Why Upskilling Our Employees is Essential For Our Business (and All Big Businesses)
by Melissa Arnoldi and Charlene Lake, AT&T
Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. think tanks are not the only ones mulling over the future of our workforce. By 2020, the U.S. will have 85 million medium- and high-skilled job vacancies with not enough people qualified to fill them, according to McKinsey. And while solutions to this skills problem are coming from the startup world and the policy sphere, the country’s largest corporations also are playing a significant role in developing solutions.
AT&T is in the midst of one of the most substantial transformations in our 140-year history. We’ve grown from a telephone company to a mobility company, and now to a data-powered entertainment and business solutions company.
Our evolving industry needs an employee pool with evolving skills. The employees who helped lay down telephone wire in the 1970s and ’80s are not the same ones who will lead AT&T into its digital vanguard — or are they?
Back when network traffic increased slowly and predictably — mostly voice calls — you built a network on hardware. You sent out trucks and technicians to install new gear, like appliances, routers, and switches. The appliance and equipment makers built that stuff to last decades. We don’t have that luxury anymore. Demand for network capacity is booming, so we’re turning network hardware appliances into software apps.
What is a software-centric network? It delivers network efficiency and consumer benefits: think how you’ve swapped a camcorder, alarm clock or CD player for apps on your smartphone. And when you move a network into the cloud, as we are doing, you need workers with specific skills to make it happen.
We’ve set an ambitious goal of moving 75 percent of our network into software by 2020. But we can only keep up that pace if we help our employees learn the skills to take us there. We need employees to be software-centric and data-powered.
So, how does a company like AT&T do it? In two ways: Investing in skills training for high school students and new graduates and providing our more than quarter million employees with opportunities to re-skill for new roles. The dual investment — our existing workforce and our future workforce — isn’t a hedge; it’s a fundamental requirement to deliver a software-centric future.
We’re applying the same ideas, methods, and curricula for our employees as we are for prospective hires — and, in many cases, for any eager learner in the world. Simply put, we need qualified workers now, and we need a steady supply for the future. So does our country. A diverse and deep talent pipeline drives a healthy economy for us all.
Investing in Talent Early
So, where do we start? For AT&T to stay competitive in this dynamic industry, we must hire employees who are “job ready” on day 1 — ready to hit the ground running. This means that in order to succeed they need tech skills, such as coding and development, as well as attributes like perseverance and grit. Like most companies, we hire great talent from top colleges and universities. But, frankly, this supply can’t sustain our demand. That’s why we are teaming with nonprofits to build programs that teach these skills and attributes specifically to youth who might otherwise not have a chance to learn or develop them. As we identify, train and educate these students, we are building a potential pathway to full-time jobs at our company.
But success comes only by teaming with quality organizations. Take Year Up and Genesys Works as examples. Year Up helps low-income youth gain their professional footing in just one year by placing them for 6 months in classroom training followed by 6 months in a corporate internship. Genesys Works runs a similar program, which combines skills training and career coaching with a year-long paid internship for its students. These organizations not only ensure students have tech skills, but also help them understand the ins and outs of working in a corporate environment. And their results are impressive. We host dozens of Year Up and Genesys Works interns across the country, and we are working to hire some into full-time positions.
There’s not one approach that fits all situations, though. That’s why we not only team with effective programs, we collaborate to design new ones. With Udacity, the online learning company, AT&T helped pioneer an education pathway that enables people to earn credentials, called Nanodegree programs, in areas like web development, data analysis, and programming. These are bite-sized, affordable online programs that ready students for jobs that are open today in the tech industry. Several corporate collaborators are now designing and participating in the Nanodegree program, and credentials have expanded to include many skills including artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Anyone, anywhere can sign up. And for companies, it’s a great way to identify job-ready candidates. AT&T is hiring 100 interns who earn one of Udacity’s Nanodegree credentials.
“My Nanodegrees have literally changed my career. I’ve moved from a job in data analysis, which depended heavily on software to meet goals, to being the one designing and delivering the software that helps our business be more productive.”
— Gavin Bedell, Associate Applications Developer based in Dallas, Texas.
Re-skilling Our Existing Employees
A wholesale hiring of new talent from outside our company isn’t possible, practical, or palatable. That’s why we’re also working with our HR team, headed by Bill Blase, to engage our current employees and provide them multiple options to re-skill in-house. And it’s why the company in February 2016 appointed our first chief learning officer, John Palmer, to lead the re-skilling effort.
Here’s how it works: We spend more than $250 million a year on our flagship internal training curriculum, T University, which enables our existing employees to take hands-on courses in data science, cybersecurity, IP networking, agile project management, and others. We’re also providing $34 million in tuition aid.
For us the effort is in large part about transparency and empowerment — creating tools and processes that help empower our employees to take control of their own development and their own careers. For example, our Career Intelligence portal helps employees understand which management jobs are “hot,” where they are located, the potential for that position within the company (grow, decline, or plateau), what skills the jobs require, and the steps they need to close any learning gaps they may have. It can even link them directly to the needed training for a particular job.
“The world is changing, and technology is shifting to meet that change. As AT&T works to become a software-centric company, I want to be part of that change. I love working somewhere that understands the importance of giving its longtime employees the necessary skills for the jobs of the future.”
— Jacobie Davis, Senior Specialist-Product Development Engineer based in Dallas, Texas
Many courses require after-hours work, but with free or reduced tuition and a chance to stay relevant in a changing workforce, many employees are embracing the opportunity and reaping the rewards. In fact, last year we were twice as likely to hire graduates of our re-skilling program for management positions in our technology and operations group, compared to other internal candidates who did not complete the training.
But we also know that investing this much time and money in an internal skills program is a risk. Will it literally and figuratively pay off? We decided that to succeed in the 21st century, we had to take this risk. Engaging and re-skilling our current employee base is the right thing to do for many reasons — not the least of which is providing those who have helped build AT&T an opportunity to grow and succeed along with the company. We want to make sure they have an opportunity to fill the jobs of the future at AT&T.
“AT&T’s gambit to re-educate its enormous workforce is without precedent,” John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, wrote in a recent Harvard Business Review article with Cathy Benko. “If AT&T succeeds, it will provide a blueprint for how legacy technology companies can compete against younger, digitally native firms such as Google and Amazon. If it fails, it may deter other companies from attempting internal transformation, putting further pressure on the global labor market.”
We passionately believe that investing in the people who helped build our company is not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do. And that, combined with supporting future workers before their very first job interview, creates a combination that can help take our company and our country into a future of economic vitality and human prosperity.
Creative Art Direction by Redindhi Studio.
