Knowledge And Skills Influencing The Telecommunication And It Careers

INTRODUCTION

Today, telecommunication has becomes one of the most important things for people’s everyday life. With supports of new innovations and technology developments (such as microprocessors, computers, etc.) make the telecommunication and information technologies (IT) have continuously developed. The values of the Telecommunication and IT markets have grown very fast year by year. Therefore, the telecommunication and IT industries are considered as one of the best opportunity for both investment and career.

Telecommunication and IT jobs have great opportunities all over the world. The jobs also have an interesting salary (see Table II, Appendix I) which interest people (especially, student) to study about technologies that are used to do the Telecommunication and IT jobs. However, almost all universities in Thailand provide Telecommunication and IT courses. But the course from different university have different course syllabus and the syllabus must be simultaneously developed to mach up with the technology developments that make the graduated student from those universities would be desired by the Telecommunication and IT companies. Therefore, the student should know, what are the important skills and knowledge considered by those employers? This would help those universities and technology institutes develop their course syllabus and also help student to select the course and university and then have great career after they have graduated.

This is an exploratory research and its objectives are to answer the question above and try to find out important qualifications that make a candidate would be desired by the Top Telecommunication and IT companies. The data is collected from managers of the Top Telecommunication and IT companies by using a questionnaire (see Appendix II) and other resources such as literatures, reviews, and reports from believable sources. The data would be analyzed by matching the managers’ opinions and the literature review, and then would be summarized. The result is expected to be a guideline for the must considered contents or subjects of Telecommunication and IT study and technical trainings.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Most of the literatures are mentioned that the Telecommunication and IT market is the most interesting market, especially in America and Asia. The market is growing continuously from years to years with the help of new innovation and technology development. Therefore, the number of employees is increased in order to support the industrial growth. The ZDnet Asia reported at the end of the year 2006 that the average year-on-year revenue growth over 4 years of almost all leading telecommunication and IT firms in Asia are around 10 to 15 percent indicate that the industry still has opportunity for growing in the year 2007.

The new employees are expected to ready-to-work (have experience or can use the programs well) and the thousands of IT students have graduated every year also leads to a tough competition in telecommunication and IT careers. Therefore, personal skill improvement and technical trainings have become the important factors to create competitiveness to succeed.

However, the general contents taught in the universities or institutes become insufficient for student to use only that knowledge and skills to the success in telecommunication and IT careers after they have graduated. Therefore, the technical trainings (e.g. programming, database) also become more and more important to indicate the knowledge and skills of those IT employees which they normally have to apply for the training themselves. However, the costs of technical training are very high, especially the database and network programs (see Table I, Appendix I). So, it would be good both student and the university to provide such the trainings in-house by the expert of each program or looking for outsourcers to setup the trainings.

In order to arrange or participate the appropriate training, we should realize the important knowledge and skills that are considered by the managers of those telecommunication and IT firms, what are the knowledge and skills the firm need. This would also help to save both times and costs spent to trainings.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This research is an Exploratory Research that focused on the knowledge and skills that influencing the decision to hire a candidate of Telecommunication and IT companies. The study also focused sub-contents of each independent variable (e.g. programs concerned). The samples of this study are managers of Telecommunication and IT companies which mostly take care of engineering, maintenance, service, innovation department of the companies. After reviewed some literatures concerning, I have designed a research framework and methodology as figure below

RESEARCH FRAMEWORK

Other factors (such as experience and personality) would be considered as environmental factors which support the managers’ decision. The data would be analyzed and then be summarized as pie charts of the desirable knowledge and skills.

DATA ANALYSIS

After received the raw data, it was categorized into 3 categories which are knowledge, skills, and personality. For knowledge and skills, the analysis also considered the programs used to do a certain job. Following pie and bar charts represent analyzed data of each category.

SUMMARY

From the results shown in charts above, the important factors of those categories are summarized as below;

1. Knowledge

• Internet

• Networking

• Database

• Programming

2. Computer skills (Networking and Database programs)

• MySQL

• Cisco

• Oracle

3. Computer skills (Common programs)

• WINDOWS

• MS Office

4. Personalities