With Sprint and T-Mobile US accelerating their LTE rollouts while AT&T and Verizon complete theirs, demand for cell tower climbers and technicians has never been greater. “Smaller markets with 100,000 – 300,000 population are going to be the hotbeds for 2014,” said Ron Deese, founder of telecom and wireless staffing agency TelForce Group. LTE has already come to the nation’s biggest cities, as well as many of the “tier two” urban areas with 300,000 – 1,00,000 residents. Now tower crews are needed to maintain those sites, and to build out sites in the smaller cities.
“I have only seen one market as fluid as it is today and that was 1996-2001, during the dot.com/CLEC expansion,” said Deese. “I think 2014 is going to far exceed that. … Crown Castle has very heavy hiring needs throughout 2014. They’re actually wrapping up their T-Mobile asset acquisition and now taking on the AT&T tower acquisition.”
Tower companies are expected to hire aggressively next year, as are the professional services firms that contract with the carriers to complete network builds. MasTec Network Solutions plans to hire roughly 1,000 tower climbers over the next year, many of whom will be deployed in the eastern and northeastern parts of the country. The company’s current postings on Towercrews.net include positions in Maryland, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.
Georgia’s BlueStream Professional Services contracts with carriers to perform network design and engineering, site acquisition services, logistics (through KGP Logistics) and site construction and maintenance. The company hopes to grow from 2,000 to 3,000 employees in the next six to eight months, and said that most of those new hires will be tower climbers for jobs in the middle part of the country. “Recruiting is challenging,” said Trevor Putrah, president of BlueStream and KGP, adding that BlueStream’s goal is not to take climbers from other companies but to find new recruits and train them to climb.
But knowing how to climb a tower is not the only skill tower technicians need in today’s market. As networks become more complex, basic computer and software skills are often required of tower climbers. “Those folks are going to have to improve on their soft skills dramatically,” said Deese. “As the towers go 4G, the electronics are being placed on top of the tower at the antennas, where you have fiber jumpers connecting those antennas. Construction guys are going to have to have more soft skills to do your soft tasks and then do your maintenance.”
Deese said the basic requirements of a tower technician today are likely to include the ability to label a photo and upload it into a software program. Contractors use a variety of different programs, so an individual who is comfortable with software and learns quickly has an advantage.
Image source: National Association of Tower Erectors
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