The employment market is at its most competitive, with workers now placing greater emphasis on job satisfaction, work-life balance, well-being and flexibility than ever before.
The unified communications space is not immune to these challenges, particularly with UC platforms now crucial to keeping businesses running in the age of hybrid working. Talented UC engineers are highly sought after.
Research conducted by Akkadian Labs found there to be 23,000 UC engineer vacancies globally on LinkedIn, with 6,000 vacancies on job website Indeed.
What does this tell us? It means that UC engineers have plenty of opportunities to move on if they’re unhappy in their current roles.
There are many elements to consider when thinking about an employee’s happiness – everything from culture to salary – but a core component of this happiness will be what they actually do at work on a day-today basis.
“UC engineers don’t want to be doing ongoing, repetitive, manual work that is necessary to maintain moves, adds, changes and deletes,” according to David Levy, Director of Marketing at Akkadian Labs.
“People are hired and need to be onboarded to UC platforms, people leave and need to be offboarded, people move offices… it’s not fulfilling work for the UC engineer, and it doesn’t give them broad strategic projects; it’s the same thing over and over again.
“If you don’t take away that repetitive work, they won’t be happy and they’ll look for another job.”
Service management providers like Akkadian Labs do just that: they automate simple, manual tasks like creating accounts and assigning phone numbers, freeing up UC engineers to work on more complex and exciting projects. This effectively saves a company money because its engineers can spend their time on strategic tasks that really matter.
Levy highlighted bulk provisioning as encapsulating this point. Onboarding 50 new people into multiple UC applications would typically take a UC engineer hours to complete. With bulk provisioning, they can upload a CSV file into Akkadian Provisioning Manager and complete the task in 10 minutes. Provisioning Manager also has native integrations with Microsoft Active directory and ServiceNow so it can even do this automatically — across multiple UC platforms.
From the business’ perspective, using a service management platform means the required knowledge is stored within a system. The necessary workflows and quirks of countless manual processes should be captured in job templates, not in the mind of a UC engineer This makes it easier for businesses when employees inevitably leave, and new starters have to be trained.
Ultimately, engineers that see their employer investing in their success will feel valued and less likely to apply for one of the 23,000 roles undoubtedly flashing up in their LinkedIn feed.
“The engineer who feels like the company is investing in them and exposing them to new technology is going to feel like the company cares about them,” Levy added.
“They won’t be as quick to leave when the next offer comes around.”
