AS EARLY as today the government will announce which will be the next 20 towns to receive high-speed broadband through the government's national network.
But while the rollout of the national broadband network (NBN) is accelerating, little progress has been made in building a workforce with the technical skills to connect 10 million houses in eight years.
A special training facility in Melbourne has not been constructed yet and NBN Co has not released minimum training standards for contractors.
NBN Co will soon announce construction contracts for five mainland test sites. The contract for the national rollout has been shortlisted to 21 companies.
Tenderers will have a better chance of winning the contract if they have a skilled workforce ready to go, but there is a big gap between the number of people qualified to construct and install the network and the number needed to build it.
Recruitment firm Skilled told BusinessDay it had been asked to find employees for middle management construction roles, and was busy identifying and training workers for the lower-level roles expected to be available by mid-2011.
''We are in discussions with a number of leading contracting organisations to provide specialist staffing solutions who have been shortlisted by NBN Co … it is unclear how many resources they will require until they are successful in obtaining contracts with NBN Co,'' a Skilled spokeswoman said.
A qualified electrician or cabler could take just weeks to upgrade their skills to work on the NBN, but it could take two to three months to train someone new to the industry, said a consultant for Communications and Information Technology Training, Kevin Fothergill.
NBN Co has not yet announced whether its contractors will need additional accreditation, but high standards could be expected given its reaction to reports that a worker received an electric shock while installing cable on the Tasmanian network - NBN Co suspended work for two weeks to retrain staff.
Private contractors had started asking about training now NBN Co had issued the rollout shortlist, Mr Fothergill said yesterday.
The problem was that most qualified technicians were already employed to maintain existing fixed and mobile networks. He estimated a further 30,000 skilled workers would be needed to install the network by 2018.
The Communications Electrical and Plumbing Union has been providing resumes of former Telstra technicians to private contractors and has a database of skilled workers, according to the president of the communications division, Len Cooper. Skilled said it was looking at training options for workers who had left the industry in recent years.
To help redress the skills shortage, the federal government last May committed $16.15 million to upgrade the Energy Training Centre at GippsTAFE's Chadstone campus. The centre will train workers in underground and overhead telecommunications optical-fibre cable installation.
However, the centre will not be ready for another year.
The Victorian government has also paid for a program to train and certify 350 Victorian technicians, but this will also take 12 to 18 months.
Construction in the five test sites is expected to start soon.
