Many companies are having difficulty holding on to frontline workers as factors like low pay, inadequate job training, and big workloads have made these roles undesirable.
Telamon, a telecommunications services company headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, with locations in 12 states, plus India and Europe, experienced this with its telecommunications equipment installers.
The problem for Telamon was two-fold, Kat Gerig, its VP of HR, told HR Brew: Not only was the company having difficulty recruiting experienced talent, but it also had too many senior-level workers completing junior-level tasks. As a result, it launched its Academy Installer Program in 2021, a multi-year training curriculum structured to promote apprentices into senior roles.
Not the right mix. At Telamon, the telecommunications installers are assigned a level depending on their experience. Level one employees are entry-level, essentially trainees, while level four installers are capable of handling high-level, potentially dangerous tasks, like testing and rebooting live equipment and supervising junior workers.
While a training program for these roles had been discussed for years, nothing had come to fruition. As a result, Telamon had been hiring senior technicians to handle responsibilities junior employees should’ve been overseeing. In 2020, one year before the program launched, 82% of its technicians were level four employees.
“What was happening is they were essentially doing all of the work,” Gerig said. “Even the lower level work that technically an apprentice or a level one or a level two could have done, obviously at a better cost mix, level fours were doing. It was causing a cost challenge.”
During the pandemic and subsequent Great Resignation, it became even more difficult to recruit for these roles, Lesa Riczo, an HR manager at Telamon, said.
“The labor market tightened up so much, it became painfully hard to fill these jobs,” Riczo noted.
And the recruiting challenges weren’t likely to go away: Overall employment for telecommunications technicians is expected to decline by 3% between 2023 and 2033, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data—though the field is expected to have an average 24,600 job openings annually, to replace workers who quit or retire.
How it works. With $65,000 in state funding from Indiana, which reimburses employers that hire and retain workers to fill in-demand roles, Gerig and Riczo worked with Telamon’s operations team to develop the program.
The program is designed to last three years, though some employees take longer to become a level four, Gerig said. They start at level one and learn the daily tasks and basic responsibilities associated with the job, like how to label and organize the dozens of wires connected to various pieces of equipment, as well as what a telecommunications central office looks like.
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Every six to nine months, workers return to Indiana for training. They have to complete skills tests required for promotion to determine whether they have the knowledge around proper installation,equipment maintenance, and necessary safety precautions.
Measuring impact. Three years later, the program currently has 21 participants ranging from level one to three. The company has also achieved a more balanced ratio of junior to senior technicians: Level fours now make up 61% of its workforce.
The program’s turnover rate in the first nine months is 84%. After that period, however, it drops to just 16%. That first stat may sound worrisome as many employers are concerned about retention in the first few months, but Gerig said that Telamon expected it. In the telecommunications industry, it’s not uncommon for technicians to quit within the first one to two years, an analysis from recruitment website Zippia found.
A lot of workers also don’t fully understand what’s required of the role until they’re in it, Gerig said. For example, it involves a lot of travel, and while candidates may say they don’t have a problem being away from home and family for extended periods of time, they often feel differently once on the job.
“We can talk about what that travel is going to look like ‘til we're blue in the face, but until people get out in it and live it and experience it, you don’t really know how they’re going to either like that or not like that,” Gerig said.
While Telamon doesn’t track apprentice promotion rates, Gerig said that trainees become profitable after just two months in the program.
Overall, Gerig and Riczo are most proud that the program got off the ground. They said other leaders, including in operations, were initially skeptical, but the data that Gerig and her team regularly share with Telamon’s CEO and telecommunications president show profitability.
“We know that it’s working, so we’re proud of that,” Gerig said. “We have proven data that our profitability is better because we’ve been able to change the workforce mix. We have the right people at the right level doing the right work.”