The job market is at its most competitive, with workers now placing more emphasis on job satisfaction, work-life balance, well-being and flexibility than ever before.
The unified communications space is not immune to these challenges, especially with UC platforms now essential to keeping businesses running in the age of hybrid working. UC’s talented engineers are highly sought after.
Research conducted by Akkadian Labs found that there are 23,000 UC engineer vacancies worldwide on LinkedIn, with 6,000 vacancies on job website Indeed.
What does this tell us? This means that UC engineers have many opportunities to move on if they are unhappy in their current roles.
There are many elements to consider when thinking about an employee’s happiness – everything from culture to pay – but a key part of this happiness is who they really are. do at work on a daily basis.
“UC engineers do not want to do the constant, repetitive, manual work required to maintain movements, additions, changes and deletions,” 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 doesn’t meet the workload for the UC engineer, and it’s not giving them broad strategic projects; that’s just repeating.
“If you don’t remove the 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 UC engineers to work on more complex and exciting projects. This effectively saves the company money because its engineers can spend their time on strategic tasks that really matter.
Levy emphasized bulk provisioning as an encapsulating point. Onboarding 50 new people to multiple UC applications typically takes one UC engineer hours to complete. With bulk provisioning, they can upload a CSV file to Akkadian Provisioning Manager and complete the task in 10 minutes. Provisioning Manager also has native integrations with Microsoft Active directory and ServiceNow to do this automatically — across multiple UC platforms.
From a business perspective, using a service management platform means that the necessary knowledge is stored within a system. The necessary workflows and quirks of countless manual processes must be captured in work templates, not in the mind of a UC engineer.
Ultimately, engineers who see their employer investing in their success feel valued and are more likely to apply for one of the 23,000 roles no doubt flashing across their LinkedIn feed.
“The engineer who feels like the company is investing in them and exposing them to new technology will feel like the company cares about them,” Levy added.
“They won’t be as quick to leave when the next offer comes.”