‘At a Crossroads’: Ongoing Job Training Deemed Essential
AT&T is trying to reinvent itself to compete more deftly, and as part of this reinvention, employees are encouraged to study on their own time, and occasionally on their own dime.
AT&T’s competitors are no longer just Verizon and Sprint but also tech giants like Amazon and Google. For the company to survive, Chairman and Chief Executive Randall Stephenson says he needs to retrain the company’s 280,000 employees to improve, or learn, coding skills, and make quick business decisions based on a fire hose of data coming into the company.
In an ambitious corporate education program, he is offering to pay up to $8,000 a year toward tuition to help employees update their skills. But there’s a catch:
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“There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop. People who do not spend five to 10 hours a week in online learning will obsolete themselves with the technology.” Randall Stephenson |
They have to take these classes on their own time and sometimes pay out of their own pocket.
By 2020, Stephenson hopes AT&T will be well into its transformation into a computing company that manages all sorts of digital things: phones, satellite television and huge volumes of data, all sorted through software managed in the cloud. That can’t happen unless at least some of his workforce is retrained to deal with the technology, and many employees don’t have the right experience.
The company claims that over half of the workforce, mostly managers, has started training, sometimes with dozens of short online courses.
“We’re at a crossroads as a business—and a country,” said William Blase, who oversees personnel for AT&T, “where education has to keep up with technology.”
Source: The New York Times S