As 5G approaches, telcos are hunting tech workers.

Monster India CEO Sekhar Garissa said network engineers, software developers, cloud specialists, data analysts and test engineers are keen to support the deployment of 5G.

In July, according to the Monster Employment Index, published on August 8, employment in the telecom sector increased by 15% from a year ago. Garissa said that 78 percent of the job advertisements released in the telecom sector in July were for the above jobs.

India’s telecom sector currently employs around six million people. According to industry estimates, there is a huge demand-supply gap in the market for such skills.

Deval Singh, vice president and business head of TeamLease Services Ltd, estimated the gap at 28 percent at present.

Another specialist staffing firm, NLB Services, is expecting nearly 40-45% job growth in this sector in FY23. Sachin Alug, CEO, NLB Services, said the demand for mid-level employees, including those with 4-8 years of experience and strong technology skills, is high.

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“There are many new opportunities in network modernization and migration, private 5G for enterprises, IoT, augmented reality, virtual reality, network infrastructure and network security,” he said.

A telecom executive, requesting anonymity, said network engineers and other technology-related roles are needed by telcos to reconfigure networks to deploy 5G. This is because firstly, telcos use the new technology for backward compatibility with many existing 4G infrastructures in their 5G networks.

“In the stand-alone (NSA) format, when the RAN (radio access network) part upgrades to 5G, the core LTE remains, but in stand-alone (SA), both the RAN and the core have to upgrade to 5G,” said Charu Paliwal. A telecom analyst at Counterpoint Research said hiring will grow as OpenRAN enters the fray.

OpenRAN is a relatively new technology, which allows telcos to rely more heavily on software and use tools from multiple vendors to deploy networks. Globally, companies like Dish Network of America and Japan’s Rakuten Mobile are banking on this technology, as are India’s Reliance Jio and others.

The technology allows telcos to deploy more artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the telecom network, especially for maintenance.

The Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing are other use cases that require skilled technology workers.

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