x-man,
This is not good and with Mitel pressing forward with the Cloud installations it is making it harder to keep the field technicians working when things aren't breaking. It is also getting harder to sell on-premise equipment as well so I have less and less work myself.
Good Luck,
TE
We have been seeing this trend for several years... Luckily the company I work for is pretty aggressive and started their own hosted PBX service several years ago. At the time I questioned whether it would be worth it or not, but today we install more hosted phones than on CPE key systems and PBX's by probably a 50:1 ratio. We are a fairly small rural company in the big scheme of things, but new hosted customers are about 10+ per month and new phone systems are maybe 10-12 per year if we are lucky.
If I was exclusively a CPE system technician I would be worried, and I mean REALLY worried, about the future of my career right now. At least in our neck of the woods, for better or worse I believe CPE systems will be a purely niche market within 10 years. Any key system/PBX technician with more than 10-12 years to retirement should be looking at "alternatives"... We have gone from about 8 techs to 2 (2.5, if you count me) in our phone systems department in the last 10 years, and honestly both of those guys have been doing things like school clock systems, security systems, and helping out the nurse call system guys quite a bit as well. One of those guys is less than 5 years from retirement, and there is no talk about getting an apprentice or trainee in the future. The number of customers we have hasn't declined, it's increased, the business has just changed.
Although I still work occasionally on large or complex Mitel systems and maintain all my credentials, I have moved almost exclusively to working on the hosted side doing provisioning, site installs, and network engineering. I have a minimum 17 years to retirement... just as a point of reference.
@x-man Enjoy your retirement, you deserve it... You will be missed!
