Fast-paced telcos luring away IT talent

By PETER GRIFFIN

Experienced IT workers are heading in numbers for the telecoms industry as their skills draw greater demand and the IT industry's allure dims.

The departure of IT industry heavyweight Russell Hewitt, who steps down as the head of Hewlett-Packard to take a senior role at Vodafone Australia, is only one of several high-profile defections to telecoms in the past two years.

Only last week Vodafone New Zealand also picked up Mark Giles, the managing director of French equipment maker Alcatel. A former IBM man, he will now lead Vodafone's consumer division.

A host of others have left high-level IT jobs for operational roles at telcos.

Vodafone was headed by Tim Miles for more than two years. He and Russell Stanners both came from Unisys and have extensive experience in the IT industry. Nigel Blair and Paul Morrison, both formerly at Computerland, also hold senior jobs at Vodafone. Last year, Vodafone hired David Crown, former head of web developer Terabyte, as general manager for business solutions.

TelstraClear has its share of IT to telco converts. Head of customer operations, Connell Graham, who joined TelstraClear early last year, was previously at Unisys, Datacom and Fujitsu.

TelstraClear's head of customer marketing, Peter Thompson, headed Data General for nine years before joining Telecom and then moving on to TelstraClear. Head of business sales, Sunil Joshi, also joined TelstraClear last year, moving from IBM Australia.

Telecom's executive team has a key IT figure in Mark Ratcliffe, and the lower ranks are full of former pure IT workers.

"There has definitely been an increase in the number of skilled IT workers required for the telco space, especially in the area of data networking," said Megan Fletcher, founder of Protocol Personnel Services, an IT recruitment firm playing increasingly in the telco space.

The convergence of voice and data meant telcos wanted to have their fair-share of experienced IT staff.

But telcos were also perceived as more exciting places to work. Vodafone in particular had seen a major shift in perception among skilled job hunters.

"They're seen as a high-flying, fast-paced technology company which has money to spend and is unstoppable. They have a similar feel to what some IT vendors had in the nineties," she said of Vodafone.

While skilled IT workers stood to be paid a similar amount in the telco industry, the prospect of working on exciting applications using leading edge technology was hugely appealing, said Richard Gladwell, founder of IT recruiter ITEC.

"Most IT companies have a push on sales, but a dollar saved is a dollar made. They're interested in cutting cost out of the business rather than selling more."

The priorities of the multinational IT companies had in many cases changed to that of facilities management, and with slower cycles of product development than that of the telecoms industry.

Moran Collard, director of Wellington headquartered Absolute IT, said the move to telcos was more noticeable at management level, where executives found it hard to expand their careers without heading overseas.

"When you get to a level of seniority you start to see the shift from IT to telcos because the options are limited [in IT]."

A preferred recruiter for Telecom's IT integration arm, Advanced Solutions, Collard said adoption of new technology in IT often lagged behind telecoms.

New Zealand's mobile operators, however, were set to build 3G networks this year ahead of many other countries and were leading the world in the roll-out of some wireless broadband technologies.

But Fletcher said the trend was not entirely one-way, a number of her candidates coming from a telco background but seeking to expand their skills into IT.

IT recruiters were well placed to cater to a telco industry hungry for IT staff. They were also confident of prospects for the year ahead.