In a dynamic and global marketplace, companies need to be quick and agile to adapt to changing technologies, market preferences, and regulatory environments. This is perhaps nowhere truer than in technologically driven industries. And change doesn’t just mean the leadership adapting new strategies to run the company. It also means ensuring its workforce has the skills and training necessary to execute those strategies.
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Telecommunications giant AT&T is a great example of this. The company has been in operation for 133 years and has a massive workforce of 250,000 employees. In an article for CNBC, Susan Caminiti writes, “Over the last decade, AT&T’s business has been changing at warp speed, moving from a voice network to a data network, from hardware to the cloud and from a landline business to a mobile-first enterprise.”
That’s a lot of change. How can an organization manage such a massive workforce, amid significant environmental changes, to remain successful?
AT&T knew that it had two options—as most companies do—to respond to such challenges: hire new employees with the necessary skills or retrain the existing workforce. AT&T opted for the latter, launching a $1 billion effort to retrain its enormous workforce. According to Caminiti, this is the route that many companies like AT&T opt for as opposed to bringing in new staff.
Why? As Caminiti points out, while the cost of training can be high, so is the cost of turnover, which is why companies like AT&T are taking steps to continually retrain their staff members. The median cost of replacing a worker, says Caminiti, is 21 percent of their annual salary—that percentage rises, or course, as salaries increase. “Retraining workers for new, or more highly skilled, jobs also allows a company to keep valuable institutional knowledge in-place,” she says.
AT&T’s effort, known internally as Future Ready, is a web-based, multiyear effort that includes online courses—with collaboration with organizations like Coursera, Udacity, and major universities—as well as a career center allowing employees to identify and train for the company’s current and future job needs.
Efforts like AT&T’s show how crucial even corporate giants see employee training. The amount of time, money, and effort they are putting into their Future Ready program should make businesses of all sizes pay attention.