In the MENA region, there is a major shortage of highly skilled technical manpower resources, whether for Earth station operations (24×7) or simple field service support/OB van operations, according to Riaz Lamak, GVF Lead and International Director. Lamak works with GVF towards capacity-building via mentored classroom training and certifications, network validation and bench-marking.
This can be addressed when the service providers and users get highly focused and have a genuine desire to initiate capacity-building.
“We strongly feel that if government regulatory authorities, telcos and users insist on capacity-building, as governments and key users in other parts of the world do, there will be a paradigm shift and experience change with all the stakeholders in the region. The military would also play a key role and benefit by adopting and mandating capacity-building of resources for self-reliance and resilient satellite-based communications,” he commented.
According to Lamak, all the stakeholders stand to gain in multiple ways.
“For instance, there will be a robust network and individual links, reduced and mitigated interference, high reliability, lesser field support requirements, exposure to the latest innovations in technology and so on, which lead to happy end users. This, in turn, enhances the business by way of adding capacities and terminals, as well as higher profitability. Investment in up-sizing competencies of manpower has to be an ongoing process. We are doing very focused programmes with the ITU, UN agencies and US DOD PACOM, but we see very few requests from MENA compared to Europe, the Americas, the Far East or even the Pacific islands,” he added.
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