0条Plus

这家百年老店能否带领10万员工华丽转型？

Aaron Pressman 2017-04-02

瞬息万变的科技进步让美国劳动力备受蹂躏。但AT&T决心向老员工传授使用新设备的技能。这项再培训计划是这家拥有132年历史的电信巨头面临的最大挑战之一。它将为陷入类似困境的其他老牌企业提供一个极其宝贵的模板。

纳撒尼尔·迈耶的旧办公室，坐落在夏洛特市外庞大的AT&T网络可靠性中心犹如海洋般的格子间之中。2013年，32岁的迈耶仍然在他入职时进驻的同一栋设施工作。19岁那年，他追随父亲的脚步，加入这家彼时还叫南贝尔的公司，从事技术员工作。在这家电信巨头供职十多年，并获得多次晋升之后，迈耶的工作仍然围绕着同样的基本技术。他日复一日地监测大规模交换机（它们运行着一个分布在20多个州的老式电话网络），远程测试新设备，更新数据库。

然而，随着时间的推移，迈耶开始觉得这是一份没有前途的工作。他之所以有这种感觉，是因为事实如此。

迈耶当时不知道，在千里之外，位于达拉斯市中心的AT＆T总部大楼里，最高领导层已经意识到，这家公司有很多像迈耶这样一直跟旧电话线和其他过时技术打交道的员工。内部研究发现，在AT&T的24万名员工中，有多达10万人正在从事该公司在未来十年可能不再需要的工作。

彼时的AT&T正处在巨大的变革阵痛中。现在仍然如此。数十年来，客户一直在断开他们的固话线路，移动网络流量则呈现爆炸式增长。自苹果公司于2007年推出iPhone手机以来，AT&T的数据使用量已经飙涨了250,000%。

随着各大企业在办公室，以及亚马逊和微软等公司运营的云服务平台之间传送日益巨大的数据，AT&T的企业级业务也开始蓬勃发展。现在，AT&T网络每天处理130 PB的数据——相当于国会图书馆数字馆藏的40多倍。

有一段时间，该公司试图更新其现有的技术零件，投入数十亿美元购买更多的交换机，增添新的手机信号塔，并铺设更多的光纤电缆。但这番努力并没有长时间地遏制这股潮流。

2012年，这家拥有132年历史的公司启动了一个更具戏剧化的解决方案：到2020年，AT&T将用计算机软件系统替换75%的硬件。这是一项极其艰巨的任务。比如，该公司仍然拥有一套服役40年之久，每天处理1.28亿个800免费电话的交换机，但它的计算能力还不如一对iPhone 7手机。

迄今为止，借助分布于世界各地的近100万台“盒子”（即执行诸如路由数据包或阻止黑客袭击这类功能的专用计算机），AT&T已经将34%的网络转化为软件定义的模型，并计划在2017年末实现55%的转化率。“今年我们将达到临界点。”该公司首席战略官约翰·多诺万说。“开弓没有回头箭。”

然而，比更换硬件更难的是，他们必须找人来运行和维护它。2013年，当时负责监管技术和服务部门（该部门雇佣了包括迈耶在内的13.5万名工人）的多诺万，与人力资源部总裁比尔·布拉斯聚在一起鼓捣数据。尽管他的员工中只有50%的人接受过科学、技术、工程和数学培训，到2020年，该公司预计需要多达95%的员工拥有这类背景。

首席执行官兰德尔·斯蒂芬森表示，“很明显，我们的员工还没有掌握运行大规模软件基础设施所需的技能。我们面临一个巨大的人力资源问题。”

为解决这个问题，AT&T启动了一项或许是美国企业史上最雄心勃勃的再培训计划。这种人力资源投资，是员工们热爱这家公司的原因之一：今年，AT&T首次跻身《财富》最适宜工作的100家公司榜单。尽管如此，这家公司仍然面临让人望而生畏的挑战：2015年收购DirecTV之后，AT&T现拥有近27万名员工，堪称全球最大的企业雇主之一。其目标是，到2020年重新培训其中的10万人从事新工作。这项被该公司称为“劳动力2020倡议”的工程，是一笔需要耗费逾十亿美元的投资，涉及一系列新项目、新设施和旨在推动员工再教育的协同努力。

如果AT&T能够成功这项浩大的工程，它就将避免大规模裁员，并可能让其整个软件网络战略获得一项关键的竞争优势。

如果不能，就像斯蒂芬森自己承认的那样，AT&T将成为一家陷入长期衰落的公司。

技能差距

AT&T致力于解决的技能差距，一点都不罕见。从许多方面看，该公司与美国经济面临的是同一道难题。根据非营利性组织“国家技能联盟”提供的数据，需要熟练掌握计算机的所谓“中等技能”工作占美国所有就业岗位的54%，但只有44%的工人拥有这些技能。人力资源机构万宝盛华集团对4.2万家公司进行的调查发现，2016年，有多达40%的雇主难以找到人才来填补空缺的工作。这是2007年以来的最高数字。

部分问题是，各大公司向来不愿意挖掘内部潜力来满足它们对技术工人的需求。劳动部的统计数据显示，2001年至2016年，作为在职培训的最佳方式之一，企业学徒计划的数量下降了三分之一。根据沃顿商学院教授彼得·卡佩利的研究，或许是考虑到员工的平均任职时间缩短，企业提供的培训比过去更少。他发现，1979年，年轻工人每年平均获得21/2周的培训。几十年后，这一数字已下降至仅仅11个小时。

其结果是一个利害攸关的经济挑战。“我们不能让人们的技能落后于前沿，否则的话，他们将被替换。”马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校教授，《美国再培训》(Reskilling America)一书的合著者凯瑟琳·纽曼说。“文化资本被不断浪费，由此形成一个恶性循环。”

一个亮点：万宝盛华集团估计，在2015年，只有20%的公司专注于培训自己的员工；然而，截至2017年，有一半以上的公司报告称，他们将专注于员工培训。

如果你想了解这些公司将如何培养自己的员工团队，以满足它们对于熟练劳动力日益增长的需求，AT&T的再培训努力或许是一个极好的案例。其庞大的培训规模不仅有望避免数以千计的裁员，而且有可能成为面临人才短缺的其他企业效仿的榜样。纽曼说，像许多公司一样，AT&T“意识到这种技术提升对他们的未来至关重要。”

AT&T并非一开始就构想出这个解决方案。大约五年前，最初的问题是，如何应对流量迅速增长而收入增长不能保持同步这种情况。在愈演愈烈的价格战中，移动电话市场越来越接近饱和点。

因此，首席执行官兰德尔·斯蒂芬森召集约翰·多诺万商讨这个问题。作为斯蒂芬森麾下为数不多的几位没有贝尔系统公司工作背景的直接下属之一，时任AT&T首席技术官的多诺万来自硅谷，深谙其文化，并拥有互联网基础设施领域的背景。个性稳重，目光如炬的多诺万，最初为移动数据的增长方式想象了三种情境，从迅速增长到天文数字般的增长。2012年，他告诉斯蒂芬森，“情境三”，即最极端的一种，即将成为现实。

由于斯蒂芬森立即排除了向客户大幅涨价这一选项，多诺万需要找到一种方法来降低AT&T传统网络的成本，同时还需要为新的移动和业务平台增加巨大的容量。关键是，所有这一切必须以不增加资本预算为前提。

该公司起初的应对方式是软件升级。对于AT&T来说，大规模技术升级意味着不再依赖诸如诺基亚、爱立信和阿尔卡特-朗讯这类大型电信设备制造商。AT&T不能坐等设备制造商加快创新步伐，制造更快的产品。随着半导体创新消退，整个产业频频陷入资金困境，这一动态已显著放缓。这家运营商将不得不依靠自身的力量，从根本上简化其数据和交换中心的硬件。通用的低成本计算机盒可以代替专用于特定功能的专有设备。所有功能将由在通用计算机上高效运行的软件应用提供，而不是一组盒子来路由数据，另一组建立安全防火墙，还有一组用来创建加密专用网络。

按照技术标准来衡量，一些正在更新的硬件属于史前水平。在旧系统中，当AT&T想升级的时候，比如安装更快的路由器，它必须在物理意义上更换所有旧设备。目前负责企业级业务营销的AT&T 资深员工史蒂夫·麦高解释说，“我们将不得不动用叉车拉出旧设备，放入新设备。实际上，我们真的称之为‘叉车升级’。”

在新系统下，容量升级只需通过增添更多的普通计算机就能迅速达成。技术开发总裁梅丽莎·阿诺尔迪说，在极端情况下，向网络添加一个主要功能可能需要18个月，现在只需一周。阿诺尔迪负责监管该公司80多个全球数据中心站点。她说，“我们所有人都没有这种技术背景。”

接下来，AT&T必须解决其员工问题。随着新系统相继铺就，多诺万意识到，填补成千上万的软件和工程工作来构建和管理新的AT&T网络，可能是一项不可能完成的任务。但如果该公司不可能招募到如此多技术工人，唯一真正可行的选择就是向现有工人传授如何做这些新工作。

在多诺万和人力资源主管布拉斯向首席执行官解释了人手短缺的严重性之后，斯蒂芬森准许他们采取戏剧性行动。他们需要一个能够为工人传授新技能的全新培训系统。此外，随着AT&T向软件变迁，这个系统还要帮助这些工人制定他们未来可能需要做出的决定。

为了创建该系统，布拉斯特意拜访时任AT&T北卡罗来纳州分公司总裁辛西娅·马歇尔。作为另一位终生献身于贝尔的资深员工，马歇尔是她们家走出的第一位大学生，毕业于加州大学伯克利分校，于1981年加入太平洋贝尔公司。在随后的30年，她几乎从事过所有的工作，从爬电话杆，到运营总部事务，再到游说州长批准兼并交易，不一而足。她现在是AT&T人力资源高级副总裁兼首席多元化官。马歇尔回忆说，这项使命极其清晰：“我们不只是告诉那些工程师他们可以离开，另一个人会来做他们的工作。”她获得的指令是“我们必须接纳这些人。”

“劳动力2020倡议”从彻底重组公司组织图开始。马歇尔将这家电话公司的2000个职位简化为拥有类似技能，数量少得多，职能更广泛的岗位。比如，17种不同的程序类职位转变为“软件工程师”。每个新职位都与特定的技能或能力相关联，比如精通特定软件开发语言，或拥有担任项目领导者所需的技术。

接下来的任务就是解释这些变化，并帮助员工探索这个全新的局面。AT&T创建了一个名为“职业情报”的在线系统，让员工浏览可能获得的工作，了解该工作要求的技能，有多少职位空缺，调查这部分业务的增长或缩小前景，并查阅潜在的薪水区间。

然而，对于员工来说，其缺点在于他们必须主动进行再培训。一些工作可以在上班期间完成，但该公司提供的全新在线课程涉及更加广泛的内容，需要员工付出大量的下班时间。鉴于一些无法在家中腾出培训时间的员工可能会发现，他们的工作正在被淘汰，经济社会学家纽曼指出，该项目“并非完全令人愉快，这一点令人印象深刻。”（在《财富》最适宜工作的100家公司榜单上，AT&T的员工培训时间相对偏高，人均每年约75个小时。）

再培训工程

在北卡罗来纳州，供职于网络可靠性中心的技术专家纳撒尼尔·迈耶已经习惯于看到许多经验丰富的同事慢慢消失——顺利退休，没有被替换。在他周围的书架上，摆满了一些曾经作为网络基础设施的设备的培训材料和原理图，比如1970年代的1AESS交换机。迈耶逐渐发现，他正在花费更多的时间与萨克拉门托、堪萨斯城和密尔沃基的AT&T员工进行电话沟通，与员工数量不断减少的夏洛特办公室的交流则越来越少。

然后，在2013年5月，迈耶听闻AT&T即将启动一项大规模的再培训计划。AT&T联手乔治亚理工学院及其位列全美前茅的计算机专业，正在推出一个专门面向像他这样的技术专家，完全在线的计算机科学硕士课程。

差不多在第一时间，迈耶申请成为首批学员。他早就意识到自己需要一个研究生学位来获得他想要的那类计算机科学工作，以脱离夏洛特办公室。迈耶此前一直考虑辞职，注册成为北卡罗来纳或北卡罗来纳州立大学的全日制学生。现如今，他不仅能够参与乔治亚理工学院的在线课程，而且无需支付学费——AT&T负责全部费用。“这正是太美妙了。我获得了硕士学位，而且没有背负任何债务。”

但这并不容易。迈耶不得不利用下班时间参加必修课程，同时还得完成日常工作，并帮助太太照顾两个小孩。在线和校内学位课程使用的学习材料完全相同，并有着同样细致的要求。迈耶需要观看视频课程，做家庭作业，并完成广泛的项目。但在线课程的灵活性允许他在晚上和周末挤出学习时间。此外，他迅速地承认，“我的太太给予我很大的帮助。”

AT&T表示，让员工承担起自我提高的责任是一个特色，而不是错误。“你可以选择你的未来，你如何抵达那里，以及你将多么积极地追求这个目标。如果你不选择加入，你将无法使用所有的工具，也自然不会融入AT&T的愿景。”

为了提供进一步的鼓励，并明确AT&T多么严肃地看待这个项目，该系统也会评估员工当前的技能，并安排这些员工从事他们在未来几年内借助额外培训有可能获得的工作。如果愿意的话，员工可选择不同的未来目标。与期望技能相匹配的心仪工作出现时，他们还可以让系统提醒自己。

34岁的卡拉·里维斯就是这样获得晋升的。在该公司的零售店工作八年之后，她有意转向更具技术含量的工作。里维斯将她现有的技能和兴趣输入系统，后者随即建议她争取成为一位“流程管理员”。这是AT&T新设立的职位之一，其职责包括领导一个项目团队，担任调解人，并帮助该团队制定决策，与公司其他部门无缝合作。

里维斯此前从未接受过这方面的正规培训。所以，她转向AT&T为再培训项目创立的短期在线课程目录。这个与Udacity合作开发的培训项目，已经帮助像里维斯这样的员工完成了逾250个迷你课程。如果某位员工完成了一套特定领域（比如网络安全或项目管理）的课程，他或她的个人资料页面就将获得一枚虚拟“勋章”。到目前为止，AT&T已经颁发了大约17.3万枚勋章。去年三月，里维斯成功地过渡到她的全新工作。

再培训项目的另一个关键环节是AT&T的实习计划，也就是让获得额外技能的员工在一个有限的实习期尝试从事新工作。供职时间长达20年的资深员工苏珊·比克，正是利用这个实习计划从计费系统转入软件界面开发部门，担任流程管理员。完成这一转变，只需要她从AT&T圣路易斯办公楼的7楼搬入22楼。

迈耶早已成为一位大数据科学家，这份新工作需要他更加频繁地飞赴各地。他如今在得克萨斯州普莱诺市的AT&T办公室工作。熔岩灯和Nerf玩具枪等奇异设备，让这里看上去更像是一家新潮的硅谷初创企业。迈耶看上去非常自在。他手捧一个“我爱我”主题咖啡杯，不时地引用电影《黑客帝国》的剧情，激动地解释他是如何挖掘此前躺在各类数据库，从未被使用的海量信息，来确认一些过去被AT&T互联网和有线电视服务忽略或错过的潜在客户。“我真心觉得这里棒极了。”他笑着说。

首席执行官斯蒂芬森希望，在这项培训计划完成之后，AT&T将获得一支更加灵活，更有能力应对未来竞争对手的员工队伍。然而，AT&T的转型之路才刚刚过半。如果该公司希望完成在未来三年拥有一支技术精湛的劳动力大军这一目标，它还需要再培训成千上万的员工。此外，超过一半网络仍然需要转移到软件平台。

但他们已经看到进步的迹象。去年，AT&T用内部人选填充了4万个空缺岗位的40%以上。该公司估计，有多达14万人正在接受某种形式的培训，这将有助于他们迎接未来新工作的挑战。然后，根据该公司的预测，如果电信业以目前的颠覆和发展节奏奔涌向前，在短短4年后，这些刚刚“充完电”的员工将不得不为另一种新工作做好准备。

斯蒂芬森说，“技术变迁似乎已经成为常态。但随着技术的变革，谁能以如此大的规模推动员工团队完成技术升级呢？”无论是对于AT&T，还是对于美国所有的劳动力来说，这都是一个更加重要的问题。这位CEO表示，其答案将决定一家公司究竟是茁壮成长，还是沦为历史的尘埃。（财富中文网）

作者：Aaron Pressman

译者：Kevin

本文刊发于2017年3月15日的《财富》杂志。

Nathaniel Meyer’s old office was nestled in a sea of high-walled cubicles in a hulking AT&T network reliability center outside Charlotte. In 2013, at 32, Meyer was working at the same facility where he had started when he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the company, then BellSouth, at age 19 as a technician. After more than a decade with the telecom giant, and several promotions, Meyer’s work still revolved around the same basic technologies. He spent his days monitoring the massive switches that ran an old-fashioned telephone network scattered across more than 20 states, testing new equipment remotely, and updating databases with any changes.

Increasingly, though, Meyer was beginning to feel like he was in a dead-end job. He felt that way because, well, he was.

Meyer didn’t know it at the time, but a thousand miles away, in the executive offices of AT&T’s headquarters in downtown Dallas, the company’s leaders were realizing that they had a lot of people like Meyer working with old phone lines and other technology that were quickly becoming outdated. Internal research found that 100,000 of AT&T’s 240,000 workers in 2013 were in roles that the company probably wouldn’t need in a decade.

AT&T was, and is, in the throes of a huge transformation. Customers have been disconnecting their landlines for decades, while traffic on the company’s mobile network has exploded. Data usage at AT&T has increased 250,000% since the 2007 introduction of the iPhone.

Its corporate business has also boomed, as companies zap increasingly huge amounts of data among offices and the cloud-server farms run by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. Now, every day AT&T’s network handles 130 petabytes of data—equal to more than 40 times the digital holdings of the Library of Congress.

For a while, the company tried updating its existing technology piecemeal, pouring billions of dollars into buying more switches, adding new cell towers, and laying more fiber-optic cables. But that didn’t stem the tide for long.

By 2012 the 132-year-old company had landed on a much more dramatic solution: replacing 75% of its hardware with computer-operated software systems by 2020. The task was immense. AT&T still has one set of 40-year-old switches, for example, that handle the 128 million 800-number calls a day, all with less computing power than a pair of iPhone 7s.

With almost 1 million boxes in service around the world—dedicated computers that perform functions like routing data packets or blocking hackers—AT&T has so far managed to convert 34% of the network to the software-defined model, with a goal of 55% by the end of 2017. “This year we will have hit the tipping point,” says John Donovan, AT&T’s chief strategy officer. “There’s no turning back.”

But even more difficult than replacing the hardware is finding the people to run and maintain it. In 2013, Donovan, who was then responsible for overseeing the company’s technology and services unit that employs Meyer and 135,000 other workers, got together with human resources chief Bill Blase. Together they crunched the data and found that, although only about 50% of his staff had training in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, the projected need for employees with that training by 2020 would hit 95%.

“It became clear that our people did not possess the skill set required to run a massively scaled software infrastructure,” says CEO Randall Stephenson. “We were facing a massive people issue.”

To address the problem, AT&T has embarked on what may be the most ambitious retraining program in corporate American history. That investment in its people is part of why its workers love it: This year, for the first time, AT&T made Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. Still, the challenge facing the company is formidable: With nearly 270,000 employees after its acquisition of DirecTV in 2015, AT&T has one of the largest workforces in the world. By 2020 it aims to retrain 100,000 of those people for radically new jobs. The project, referred to at the company as the Workforce 2020 initiative, is a more than billion-dollar investment that comes with a suite of new programs, new facilities, and a concerted push toward worker reeducation.

If AT&T can pull it off, it will avoid sweeping layoffs and perhaps give its entire software network strategy a critical competitive edge.

If it can’t, as Stephenson himself admits, AT&T will be a company in long-term decline.

The skills gap AT&T is now addressing is far from unique. In many ways, the company’s conundrum is the same one facing the larger American economy. According to the nonprofit National Skills Coalition, “middle skill” jobs like those that require computer proficiency account for 54% of positions in the U.S., but only 44% of workers have those skills. One survey of 42,000 companies by HR consultancy Manpower Group found that 40% of employers in 2016 were struggling to find talent to fill available jobs—the highest number since 2007.

Part of the problem is that companies have historically been resistant to look inside their own workforce to meet the demand for technical workers. The number of corporate apprenticeship programs, frequently cited as one of the best ways to get workers on-the-job training, fell by more than one-third to 21,339 from 2001 to 2016, according to Department of Labor statistics. And businesses—perhaps looking at the shrinking average tenure of their employees—provide less training than they used to, according to research by Wharton School professor Peter Cappelli. In 1979 the average young worker received 21⁄2 weeks per year of training, he found. A few decades later the average had fallen to just 11 hours.

The result is a high-stakes economic challenge. “We cannot afford to let people’s skills fall behind the cutting edge, or they will be displaced,” says Katherine Newman, provost of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and coauthor of Reskilling America. “It becomes a cycle of wasted cultural capital.”

One bright spot: Manpower Group estimates that only 20% of firms were focusing on training their own employees in 2015; however, as of 2017, more than half reported that they will focus on training.

For an indication of how—and if—those companies will manage to develop their workforces to meet the growing demand for skilled laborers, a good place to look may be AT&T’s retraining push. The sheer scale of the company’s programs not only has the potential to avoid thousands of layoffs, but also could serve as a model for other businesses facing their own talent shortages. Like many companies, says Newman, AT&T “has realized that this upskilling is critical to their future.”

AT&T didn’t come to this solution immediately. About five years ago, the initial problem was how to deal with the skyrocketing traffic while revenue growth wasn’t keeping pace. The landline business was dying, and the mobile market was nearing a saturation point amid growing price wars.

So CEO Randall Stephenson brought the problem to John Donovan. One of Stephenson’s only direct reports who had not spent his career in the Bell System, Donovan, then AT&T’s chief technology officer, had come from Silicon Valley and was steeped in its culture, with a background in Internet infrastructure. A rock-steady presence with a laser stare, Donovan had initially imagined three scenarios for the way mobile data growth might play out, ranging from quick to astronomical. In 2012 he told Stephenson that scenario three—his most extreme case—was the one that was coming true.

With Stephenson immediately ruling out big price hikes for customers, Donovan needed to find a way to reduce the cost of AT&T’s legacy network while adding huge amounts of capacity to its newer mobile and business platforms, all without any increase in its capital budget.

First, the company responded with its software push. The wholesale update of AT&T’s technology was a risky move away from depending on the big telecom equipment makers like Nokia, Ericsson, and Alcatel-Lucent. AT&T couldn’t wait for the gearmakers to innovate and make faster products, a dynamic that had slowed as semiconductor innovation ebbed and the industry had suffered from repeated financial difficulties. The carrier would have to move on its own to radically simplify the hardware in its data and switching centers. Generic, lower-cost computing boxes could replace the proprietary devices that had each been dedicated to a specific function. Instead of having one set of boxes that could route data, and another bank that established a security firewall, and then yet another that created encrypted private networks, all of the functions would be provided by software applications running more efficiently on the generic computers.

Some of the hardware that was being updated was prehistoric by tech standards. In the old system, when AT&T wanted to upgrade—to install faster routers, for example—it had to physically replace all the old gear. “We would have to use a forklift—we literally called it that, a ‘forklift upgrade’—to pull out the old piece of equipment and put in the new piece of equipment,” explains Steve McGaw, an AT&T veteran who currently runs marketing for its corporate business. Some gear stayed in service for decades.

Under the new system, capacity can be increased quickly just by adding more banks of simple computers. At the extreme end, adding a major function to the network might have taken 18 months before and now can be done in a week, says Melissa Arnoldi, president of technology development, who oversees the company’s more than 80 global data-center sites. Says Arnoldi, “This isn’t technology that any of us grew up with.”

Next, AT&T must tackle its workforce issues. As the new systems rolled out, Donovan realized that filling the tens of thousands of software and engineering jobs he needed to build and manage for the new AT&T network might be an impossible task. But if the company couldn’t hire skilled workers at that scale, the only real alternative was to teach their existing workers how to do the new jobs.

After Donovan and HR chief Blase explained the severity of the shortage to the CEO, Stephenson gave his blessing to taking dramatic action. They would need a new training system capable not just of imparting new skills to workers, but also of helping those workers make decisions about which ones they might need and which would be in demand as AT&T shifted toward software.

To help create that program, Blase called on Cynthia Marshall, then the president of AT&T North Carolina. Another Bell lifer, Marshall went to the University of California at Berkeley, the first in her family to graduate from college, and started at Pacific Bell in 1981. Over the next 30 years, she had done everything from climb telephone poles to run central offices and lobby governors to approve mergers. She is now the company’s SVP of human resources and chief diversity officer. Marshall recalls that the mission was clear: “We’re not just going to tell those engineers that they can leave and somebody else is going to come do their jobs,” she says. Her mandate was “We are taking the people.”

The initiative, Workforce 2020, started with a sweeping restructuring of the company’s organizational chart. Marshall helped streamline the phone company’s 2,000 job titles into far fewer, broader categories with similar skills. Seventeen different programming-related jobs, for example, became “software engineer.” Every new title was associated with specific skills or abilities, such as knowledge of a particular software-development language or techniques for being a project leader.

Then came the task of explaining the changes and helping employees navigate the new landscape. AT&T created an online system called Career Intelligence, which allows an employee to surf through possible alternative jobs, see what skills are required, how many positions are available, investigate whether the segment is projected to grow or shrink, and view the potential salary range.

The drawback for employees, however, is that they must take the initiative for their own retraining. Some of the work can be done on the job, but the company’s new, more extensive online courses also require a large chunk of time outside work. Economic sociologist Newman calls the program “impressive in a not altogether happy way,” given that employees who can’t find time at home to participate may find that their jobs are being eliminated. (AT&T’s roughly 75 hours of annual training for employees per year averages on the high end compared with other companies on the 100 Best Companies to Work For list.)

Back in North Carolina, technologist Nathaniel Meyer was getting used to seeing many of his experienced coworkers in his network reliability center slowly disappear—retiring and not being replaced. Sitting among shelves of training materials and schematics for gear like the 1970s-era 1AESS switches that were once the foundation of the network, he gradually found that he was spending more time talking on the phone with AT&T staffers in places like Sacramento, Kansas City, and Milwaukee than with anyone in the shrinking Charlotte office.

Then, in May 2013, Meyer got wind of AT&T’s big retraining push. In partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology and its top computer science program, AT&T was rolling out a fully online master’s degree program in computer science aimed at technologists like him.

Almost immediately, Meyer applied to be in the first class. Realizing he needed a graduate degree to get the kind of computer science job he wanted to break out of the Charlotte office, he had been considering quitting work and enrolling full time at the University of North Carolina or North Carolina State. Instead, he got into the online version of Georgia Tech’s program, and AT&T footed the bill for the tuition. “It was the best of all worlds,” he says. “I got a master’s degree, and I got zero debt.”

But it wasn’t easy. Meyer had to complete the course work for the degree during off-hours, while holding down his day job and helping his wife raise two small kids. The program included all the same material and intensive requirements as an on-campus degree program. Meyer was required to watch video classes, do hours of homework, and complete extensive projects. But the online flexibility allowed him to squeeze the time into nights and weekends. Also, he’ll readily admit, “I had a lot of help from my wife.”

AT&T says putting the onus on employees to better themselves is a feature, not a bug. “You have the choice of what your future is, and how you go about getting there, and how aggressively you pursue that,” Donovan says. “If you don’t opt in, all the tools and the vision [at AT&T] aren’t going to do any good.”

To give further encouragement and make clear just how serious AT&T is about the program, the system also assesses employees’ current skills and assigns them to a specific future job that they could attain in a few years with additional training. Employees can choose a different future target if they’d like. And they can also set the program to alert them when roles of interest matching their desired skills are available.

That’s how Kara Reeves, 34, got her promotion. After working on the retail store side of the company for eight years, she decided she wanted to shift to more technical work. She input her existing skills and interests in the system, and it suggested she vie for the role of “scrum master”—one of AT&T’s new job titles, which entails leading a small team working on almost any kind of project, acting as a facilitator, and helping the group make decisions and work smoothly with other parts of the company.

Reeves had no previous formal training in that kind of project leadership, so she turned to AT&T’s vast catalog of short online courses created as part of the retraining program. Developed both internally and in conjunction with Udacity, the program has helped employees like Reeves complete over 2.5 million of the minicourses, which typically take a few hours or less. Completing a set of courses in a specific area like cybersecurity or project management grants the employee a virtual “badge” on his profile page. AT&T has given out 173,000 so far. And Reeves’ transition to her new job last March has been successful.

Another key part of the retraining effort is AT&T’s internship program, which lets workers who have added skills try out a new position for a limited test run. Susan Bick, a 20-year veteran of the company, used the program to make a jump from billing systems to scrum master for teams in the software interface development unit. To make the move, she simply relocated from the seventh floor of one of AT&T’s large offices in St. Louis to the 22nd floor.

Meyer had to travel a lot farther for his new job as a big-data scientist. He now feels and looks at home amid the lava lamps, Nerf guns, and other nerdy gadgetry in an AT&T Plano, Texas, office that looks more like a hip Menlo Park startup. Toting an “I heart me” coffee mug and making the occasional reference to the movie The Matrix, he gets excited while explaining how he sifts through the reams of information previously lying unused in various databases to identify where there might be potential customers for AT&T’s Internet and cable-TV service who have been skipped over or missed in the past. “I feel like this is an awesome place,” he says, grinning.

CEO Stephenson hopes that after the training is complete, the result will be a workforce that’s more nimble and better equipped to take on future competitors. However, AT&T is only midway through its transformation. It still has tens of thousands of employees to retrain if the company hopes to meet its goal of having a technically proficient workforce in the next three years. And more than half the network still needs to be shifted to the software platform.

But there are some signs of progress. Last year AT&T filled more than 40% of the 40,000 jobs with internal candidates. And the company estimates that 140,000 people are undergoing at least some sort of development that will prepare them for a new job in the future—and then another new job only four years after that one, if the industry speeds along at its current pace of disruption and development, according to company predictions.

“Technology shifts have become somewhat routine,” says Stephenson. “But who can transition their talent at scale as the technology changes?” That’s the more important question for both AT&T and the American workforce writ large. The answer, says the CEO, will be the difference between growth and obsolescence.

A version of this article appears in the March 15, 2017 issue of Fortune.

精选评论

撰写或查看更多评论, 请打开财富Plus APP

热读文章

热门视频

500强行业分布