Is it hard to get a job in telecom industry in Malaysia?
I came from the technical part of this industry, so I will try to explain the telecom industry situation based on the engineering perspective. First, i will explain why it is hard to land a job in telecom and then what can be done in order to increase the chances to get the job.
There are many reasons why fresh graduates or experienced engineer find it hard to get a job in telecom. There are times when telecom are booming which creates a lot of jobs and there are times where no job can be found and one has to be patient and always keep on the lookout for opportunities. Furthermore in some countries, telecom jobs are rather limited since it depends on the scale of the network infrastructure and the population of the country as well. The more people are using it, the more it requires to expand the infrastructure. In Malaysia, the country is rather small, therefore the job opportunities are rather limited. Countries that have plenty of telecom jobs are countries where the telecom vendors (ericsson, huawei, nokia, zte, etc. ) set up their research centers. These countries requires a lot of engineers and they have the opportunity to learn highly technical skill and stay up to date with the latest telecom technologies.
As for other countries such as Malaysia, the nature of telecom work may be in the form of service delivery projects for telecom vendors and their subcontractors ( telecom vendors sub their project to these companies ) . Apart from that, several jobs can be found in MNOs (Maxis, Celcom, Digi) and in the telecom regulatory (MCMC) as well but the positions available are limited which requires applicants to compete with many other applicants to fill as little as one position. This situation happens when there are no new projects are running. But there could be a lot of opportunities when there is a big project until to some extend there isn’t enough manpower to run it. For example, in 2011, Digi invested a large sum of money to swap their 2G and 3G networks to ZTE equipment. At that time, there were hundreds of openings for engineer role in ZTE. Those were the good old days. Made a lot of friends, learned new things. Therefore, there are opportunities and one needs to stay alert on the latest telecoms news.
As I have mentioned ealier, telecom industry is a niche industry where only the ones who have worked in this industry knows about this industry. In other words, someone who have never worked in telecom industry won’t have the slightest idea about what telecom engineers do.
Therefore fresh graduates cannot burst into these profession easily because most of the things that they learned in the university cannot be applied into the job that they are applying. In order to increase the chances, one could focus his/her final year project on telecom research topics such as RF analysis, antenna design, optical performance analysis. Besides that, due to advancement in virtualization technology, one can simulate the whole LTE network by using desktop PC, SDR card, a sim card and a LTE smartphone. These options could boost the chances to get a job in telecom.
Furthermore, it is easier to land a job with subcontractors since they normally hire fresh graduates because the nature of the work is more to installation and deployment which gives an opportunity for fresh graduates to learn the fundamentals of telecom technology before they can move up the career ladder into working with telecom vendors and MNOs. On top of that, one should always put him/herself in hiring manager’s shoes and think why they should hire him/her and not someone else.