As the industry gets ready for the broad use of Open RAN technologies, a key challenge is the lack of telecoms professionals with the right skills and experience, writes Anna Ribeiro. Running Open RAN technologies demands more than just technical compatibility. It often requires a workforce skilled in agile practices to speed up engineering and innovation. In addition, data engineering is needed to create intelligent systems. Cloud knowledge is crucial for building and testing solutions. Product management plays a key role in guiding development and DevOps skills help increase automation and efficiency.
Without skilled talent, Open RAN could remain in the realm of the blueprint and fail to move to its deployment phase.
According to a recent report by STL Partners, almost 70% of telcos agree that in-house skills are one of the top three obstacles to the rollout of Open RAN. McKinsey supports this, also recognising that about 70% of the world’s telcos lack the skills required for software innovation. Agile workflows, cloud orchestration and cross-functional product development are no longer niche competencies but are recognised more as core requirements.
While players like Mavenir, Rakuten Symphony and Parallel Wireless are making progress on modular, pluggable elements, the real bottleneck is not technology, but the humans who use and maintain it.
The stakes are high
While Open RAN promises such as vendor diversity, increased cost-efficiency and accelerated innovation are appealing, these won’t become reality unless the telecoms operators focus on building a new workforce. Telcos need to recalibrate how they will manage their human capital, moving beyond retraining existing workforce to redesign hiring models, organisational structures and career frameworks around software‑centric, agile and automation-oriented mindsets. A skills-first approach is no longer optional, but more of an essential requirement.
STL Partners highlights a stark difference as telcos remain six years behind hyperscalers in strategic technology competencies like software, cloud, AI and innovation. Only 14% of telco roles are in future-skills categories compared to 19% at tech firms. It is therefore critical for operators to scale software and cloud roles aggressively to keep up with the required level of engineering.
According to an Eightfold AI study via PeopleMatters, a third of traditional network engineering roles don’t have future-ready skills needed to support innovations like Open RAN, edge and 5G. Thus, upskilling must involve clear career transition paths from infrastructure roles into roles such as cloud engineers, cybersecurity and performance engineering.
From monoliths to modular as skills shortage hits hard
Traditional RAN systems were vertically integrated. One vendor handled hardware, software, support and updates. Engineers knew what to expect. But Open RAN flips that model on its head demanding system integration, continuous software updates, orchestration and real-time troubleshooting across vendors.
Dell’Oro Group forecast that Open RAN will account for more than 25% of total RAN revenues by 2028, with cloud RAN expected to command 20% to 25 % and multi-vendor Open RAN under 10%. The firm highlights that North America will lead adoption, with Europe also gaining significant traction by the end of the period.
While Dell’Oro doesn’t specify a percentage-based talent shortage, the firm emphasises that deploying Open RAN will require ‘more virtualisation, intelligence, automation and open infrastructure,’ signaling that network operators must develop new skills in areas like cloud-native orchestration, CI/CD, AI-driven network control and O‑RAN RIC innovation. Without these agile, software-centric capabilities, deployment risks slowdowns and underperformance.
Agile telecoms means culture change not just coding
Most telecoms organisations are still structured around siloed domains such as core, access, transport, and security, with rigid handoffs and waterfall-style delivery. That doesn’t work in the Open RAN world. Agile telecoms operations, modeled after software companies, focus on rapid iteration, cross-functional squads and continuous integration and testing.
Rakuten Mobile, one of the world’s most aggressive adopters of Open RAN, built its network using principles borrowed from web-scale cloud companies. CTO Tareq Amin emphasised that success with Open RAN hinges not just on technology, but on the right organisation, culture and skills.
Dell Technologies said that this year CSPs are moving from experimentation to implementation, with increased investment in open network initiatives, as less than half of CSPs have deployed a 5G standalone core and fewer than 25% have adopted Open RAN. Though, prevailing gaps cover capital and operational cost pressures, fragmented vendor ecosystem, skill shortages and ongoing security concerns, highlighting the complexity of scaling open network transformation across the industry.
Global variations and workforce innovation
While the challenge is global, the response is not uniform. Across regions, vendors and operators are partnering with academia and industry to build an agile, software-centric telecoms workforce that Open RAN requires.
Rakuten Symphony partnered with the Asia Open RAN Academy (AORA) to deliver university-level Open RAN curriculum across the Philippines and Indo‑Pacific. These courses aim to upskill local telecom professionals on Open RAN deployment and interoperability through a structured learning hub
In Europe, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica and Vodafone joined forces to demand vendor-neutral skill certifications and co-develop industry-wide training programmes.
Vodafone teamed up with Nokia to co-develop Open RAN systems targeting at least 30% network coverage in Europe by 2030, alongside establishing a dedicated R&D and digital skills hub in Málaga to foster talent and interoperability testing across providers and vendors.
Vendor-led training and open source momentum
Vendors are trying to close the skills gap as well. Ericsson and Intel are accelerating Open RAN innovation through their Tech Hub, particularly around cloud RAN, AI development and edge‑based RIC inference workloads, while VMware Telco Cloud Automation, launched in 2024, has become integral to CSP transformation strategy and comes with training support and certified deployment ecosystem
Open-source platforms like the O‑RAN Software Community are emerging essential training grounds, offering engineers practical, hands-on experience while accelerating development. Yet most CSPs still have not integrated open-source participation into their workforce development strategies.
Workforce as infrastructure
While progress is uneven, many telcos still try to retrofit legacy teams into agile models without changing incentives or structure. Others outsource Open RAN deployments entirely, risking another generation of vendor lock-in under a different label.
McKinsey warns of a deeper transformation underway highlighting a deeper shift from vertical ownership to horizontal orchestration. Telcos must start thinking like software companies, building small, autonomous teams that own outcomes, not just features. That, however, means hiring differently, rewarding differently and leading differently.
The race for Open RAN is less about technology and more about talent. Operators that invest in agile, cross-functional teams will turn Open RAN from a theoretical architecture into a competitive advantage. Human capital, not hardware, is now the critical infrastructure.
Anna Ribeiro