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Our people are the most valuable resource in the aerial OSP industry. Communication services wouldn’t be possible without the folks collecting data in the field, calling make ready in the back office, or safely building out new pole attachments.
Those people are in high demand. The Fiber Broadband Association released a study in July about the telecom job market growth as a result of new funding. Based on their research, the industry needs an additional 58,000 construction and technician workers to complete the planned work.
We know that BEAD is going to create a surge of new work, but this round of funding is just one initiative in a much longer list of catalysts that have been driving up the industry. Internet for All, RDOF, 5G, the Internet of Things… it all increases the push for faster, better services.
To bring those services to communities and families, we need more people.
Wanted: OSP Experts
Meeting the rate of demand within the industry means having enough staff to take on new work. Opportunities to grow are great, but taking advantage of those opportunities requires training new staff to become experts.
At Katapult, we’ve always focused on growing experts instead of headhunting for the most experienced in the industry—our designers started out as farmers, camp staff, and salesmen.
Obstacles to OSP
Over the years we’ve learned that the training process for new designers has its own challenges:
Hands-on Training
OSP demands hands-on learning and training. Growing your team requires repetition and exposure, combined with plenty of oversight from experienced designers to help give feedback and answer questions. While OSP design is a lot of things, simple or mindless isn’t one of them. The cutting-edge, constantly evolving nature of our industry makes it impossible to teach OSP from a textbook.
Training newbies takes a huge level of investment. You’re often taking some of your best designers out of play to help provide feedback for new staff. Balancing the important versus the urgent isn’t easy, especially when winning this week could mean losing next week (or next year).
The Why
One of the hardest and most important parts of training is explaining the context, the “why” behind the “what”. OSP deals with deceptively difficult topics, like catenaries and loading physics. Explaining the context without overwhelming your team is a difficult balance to strike. It’s easier and faster to fix someone’s errors than it is to explain their mistakes and let them find the solution themselves. The latter method takes a lot longer but yields better results.
Plus, an excellent OSP designer has to have some unique traits and stamina. When looking for new team members, we like to make sure they’re okay looking at screens for 8 hours a day and they’re able to stay dialed in and safety-conscious. They need to be able to solve complex problems and handle the sometimes-repetitive aspects of OSP design.
While it’s often a solitary job, there’s a really important team aspect too—do they communicate well? Are they willing to ask for advice and look for help? Can they admit when they don’t know something?
The hardest part of hiring really comes down to finding the right person and making sure they’re in the right role. Even the obstacles above are less painful when you have the right people.
Onboarding OSP Designers
It’s not hard to see why OSP experts are in high demand (and expensive)—they’re dealing with highly technical work and leveraging years of experience to keep communities safe.
But as funding drives up the need for more workers, and retirement and natural attrition continue to deplete the OSP all-stars, effective and efficient training is becoming more and more important. We need staff to bring reliable utilities to people, and we need to start training them quickly.
By default, Katapult Pro is a scalable platform with low barriers to entry, so even the newest staff can start providing value quickly. Over the years, we’ve found some helpful processes and tips for onboarding and training new designers to help them get up to speed quickly:
Cover all the basics. Starting with safety, software, and other fundamentals set a solid foundation for team members just starting out in overheard OSP.
Provide plenty of feedback. New designers learn faster when they work closely with more experienced team members who can give feedback and answer questions as they come up.
Trust the process. Make ready engineering is an art, not a science, and becoming fluent will take time, repetition, and experience dealing with gnarly poles.
Overhead OSP isn’t simple, but over the years we’ve seen people with all types of backgrounds turn into experts in outside plant design. We’re working on building an intensive OSP boot camp based out of our headquarters to help train new staff to meet the rising demands for designers.
Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in learning more about our OSP Office Apprenticeship, or training experts in general, reach out to us at hello@katapultengineering.com!
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