3,205 Telstra jobs gone... and counting

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Telstra has revealed it has trimmed 3205 full-time jobs since June as it steams ahead in its multi-year cost-cutting and “simplification” plan.

The telecommunications company on Thursday revealed that 3205 full-time equivalent jobs have been cut in just six months, meaning it is already 40 per cent of the way through the net 8000 terminations it wants to achieve by 2022.

When the cuts started in June last year, Telstra had 34,600 full-time equivalent jobs.

The company’s half-year presentation showed that it’s currently concentrating on trimming management and “back-of-house” roles. There have been customer-facing job cuts but they’re directly related to customer enquiry reductions.

In the 2020 financial year, the focus will go to cutting both back-of-house and customer-facing roles. By the 2021 financial year, “simplification and automation” will allow the telco to remove even more customer-facing jobs.

The corporate restructure, dubbed Telstra2022, launched last June with the promise to cut 9,500 positions but add in 1,500 new jobs.

However, Telstra chief Andy Penn last month admitted that most of the new roles so far had gone overseas — and that the company would open an “Innovation and Capability Centre” in Bangalore, India to assist in offshoring.

“We need these capabilities now, but the fact is we cannot find in Australia enough of the skills, like software engineers, that we need on the scale that we need them,” he said.

“Why? There simply are not enough of them. The pipeline is too small.”

The competition for skilled workers within Australia is “fierce”, Penn said in January, and in the next five years the country would be 60,000 workers short in the technology industry.

“Bangalore is India’s ‘Silicon Valley’ and even there we are competing for talent with the likes of Apple, Google and other digital companies,” he said.

“[The new Innovation and Capability centre] means we can quickly hire, develop and scale that talent across our business.”

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