When things didn t look good for advancement in that direction, he took a position at Tellabs as a senior applications engineer, working with cable telephony devices. My ambitions conflicted with the daily operations of the cable company. The general state of the economy is adding to the burden. Cable execs cite unemployment rates of 2 to 3 percent in their respective markets. We have to find more innovative ways to recruit.
People actually have jobs.
This means that cable companies, even the overbuilders, sometimes find themselves hiring people who don t have the necessary skill set to do the job. There are a fair number of people who know a little bit, but not a lot of people who can hit the ground running. Any skill sets that don t come with the employee means training. And training can be a double-edged sword. Training programs allow cable companies to build teams of employees skilled in many of the convergent technologies.