SAN DIEGO – ATX Networks, a global leader in broadband access and media distribution solutions, today unveiled its Field Personnel Replenishment Program (FPRP), a cable technician training initiative spearheaded by the company's recently expanded professional services organization.

The program's mission is to work with community colleges and other vocational training centers to supply the cable industry with a steady flow of qualified field technicians necessary to overcome severe labor shortages and assist MSOs in the completion of their ambitious HFC evolution projects. The ATX-developed curriculum, which adds another four to eight weeks of cable-specific training onto an already intensive electrical lineworker training program, produces graduates with a ready-to-hire skillset, including a commercial driver's license, the ability to operate a bucket truck, proficiency in coax and fiber splicing, meter reading and other skills needed to upgrade and maintain cable plants.

The labor pool of skilled technicians has been shrinking for the past several years. Many of the workers cable operators hired roughly two decades ago, coinciding with their last major network expansion, have retired, taking with them the knowledge required to extend the bandwidth and speed of existing HFC networks. ATX's FPRP initiative was created to alleviate existing resource constraints by pumping a new generation of skilled technicians into the workforce as the broadband industry enters another expansion cycle.

The depletion of the existing workforce poses a significant challenge to cable operators, many of which have been pressed into accelerating plant upgrades in the face of unprecedented challenges from fiber overbuilders and FTTH service providers recently buoyed by a massive wave of public funding for broadband infrastructure expansion. MSOs will need hundreds, if not thousands, of new workers to ensure cable operators can upgrade their networks fast enough to go head-to-head with fiber operators and other competitors over the next decade or longer.

Among ATX's initial FPRP partners is Cape Fear Community College (CFCC), a North Carolina educational facility with a mission to provide high-quality, dynamic, innovative, educational, cultural, training and workforce development opportunities to individuals and local businesses and industries. ATX's FPRP presents graduates of CFCC's lineworker training program with the opportunity to take an additional, ATX-designed, training course that will augment their education with cable-specific job skills.

The goal of the FPRP is to place graduates with cable operators, third-party contractors that partner with ATX or directly with ATX. ATX is currently working to expand the FPRP to additional colleges and vocational facilities, with the objective of finding educational partners across the United States to create and feed a much-needed pipeline of skilled cable technicians.

Read the full announcement here.

ATX Networks