Section 5

Many influential leaders have created what today you see as the telecommunications industry. The companies that constitute this industry employ from thousands to hundred of thousands employees, to be able to lead organizations of this magnitude you need very intelligent and visionary people. One of them is the chairman of Telefónica, César Alierta Izuel, one of the biggest mobile carriers in the world possessing a 169 millions customer base. Lowell McAdam, the president and CEO of another mobile carrier, Verizon Wireless, has brought his company to the top creating a 86 million customer base just in US. Scott Forstall, is another leader that has influenced the industry. He is the senior VP of the Iphone’s software, the platform of the device that has “changed they way people handle telecommunications”.

The organization of this industry is dived into four sectors: wired, wireless, satellite and other telecom establishments. The wired sector, that includes the phone landlines, DSL, cable TV and Internet services, is the biggest of the four sectors followed by the wireless and satellite.

According to the US Department of labor the telecommunications industry employed one million jobs in 2008. Twenty-six percent of those jobs were office and administrative support occupations, that included telephone operators, financial clerks and customer service representatives. Another twenty six percent were installation, maintenance and repair occupations. The remaining 48 percent represented sales, professional, management and business related occupations.

Even though the demand for the industry’s services is rising, a nine to ten percent decrease in jobs is expected from now to 2018. The reason of this is that as technology evolves the demand for the jobs in the industry decreases. Another cause for this decrease in jobs, in the US, is the outsourcing and offshoring plans that this industries have.

In the telecom industry the degree of competition between companies is very high and in order to remain competitive companies have to reduce their costs by using those two strategies, outsourcing and offshoring. A recent NSN APAC survey made to US telecom companies showed that 60 percent of the industry’s companies are going to implement outsourcing and offshoring in the next 12 to 18 months.

In the other hand, jobs such as installing, repairing, maintaining and customer service representatives, which tend to have the higher levels of turnovers in the industry, can not be outsourced. These jobs will be the ones with the higher demand in these upcoming years.

 In addition, the telecom industry, locally, is going to be investing in engineering mostly. According to The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics “Product design engineers or new product development engineers are in demand due to the changing demands for new technology”.