Addressing the Talent Challenges of Municipal Broadband

Establishing a new municipal broadband project is no easy task. You’re essentially building a completely new ISP from the ground-up, one that’s expected to offer both superior customer service and world-beating, widespread connectivity to the residents of your city. And it’s one that’s unlike any other organization on the market.

First and foremost, the executive board for such an undertaking is considerable. You need to recruit leadership roles across the board, men and women who are capable of directing the growth of your city and managing both complex departments and complicated infrastructure.

At the moment, that probably doesn’t sound so different from a standard technology company.

What defines municipal broadband organizations is the fact that their operating environment is wholly unique. The transparency and reporting requirements, for instance, are very similar to what you’d find in a non-profit environment, yet the structure is more like a for-profit organization.

See, the issue is that municipal broadband agencies are usually publicly-funded (though not always). And though they’re concerned about the bottom line, they’re also government organizations. They aren’t profit-focused in a traditional shareholder or investor driven environment. This also means they’re subject to transparency laws, along with all other government regulations.

Not only that, depending on where your organization is based, it may also face a number of challenging obstacles. Legislation in many States outright makes publicly-owned networks illegal, and in other states it makes establishing them so difficult they may as well be. That’s to say nothing of the difficulties involved in making a public broadband profitable while matching private sector competitors in price, reliability, stability, and network quality.

Finally, each municipal ISP will need to take its own unique approach to connecting their city. Every community’s infrastructure, after all, is slightly different, and every community has different challenges they’ll need to tackle. Adaptability, then, is a key trait of any individual working in such an organization.
But that’s not the only quality your organization needs to nail down.

Individuals working in a municipal broadband ISP need to be leaders in their field. They need to have peerless technical expertise in designing, developing, and maintaining broadband networks. They need to be skilled and charismatic management professionals who have no issue both working with and leading their own teams.

Such professionals are hard to come by – and that’s where TD Madison can help. As a leader in executive recruitment, technical training, and staff augmentation for the broadband industry, TD Madison is an ideal recruitment partner for any city or town that wishes to take control of wireless and wired broadband provisioning. Already, we’re helping cities like Fort Collins, Colorado, providing executive placement for key roles like Executive Director of Broadband, Broadband Network Engineer, Broadband Marketing Manager, and Outside Plant Engineer.