The Upcoming 5G/MEC Skills Shortage and Aarna ONAP Training

5G and multi-access edge computing (MEC) will require  a number of brand new skills. There simply aren't enough people you can hire or outsource to, and so CSPs will have to cultivate some of these new skills in-house. Stack disaggregation will put further burden on this critical need.  2019 is the right time to start gaining these skills. If you wait too long, you are the risk of not having enough in-house expertise to implement 5G and MEC!

Examples of news skills needed are as follows.

Non-functional skills

• Agile programming  
• DevOps and CI/CD  
• API/CLI instead of GUI  
• Modeling languages — TOSCA, Heat, YAML etc.  
• Plan/build ops. mentality instead of break/fix  
• Functional testing of NFV/SDN stack  
• Performance testing NFV/SDN stack

General functional skills

• SDN and NFV basics  
• MEC basics  
• Using OpenStack, Kubernetes (k8s), SDN controllers e.g. ODL or Tungsten Fabric  
• Operating OpenStack, k8s, and SDN controllers  
• Using big data stacks  
• Modern monitoring techniques  
• AI/ML  
• Hypervisors (vSphere or KVM) and  containers  
• Hardware acceleration/Enhanced Platform Awareness (EPA)

Specialized functional skills

• Using ONAP/OSM  
• Operating ONAP/OSM  
• New VNFs such as vRAN, SD-WAN, NGFW etc.

There is no one-stop shop to acquire these skills. Nor does any one individual need to know all aspects.

Our courses fill a small aspect of the above list (ONAP, OPNFV that covers testing, and NFV101). If these are gaps you are looking to fill, consider taking one of our courses. We have public classes coming up in Berlin in late Feb (ONAP Bootcamp II) and then in San Jose in early April just before ONS (ONAP Bootcamp, ONAP+AI/ML intro). Or you can request an onsite private training just for your company employees.