Embracing and Retraining for Innovation: AT&T Strategy Aims to Disrupt Itself Part II

If AT&T is going to disrupt itself, it must first disrupt its own culture, which is a difficult and long process to say the least. It starts with its people, and AT&T has undertaken a pretty significant retraining program for its workforce.

“I give us a B+,” stated AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, referring to a grade he would assign to their efforts to retrain their workforce. It’s a monumental task. Stephenson said 150K employees have been targeted thus far, and they’ve completed over 2 million courses to date. These courses are often self-administered and aim to help AT&T employees make the transition from the legacy TDM world of telecommunications to today’s IP and broadband focused marketplace. “It’s a tremendous change, we think that we’re going to go from last year, about 50% of our people being STEM, deep in technology, to 90% by 2020, 90% of our jobs will require STEM capability in the technology organization,” said AT&T chief strategy officer John Donovan. “We’re in the middle of this skill pivot.”