On Fri, 11 Dec 2020 at 14:20, Will Hargrave <[email protected]> wrote: > > In terms of our community, I deal with a lot of industry colleagues here > in the UK who are of non-British origin and I wonder if we will see > skills shortages in network engineering as they seek their fortunes > elsewhere. >
There is already a skills shortage, has been for a long time.. - manufacturers are US, Chinese, French - international infrastructure is mostly owned by state/dominant old telcos notably Asian and the old guard in EU and US - big tech is mostly US and Chinese - big tech has long used IE or NL to recruit from the UK as a stepping stone to visas abroad Those at the top of the field in the UK (like you Will), learned when the UK was still innovating, when we were a player in the development of the Internet, both in terms of domestic infrastructure (LINX, LoNAP), and with BT or C&W back when they were leaders. But nowadays, training is Cisco or Juniper courses, field work is corporate scale not core global backbone, and even the best struggle when presented with infrastructure that is of the highest scale or with problems that can't be found in a text book or Google. Sadly this is not the beginning of the demise but it likely will be a catalyst for further decline. Some investment, government programs into training, R&D, research, key worker visa program might help I guess. The Internet is not just built at the edict of a regulator or from an > ephemeral bundle of contracts; at some point someone is going to have to > go and plug in some fibres. Us. > True, but Equinix will do that for you for £100, so by itself that's not a skilled job. And unless research and decision making of global projects or research can be led here, how will you attract people or investment inward? Steve
