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Every company facing technological change eventually meets a hard staffing question: when the skills you need are not the skills you have, do you hire new people or teach the ones you already employ? AT&T, with one of the largest workforces in the world, made one of the most public bets on the second answer.
A Workforce Built for a Different Network
Over the decade after 2008, AT&T's business shifted sharply: from voice to data, from hardware toward the cloud, and from landlines toward mobile. According to CNBC's reporting in 2018, when executives began examining the company's future skill needs around 2008, they found that only about half of its roughly 250,000 employees had the science, technology, engineering and math skills the company would require. About 100,000 people worked in hardware-related jobs that were unlikely to exist a decade later.
Company leaders concluded that hiring enough software and engineering talent from outside would be expensive and still would not close the gap. So AT&T chose to retrain at scale.
Inside Future Ready
The effort, known inside the company as Future Ready, was described by CNBC as a $1 billion, web-based, multiyear program. Its main elements included:
- Online courses in areas such as data science, cybersecurity, Agile project management and computer science, offered through collaborations with Coursera, Udacity and universities.
- University degrees. In 2013 AT&T helped launch Georgia Tech's online Master of Science in Computer Science, developed with Udacity and priced at under $7,000. AT&T gave Georgia Tech $2 million to get it started and another $2 million a year later. It also worked with the University of Notre Dame and the University of Oklahoma on online master's degrees in data science and data analytics.
- Nanodegrees. In June 2014 AT&T and Udacity announced short "Nanodegree" credentials designed to teach the skills needed for entry-level IT roles, with paid internships at AT&T for some graduates.
- Career transparency. An internal portal called Career Intelligence showed employees which jobs were open, the skills each required, the likely salary range, and whether that kind of work was expected to grow or shrink.
The stated goal was to retrain 100,000 employees for new roles by 2020. AT&T built much of the program internally after outside consultants quoted a price above $100 million to help.
By 2018 the company reported that more than half of its employees had completed a combined 2.7 million online courses, that about 57,000 employees had earned 177,000 digital badges, and that around 475 employees had enrolled in the Georgia Tech degree, with nearly 80 already graduated. AT&T said employees who were retraining were twice as likely to be hired into critical new roles and four times as likely to advance in their careers, and that it was relying less on outside contractors for technical skills. Two years earlier, AT&T's chief strategy officer, John Donovan, and Deloitte's Cathy Benko had described the effort in a Harvard Business Review article titled "AT&T's Talent Overhaul."
Build or Buy: The Talent Decision
Strategic workforce planning often comes down to a build-versus-buy choice. Buying talent through hiring is fast when the market has plenty of it, but costly when skills are scarce, and new hires take time to learn how the company works. Building talent through reskilling is slower at first, but it keeps institutional knowledge and can strengthen commitment.
AT&T's approach also illustrates the idea of an internal talent market. By publishing information about open jobs, required skills and pay, the company let employees make their own career investments, much as they would in an external labor market. That shifts part of the responsibility for learning onto employees, many of whom studied on their own time, at night and on weekends.
Reskilling works best when people can see which jobs are growing, what those jobs require and how to get there.
What the Numbers Cannot Settle
The results above were reported by AT&T, and they come with a classic problem: self-selection. Employees who choose to take courses may be more motivated or capable to begin with, so a higher hiring rate among people in training does not prove that the training caused the outcome. Reskilling also did not guarantee everyone a future role; CNBC's reporting noted that some employees who did not keep up with training had left the company. And AT&T's scale, budget and university partnerships are hard for a smaller organization to replicate.
Planning a Reskilling Program in Your Organization
You do not need a billion dollars to apply the logic:
- Map skills, not just roles. Take stock of the skills your people have and compare them with the skills your strategy will need in three to five years.
- Be honest about shrinking work. Tell employees which kinds of work are likely to decline. People cannot plan careers around information they do not have.
- Offer credible paths. Pair short courses with recognized credentials and real job openings at the end.
- Make time for learning. If all study happens after hours, participation will skew toward those with fewer responsibilities outside work.
- Measure internal mobility. Track how many open roles are filled by retrained employees, and how they perform once there.
The biggest mistake is treating reskilling as a course catalog. It works when it is tied to workforce planning and to real hiring decisions.
Keeping Your Own Skills Current
The AT&T story is ultimately about individuals taking charge of their development as their industry changes around them. FUBT's Executive Education offers short courses for working professionals, including Business Data Analysis, Project Management, and Leadership and Contemporary Management, for anyone building new skills alongside a demanding job.
