Most telecoms managers have a rough sense that their team has knowledge gaps, but turning that instinct into clear, actionable insight is often the challenge. Without reliable data, it’s difficult to quantify those gaps, prioritise them, or build targeted training plans that deliver real impact.
This guide outlines five practical steps to help you identify, measure, and address skills gaps with confidence.
Telecoms is an extremely complex technical environment. Engineers are professional problem-solvers they're adept at working around gaps in their knowledge, finding workarounds, and moving projects forward without flagging what they don't fully understand. That makes skills gaps uniquely difficult to surface in this industry
The result can be a slow, invisible erosion of team capability with projects taking longer than they should. PwCs recent dedicated telecoms talent report: PwC's global telecoms talent research identifies the skills gap as one of the two defining workforce challenges facing operators worldwide, with many organisations lacking the institutional capabilities to modernise and work at the pace of new technologies.
The future of telcos relies upon talent | PwC
Before you can identify a skills gap, you need to benchmark your teams. What level of knowledge should an engineer in your field have and in which technologies? 5G, 4G, Open RAN etc.
This step can be where the process breaks down. Without a defined benchmark, it is easy to condense experience with current knowledge but in an industry where the technology changes with every 3GPP release (around every 12-18 months), the two are not the same thing. An engineer with ten years of telecoms experience may have deep 4G expertise and significant gaps in 5G SA. Without a benchmark to assess against, that gap remains invisible.
Start by mapping your team's roles:
This gives you a skills matrix, even a rough one, that you can then validate against actual assessment data.
Asking engineers to self-assess their knowledge is well-intentioned but may not give you the accuracy you need to make confident training decisions. Without an objective measure, you're relying on perception rather than performance. You need the data.
This is exactly what NetXpert is built for. Mpirical's assessment platform gives managers access to expert-curated questions across 2G through 5G, AI, Cloud, Security, and Network Fundamentals, designed by the same trainer team that delivers Mpirical's courses to organisations globally.
Managers can build custom assessments in minutes: choose the technology area, set the difficulty level and apply a course filter. For organisations that need more tailored questions, managers can also create assessments using their own questions making it more bespoke to the organisation. Results are available immediately, with individual performance data and team-level insights surfaced automatically.
Using the assessments across the team means you are able to spot patterns. Things to look for:
These patterns are invisible if you rely on project performance or anecdotal feedback. They're clear when you have structured assessment data.
From the assessment data you can now start to build a training plan that is specific, measurable, and efficient. The NetXpert platform doesn't just identify gaps, it automatically generates recommended courses based on each individual's assessment results, drawing from Mpirical's catalogue of expert telecoms content.
That means the process from assessment to training plan is fast. And because the recommendations are data-driven, you eliminate the risk of putting engineers through material they already know.
Skills development is not a one-time project. The technology landscape in telecoms is moving too fast for a single training plan and as investments in standalone 5G continue to grow and the industries interested in Fixed Wireless Access and Non-Terrestrial Networks expands, the skills required to operate are evolving with them AI-native network architectures are being deployed by major operators right now.
Building a regular cadence of assessments quarterly or bi-annually, gives you a live picture of your team's capability trajectory, not just a snapshot. It also allows you to demonstrate ROI on training investment to leadership: before and after assessment scores that show measurable capability improvement.
Telecommunications managers who build this process into their team management cycle stop reacting to skills gaps and start anticipating them.
Ready to find out where your team’s skills gap is? Request a demo of NetXpert below...