware tech innovation, would I be curious to see is if you guys are starting to put together data scientists or people that understand how to manipulate the big data or the data coming in from these systems because I think that’s a key. Everybody seems to want that, to get to AI and machine learning and business intelligence, you need folks that are able to put their hands in all that data and make meaning out of it. It’d be interesting to see if that makes it to your agenda at some point in time.

Steve Harris:

Well, actually I’m glad you mentioned that because it is on our roadmap and we are developing it for this year. We will have a data analytics course, because to your point, we have data from every… Today we have proactive network maintenance data, we have data from the meters, we have so much data and that’s a challenge for the technician. Now, that I have all this data, how do I look at that data in a way that makes me efficient and solve the problem the first time instead of looking at the wrong number? We’re working diligently and our board of directors has asked us and tasked us with having a data analytics program this year.

Pete Pizzutillo:

That’s great. What about augmented reality? We’ve seen a couple of examples in those different trade shows in terms of, it’s pretty interesting, I just don’t know that it’s at scale yet. Is that something that you guys are looking into?

Steve Harris:

Yeah. We have an engineer working at SCTE on three-dimensional animation. Right now, we have a brand new simulation where it’s all three-dimensional. We are looking at augmented reality, we are looking at virtual reality, actually, I went through a demo of a virtual reality where I was in a bucket truck. I go up in the bucket truck, but I have the glasses on and I’m sweating.

Pete Pizzutillo:

So freaky.

Steve Harris:

We’re looking at those things, and if we can do them at the right price point, then it makes sense. If I went out and did virtual reality today, I could do it. But if I need 10, 20, or 50 of those activities, I couldn’t scale that at today’s cost. But we are moving. We went from 2D simulations to a 3D simulation, where we actually have a customer interacting with you, and so adding some augmented reality there and going to the virtual reality, that’s on our roadmap and hopefully, we’ll get there sooner, maybe in the five years, we’ll have a whole bunch of that.

Pete Pizzutillo:

I hope so too. There’s a lot going on. We’ve been speaking with Steve Harris, he’s the Executive Director of Education and Technical Sales at SCTE, a subsidiary of CableLab. Steve, thank you for unpacking that, and how can people learn more about society and the resources that you mentioned?

Steve Harris:

I think the easiest way would be to visit our website, scte.org, and there you’ll find everything on our memberships, chapters, newsletters, webinars, everything’s right there.

Pete Pizzutillo:

Great. Please take a look. Steve, thanks for joining us, and maybe we can bring you back and dig in a little bit more to some of those advances that you’re talking about. Thank you for your time.

Steve Harris:

Yeah. Thank you, appreciate it.