The second full day of the South Wireless Summit in Nashville opened Wednesday morning with a sneak-peek at the new NATE “Small Cell Deployment” Climber Connection video that will be released soon. Kimberly Curley, Workforce Development, WIA, followed by delivering the keynote address, emphasizing the need for training and educating our workforce to meet demand for 5G. Curley said WIA is providing teaching opportunities through the ConnectX conference, TIRAP and TEC courses.
Curley’s said it was not only important to train our workforce, but necessary. Due to aging baby boomers, significant succession plans need to be in place.
Janet Gill of Vogue Towers moderated the Tower Panel with Allan Tantillo, Vice President, Vertical Bridge, Ron Bizick, CEO, Tarpon Towers, John Stevens, CEO, Infinigy, Jeff Langdon, Vice President, Tillman Infrastructure and Danny Agresta, President, APC Towers. The panel discussed “Building the foundation for a 5G future” and the changes that the tower industry has seen in the past decade, as well as the challenges and opportunities they expect to see in the future.
The group consensus was that small cells, while a hot topic, will not replace macro sites for the foreseeable future. According to Tantillo, “This is a great time to be on the infrastructure side” and cited increased carrier needs. Langdon seemed to agree and said “this is an evolving business, it never gets stale. Those of us on the infrastructure side have been busy, fairly consistently for years and years.”
The Women’s Wireless Leadership Forum (WWLF) panel discussed how we reach 5G in a way that is inclusive to all types of workers in the workplace?’ Carolyn Hardwick, Senior Director, KGPCo., Deborah Taylor Tate, Director, TN Supreme Court Administrative Office of the Courts, Tom Marciano, Chief Revenue Office, InRange, Kara Silbert, Director of Human Capital, NB+C and Ashlee Davis, Global Diversity & Inclusion Strategist, Cargill, made up the panel moderated by Carrie Charles, CEO, Broadstaff.
Charles said decreasing turnover can be solved by creating an inclusive and diverse environment in the workplace.
“Fewer CEOS are women, than are named David,” she said. “Racially diverse teams outperform non diverse ones by 35 percent, and 57 percent of employees think their companies should be more diverse.” Charles said, because of this, “Diversity and inclusion is not just a good idea, it is imperative for the success of our workforce in the future.” Ashlee Davis encouraged the audience to figure out where their own unconscious or implicit biases lie so that they can face them head on.
“Where are you in your own bias journey?” Davis said. “The worst thing you can do is to do nothing. Every one of us is carrying a bias with us that is keeping us from being greater than we are right now.”
The panel concluded that companies are going to have to step outside comfort zones and encouraged looking to other industries to find workers for the job. With poaching of employees being an industry-wide problem, the panel was in agreement that investing in an employee’s time and training and making them an inclusive part of the company’s growth, results in retention.
By Cara Aston for Inside Towers
March 21, 2019
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