Case study

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Professors William R. Kerr and Joseph B. Fuller and Research Associate Carl Kreitzberg prepared this case. This case was developed from published sources. Funding for the development of this case was provided by Harvard Business School and not by the company. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management. Copyright © 2019, 2020 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, call 1-800-545- 7685, write Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to www.hbsp.harvard.edu. This publication may not be digitized, photocopied, or otherwise reproduced, posted, or transmitted, without the permission of Harvard Business School.

W I L L I A M R . K E R R

J O S E P H B . F U L L E R

C A R L K R E I T Z B E R G

AT&T, Retraining, and the Workforce of Tomorrow

The theater was packed and buzzing. Randall Stephenson, Chief Executive Officer of AT&T, sat smiling on stage. Just a few months earlier, Fortune.com had named AT&T one of America’s “100 Best Companies to Work For.”1 To celebrate the designation, Fortune.com had invited Stephenson to speak at a 2017 convention in Chicago.2 The topic? AT&T‘s efforts to retrain 100,000 employees by 2020.3

Many companies at the time were struggling to keep employees’ skills up-to-date.4 Astro Teller, CEO of Google X, observed that technology’s rapid pace of change was overtaking workers’ ability to keep their skills relevant.5 A 2016 Manpower Group survey of U.S. companies found that “46% of employers [were] having difficulty filling jobs.”6 To those at the conference, AT&T’s retraining effort could have looked promising. A 2016 Harvard Business Review (“HBR”) article co-authored by one of AT&T’s executives described the implications at hand:

AT&T’s gambit to reeducate its enormous workforce is without precedent. Tens of thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in shareholder value, and the future of one of the most iconic brands in corporate history are at stake. 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.7

To Randall Stephenson, retraining AT&T’s workforce in an evolving telecommunications industry was critical, later saying, “If we can’t do it, mark my words, in three years we’ll be managing decline.”8

A transforming industry and a skills shortage AT&T competed in an industry marked by constant change, whether it was the adoption of electric

switches in the 1920s, the rise of long-distance calling in 1947, the divestitures and acquisitions that marked the end of the 20th century, the deployment of digital switching and transmission technology, or the advent of wireless services (Exhibit 1).9 One company report embraced that ethos, boasting that the way AT&T had “been able to survive and thrive for nearly a century and a half is through constant renewal. Change is the only constant.” 10

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Evolving technologies and new market demands

In 2012, Randall Stephenson concluded that AT&T had to change again. Customers were dropping traditional voice and wireline telecommunication services to adopt wireless services instead. In 2006, wireline voice made up 37% of AT&T’s revenues and wireless 29%. By 2012, those figures flipped to 18% and 46%.11 The company’s customers were also consuming massive amounts of data, largely driven by the iPhone’s release in 2007.12 AT&T responded by installing new switches, cell towers, and fiber-optic cables. But those changes alone could not keep up with the demand for data, and AT&T’s hardware suppliers struggled to innovate fast enough to keep apace. 13

Stephenson and the leadership team realized they would need to replace the company’s specialized hardware architecture. Historically, telecommunications providers had relied on customized systems offered by companies like Alcatel Lucent and Nokia Siemens. The systems provided backward compatibility with their installed base of equipment and allowed the companies to introduce innovations into their networks gradually in order to smooth their patterns of capital spending. The historical hardware performed discrete tasks like routing data, establishing firewalls, or encrypting private networks. Integrating the various platforms via advancements in computing and transmission technologies allowed off-the-self computers to perform all the major network tasks simultaneously and use software upgrades to introduce new features. That could shorten the deployment cycles for network updates and new feature introductions from a year to a few minutes. 14AT&T management embraced the inevitability of this transition. They decided to replace 75% of the company’s old hardware with computer-enabled, software-defined networks (SDN) by 2020.15 Such a “virtualized” network could collect, analyze, and leverage data about customer utilization of its network. AT&T could then use those data to perform tasks like creating personalized online ads.16

Changing AT&T’s business and operating models

The influx of data changed AT&T’s core services, too. Thomas Friedman described the company’s transformation in his 2016 book, Thank you for Being Late:

Using wireless cell phone data, [AT&T] could tell a signage company how many people who drove by their sign on the freeway ended up shopping in the store advertised on that sign – and if the sign became digital, and changed every hour, they could tell them which message was most effective… In the blink of an eye your friendly phone company became an all-around business solutions company, also competing with IBM or Accenture.17

To become a “networking enabler and solutions provider to the most disruptive companies in the world,” AT&T restructured its Technology and Operations (ATO) and Information Technology (IT) organizations, deciding that those two were “responsible for enabling and delivering the capabilities critical to the company’s success.” Management expected ATO and IT to drive innovation in supporting the company’s “integrated cloud, APIs, data, business function and other software platforms.”18 Furthermore, as one analyst later noted, ATO and IT could improve AT&T’s cost structure by “leveraging automation in service delivery, IT rationalization, as well as software savings.”19

The company chose to “tear down the walls” between APO and IT by reorganizing the 130,000 workers shared between them. AT&T also adopted a “DevOps” philosophy (short for “Development Operations”) that emphasized “collaboration between developers and other IT professionals” for quickly updating and creating software.20

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An impending workforce crisis

Management felt confident that they could implement AT&T’s technological and organizational changes.21 The workforce changes, however, were a different story. Stephenson told the crowd in Chicago that, after laying out their initial plans, AT&T’s executives wondered, “What is the skillset that is going to be required to run this thing out here at this date in the future?” They realized that the skillset would be “fundamentally different” to what they were doing at that time, and that retraining AT&T’s workforce would be “the biggest logistical challenge” they had ever attempted.22

AT&T researched the type of workforce that it would need to support the virtualized network and new business model (Exhibit 2). In 2012, AT&T had roughly 150,000 employees running its infrastructure, but it forecasted that it would require fewer than 100,000 workers with those skills by 2020.23 According to Stephenson, much of that downsizing would occur via retirements, but many of the remaining workers would not have the skills necessary to fulfill emerging jobs requirements.24 For instance, in 2012, 50% of the workforce had training in STEM disciplines, but that figure would need to be 95% by 2020.25 Management also figured that AT&T could not rely entirely on hiring outside talent to fix its problems, since competing with Silicon Valley for workers was costly26 and swapping out their entire workforce would drain institutional knowledge.27

Bill Blase, Senior Executive Vice President of Human Resources, contacted outside consultants for help with designing and implementing a “massive retraining program,” but found the cost of their proposed solutions too expensive. The company would need to create the program itself and promote it internally. Blase “prayed every day” that upper management would agree to prioritize a broad-based reskilling effort. They did and made it central to the company's strategy. According to Blase, reskilling became one of leadership’s “key principals at all their town hall meetings, and the thing just took off. This [retraining] would have been nothing more than an HR exercise that sat on a shelf if our leadership didn’t become its biggest advocates.”28

AT&T’s solution: Workforce 2020 Stephenson told Blase and John Donovan, Chief Technology Officer at the time, that they could take

“dramatic action” to fix the problem,29 but he forbade them from spending too much money, as the company could not afford to raise prices for its consumers in such a price-sensitive industry.30

Create a blueprint

Blase and Donovan collaborated with AT&T’s Human Resources department to determine what skill sets the company would need by 2020. Candy Conway, a Vice President at AT&T, said that the company chose to focus on future needs in six broad areas, including fields such as “big data, IP networking, and software-defined networking.”31 AT&T created a basic blueprint for its workforce transformation by comparing its future skill needs to its workforce’s current skillset. AT&T then designed its Workforce 2020 program (otherwise known as “WF2020”) to lay out the steps for that transformation: 32

• Reinvent existing roles and update talent practices to incentivize better performance

• Provide career roadmaps to employees so they can evaluate potential opportunities

• Collaborate with educational providers to create curriculums for high-demand, complex skills

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• Create educational tools that employees can use to track and upskill themselves

• Cultivate alternative talent pipelines to supplement retraining efforts

• Integrate retrained workers into agile ecosystem to maximize innovation

Reinvent roles & update talent practices

Headquarters asked managers to document “existing gaps” and create “future role profiles” for themselves and their teams. Every non-union employee received a future “Workforce 2020” role assignment. If an employee did not like her assigned role, she could choose a different one instead.33 AT&T required all employees with a future role assignment to get the necessary training by 2020.34 Union workers did not receive “Workforce 2020” roles. Such workers, who comprised 55% of AT&T’s workforce, tended to be technicians, retail workers, and customer service and call center representatives. The Communication Workers of America (“CWA”) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (“IBEW”) organizations primarily represented AT&T’s unionized employees.35

In addition to assigning future roles, AT&T chose to “simplify and standardize role structures, in order to increase job mobility and foster the development of interchangeable skills.” In 2012, AT&T had 2,000 job titles that fit roughly into 250 roles. They consolidated those roles into 80 WF2020 “future roles.”36 For example, AT&T began WF2020 with 17 different types of programming-related jobs across the company’s design, development, and testing functions. Human Resources grouped them into a single role of “software engineer.” Various types of leadership positions (e.g., team lead, tech directors) became “people leaders.”37

To “manage [this] new realignment of skills,” AT&T also changed its core “talent practices”:

• First, AT&T tied performance measures to employees’ contributions to company goals, which helped properly valuate each role. For example, individuals who had high value skills like cybersecurity received greater financial rewards than others.

• Second, the company raised performance expectations. For example, in the Technology and Operations unit “the number of managers receiving the two highest performance ratings on a five-point scale declined by 5%, while the bottom two ratings increased by 37%.”

• Third, AT&T redesigned compensation plans to reward high-performers and deemphasize seniority. The company also incentivized workers to reskill by systematically giving better performance reviews to employees who took more classes and received good grades.38

John Donovan later said that AT&T made it clear from the outset of WF2020 that employees who worked with aging technology needed to retrain or risk losing their jobs.39 "Linking yourself to the old technology will become like duck hunting through a chimney,” Donovan told the Wall Street Journal in March, 2016. “You need to be a very good shot [to keep your job]."40

Provide career roadmaps to employees

To assist employees trying to decide between different WF2020 roles, AT&T’s Human Resources department launched an online platform in January 2014 that hosted career development tools:

• Career Profile Tool: Described as AT&T’s in-house LinkedIn, the Career Profile Tool aimed to help employees find career opportunities within the company. Each employee could fill out a

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career profile page and populate it with academic credentials, professional work experience, and pre-existing skills. Afterward, the program identified relevant job opportunities and provided a list of the skills needed to transition to any of those potential new roles. When looking to fill a job opening, AT&T would use the tool to evaluate internal candidates first. The tool also gave AT&T data on the company’s current skills capabilities and deficits.41

• Career Intelligence Tool: The Career Intelligence Tool helped employees identify the trajectory of different job opportunities. The tool consolidated information about a role’s description, displayed historical data about a specific job’s growth or decline, provided contact information for people currently in those roles, and forecasted the number of jobs expected to be available as well as their anticipated salaries. Furthermore, the tool provided data on the number of people training to occupy future job roles, which showed workers where future job deficits or gluts might arise.42

Collaborate with educational platforms

AT&T created an in-house training program in 2008, dubbed “AT&T University.”43 By 2012, the company was already trying to virtualize many of its in-person classes.44 As part of WF2020, AT&T began sponsoring training programs and boot camps under the technology function’s leadership.45 However, management realized that AT&T’s training modules were not specialized enough to prepare employees for advanced careers. Providing such training via traditional means at scale would be very expensive.46

Perhaps looking for an alternative way to train employees, Stephenson agreed to hear a pitch from Sebastian Thrun in 2012. Thrun, a former Stanford professor, was pitching Udacity, his new company that offered online classes. During their discussion, Thrun showed Stephenson how to watch videos of Udacity’s classes on their cellphones (despite initial struggles to play them on AT&T’s WiFi network). Stephenson later said he immediately recognized Udacity’s potential: Anybody with internet access (or a smartphone) could teach themselves complex ideas.47

Thrun had introduced Stephenson to MOOCs, otherwise known as “massive open online courses.” By 2012, online education had existed for some time. Early online offerings tended to mimic traditional classroom structures; content owners merely transferred their existing content into a form deliverable online.48 Contemporary MOOCs, by comparison, were designed to be scalable digital classrooms with features like synchronous communications and interactive tools.49 Several of the first major MOOCs included Thrun’s Udacity, Andrew Ng’s Coursera, and Harvard University’s edX.50

MOOCs had a number of attractive attributes. They were considerably less expensive than and much more accessible than traditional learning formats. Most programs offered asynchronous learning, allowing enrollees to choose where and when to study. As technological change drove rapid increase in the demand for new skills (e.g., Machine Learning or Internet as a Service), MOOCs could update their curriculums quicker than universities or traditional training vendors.51 AT&T elected to make MOOCs central to their reskilling program. Following a meeting between Stephenson and Thrun, AT&T formed a partnership with Udacity to develop new online courses.52

In 2013, AT&T and Udacity announced they were beginning an online Master’s Degree program at The Georgia Institute of Technology (“Georgia Tech”) in Computer Science. Annual tuition for the online program would be $6,630, less than 20% of the on-campus program’s cost.53 As part of their partnership, AT&T gave Georgia Tech $2 million to launch the program, and followed up with an additional $2 million the next year.54 The program had many admirers – including President Barack

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Obama – who saw it as a means to expand affordable access to high-quality, technical education.55 By 2017, hundreds of AT&T employees had enrolled in the program. 56 AT&T went on to form similar partnerships with other universities, such as Notre Dame.57 The company also developed new classes with Udacity and Coursera that covered topics in emerging fields such as data science and agile project management.58

In 2014, Udacity launched a “nanodegree” program, which attempted to provide “online, fast-track, high-skill and career-specific training for individuals interested in gaining industry-relevant technology skills.” 59 Paying at a rate of $200 per month, students could complete many of the nanodegree programs within a range of six to twelve months.60 AT&T endorsed the program. By the following summer, over 1,000 of the company’s employees had enrolled in nanodegree programs covering fields like Front-End Web Development, Data Analysis, Full Stack Web Development, and IOS Development.61

Create educational tools

AT&T revised the company’s tuition assistance program to cover its new educational programs. It offered up to $8,000 per year per employee for degrees and nanodegrees, with long-term maximums of $25,000 and $30,000 for undergraduate and graduate degrees, respectively.62 The company also created tools and workplace programs to get the new coursework in front of AT&T’s employees:

• Personal Learning Tools: AT&T created personal learning platforms that workers could use to identify specific job titles or skillsets that they were interested in attaining. Once an employee set her goals, the platforms provided information about the training needed to attain the new job title or skillset. Such information included the length and cost of the training. AT&T’s learning tools helped users find relevant coursework on external learning platforms such as Udacity, and tracked the completion of such classes. AT&T’s managers could also use learning tools to monitor and revise their subordinates’ training schedules. 63

• Open Learning Engine: Employees received access to an interactive, online environment where they could “search a catalogue of over 50,000 articles and videos, endorse the skills of their peers, or join a study group.”64

• Collaborative Experiential Learning Lab (CELL): Employees seeking advanced training were encouraged to participate in CELLs, where they could learn about a variety of technologies: Responsive Web Design, SDN, cloud, Open Source, Android, iOS, Big Data, Agile Dev Tactics, and Business Communications. CELL training emphasized a “hands-on, collaborative” approach that involved “iteratively developing a product.”65

• Apprenticeships: Employees interested in taking on a new position at AT&T could apply for an apprenticeship role, which provided on-the-job training. AT&T would select its apprentices based on each applicant’s “future role, specialization, and progress on their skills pivot.”66

• Coaching: AT&T hired multiple “Skills Pivot Coaches” who provided guidance on employees’ “competency gaps,” coached managers on ways to help their subordinates retrain, and evaluated the changing talent landscape.67

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Cultivate alternative talent pipelines

AT&T also sought to develop the workforce outside of its walls.68 AT&T Aspire, which had been one of the company’s main philanthropic vehicles since 2008, had adopted several major pillars regarding workforce development by 2017.69 One pillar was education technology (“ed-tech”), where AT&T developed ed-tech tools alongside digital education companies (e.g., Khan Academy), collaborated with various ed-tech institutions, and created its own accelerator to fund ed-tech startups.70 Another major pillar was workforce development. AT&T formed partnerships with nonprofit organizations that focused on cultivating skills in STEM fields (e.g., Girls Who Code, Year Up).71 Furthermore, the company hosted events to generate teenage interest in high-demand, hard-to- fill occupations such as Cyber Security.72

Integrate retrained talent into a new agile ecosystem

AT&T hoped that developing WF2020 in lockstep with the company’s transition to an agile “DevOps” organizational model would spur innovation. Specifically, by breaking down barriers between people moving across departments of AT&T, Brooks McCorcle, president of AT&T Partner Solutions, expected that the “ingenuity of start-ups will emerge.”73 To assist with such silo-busting efforts, AT&T revised its staffing procedures to allow for “competency based visibility to employees ready for movement and opportunities aligned with [their] Workforce 2020 roles.”74

The early implications of Workforce 2020

Key performance indicators

In October, 2016, months before Fortune.com recognized AT&T’s retraining efforts, John Donovan wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review outlining some of WF2020’s key accomplishments:75

• By October 2016, most employees were spending five to 10 hours a week retraining.

• By May 2016, employees had taken more than 1.8 million emerging-technology courses.

• By December 2015, the company had awarded 117,000 “badges” (digital certificates of achievement) to 53,000 employees.

• By the start of 2016, 323 workers had enrolled in Georgia Tech’s online Master’s Degree program, and 1,101 employees were in the middle of earning nanodegrees.

• Between 2012 and 2015, internal sourcing of STEM jobs increased more than 20%.

• Between January and May 2016, retrained employees filled half of all technology management jobs at the company and received 47% of promotions in the technology organization.

• Over the prior year, employees accessed the company’s performance management platform, which contained tools like “Career Intelligence,” 6 million times.

• Over the prior 18 months, product-development cycle times fell by 40% and time-to-revenue accelerated by 32%.

Just a few months later, Donovan reported that AT&T had converted 34% of its network to SDN in 2016, surpassing the company’s original goal of 30% and was on pace to meet the long-term

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objective of 75% by 2020.76 At the end of 2017, AT&T successfully met its next benchmark of virtualizing 55% of its core network functions.77

The future of unions at AT&T?

AT&T’s management team often highlighted the company’s relationship with its union workers as being a competitive advantage. However, AT&T closed several call centers during the period that it transitioned to SDN, which drew criticisms from union workers. A 2018 report by the CWA highlighted that, since 2011, AT&T had “closed 44 call centers and laid off thousands of workers, resulting in the destruction of 16,000 call center jobs nationwide”(Exhibit 3).78 By 2016, 49% of AT&T’s workforce consisted of union-represented employees, a decline from 55% in 2012 (Exhibit 4).79 The report argued that, “instead of investing in its workforce and transitioning to jobs of the future, AT&T is laying off American workers and relying increasingly on a global web of low-wage contractors to provide customer service and network maintenance.”80 In the report’s conclusion, the CWA asserted, “AT&T has received positive attention for its training programs…but this initiative largely excludes the front- line workforce that serves customers and maintains the integrity of the network every day.”81

Some union workers expressed confusion about WF2020. One online commenter, responding to an article about AT&T’s retraining effort, asked if the training was available to union employees, saying that it seemed “only available to managers.” She complained that her “manager can’t find info and nobody in our organization have [sic] an answer. I asked our Union President last night and he doesn’t know either.”82 While AT&T’s Personal Learning Experience tool allowed Management Employees to select Workforce 2020 roles and identify their associated competencies, union workers did not get access to that feature.83 One CWA researcher would later allege in 2019 that AT&T was not sharing its training programs “across all strata of the company.”84

A new social contract?

To Donovan, the new model of retraining workers “fundamentally changes the social contract between employer and employee… Each [AT&T employee] becomes CEO of his or her career, empowered to seek out new skills, roles, and experiences.”85 Cathy Benko, Vice Chairman and Managing Principal at Deloitte, co-authored the aforementioned 2016 HBR article with Donovan. She asserted that such employee empowerment moved AT&T beyond a traditional “corporate ladder” model and towards a “corporate lattice” instead. She argued that the lattice would broaden career pathways to allow for “lateral and diagonal and planned descents.” 86 In a later interview regarding the HBR article, Benko gave the example that “a data center operator might make a skills pivot that could lead to a role as a data scientist as some at AT&T have done.”87 To Benko, the promise of that new model was significant:

[John Donovan] and I highlighted AT&T because it has been strong in its conviction to give its employees—those who have built the brand over the past decades—the opportunity to ensure the continued marketability of their skills through wholesale reskilling…. AT&T’s approach not only gives its people an opportunity that engenders loyalty, it also ensures the integrity and continuity of the institutional knowledge and informal networks that make companies run. The cycle time for new technology has compressed and will continue to do so. In relative short order, today’s sought-after new skills in robotics, software, virtual reality and the like will evolve or obsolesce, so it’s smart to invest, as AT&T is doing, in building a culture of continual reinvention, rather than relying on wholesale talent swap outs.88

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AT&T’s management team hoped that providing retraining tools and granting career autonomy to its employees would make the company nimble. But, that exchange came with new expectations. In an interview with Thomas Friedman, Donovan expanded on the responsibilities of the new social contract:

You can be a lifelong employee if you are ready to be a lifelong learner. We will give you the platform but you have to opt in…. You can be anything you want to be in this system. But again, you have to opt in. The executive’s role here is to define the vision for the future. The company’s responsibility is to provide the tools and platform for employees to get there, and the individual’s role is to provide the selection and motivation. We need to make sure that anyone who leaves here [does not do so] because we did not provide them the platform – that it was their lack of motivation that did not make it happen.89

Donovan viewed the social contract as a way to help employees bolster their career prospects by addressing their personal skills gaps. To him, asking employees to retrain themselves on their own time “was a feature, not a bug.”90 During press tours, Donovan often told a story about how a woman once stepped into an elevator with him and talked about how she was taking classes on big data to set a positive example for her children. To Donovan, that woman showed how WF2020 could inspire the next generation of workers to take control of their education.91

Expressions of discontent

Not all employees responded positively to Workforce 2020. Many older employees expressed skepticism about the need to retrain on their own time, saying that AT&T’s executive leadership was overestimating the speed of technological change. Kenny Williams, president of a local CWA union in Southern California and testing technician at AT&T, said that he “inoculated [his] people against worrying,” pointing out that the company was missing the fiber network necessary to even begin installing a cloud system in the region.92 Other employees, who felt more exposed to the new technology, found themselves racing against the clock. Jacobie Davis, a long-term employee of AT&T, described in 2016 how he had to retrain 15 hours a week. “By 2020,” he explained, “my technology will be gone.”93

Randall Stephenson’s older brother, Kevin Stephenson, also declined AT&T’s offer to retrain. Kevin, who fixed copper lines in Oklahoma, dismissed the initiative. He told a reporter from the New York Times “I’m proud of my brother, but he’s not going to get rid of this stuff as fast as he thinks.” Instead of retraining, Kevin had different plans. “I’m riding the copper train all the way down.”94

By 2018, media outlets had reported on several employees and their responses to WF2020:

• Nathaniel Meyer, a married father of two boys, earned his online master's degree from Georgia Tech in computer science in December 2015. He left his network operations job in Charlotte, North Carolina, to become a Data Scientist for AT&T in Plano, Texas. Meyer called the degree- completion process "difficult and challenging but in the end very rewarding... I've got everything that I want in a job now. I love my work, and it's a really good fit for me." He credited his spouse for his success. “I had a lot of help from my wife.”95

• Susan Bick, a project manager at AT&T, used the company’s retraining platform to learn agile management. Bick spent nights and weekends studying, and eventually got a new position as senior scrum manager. When asked about colleagues who did not keep up with their training requirements, Bick replied, “Well, some of those folks are no longer with the company.”96

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• Patti Cunningham, a 61-year-old AT&T technician from Orange, California said in 2016 that she had not taken any classes and could not remember seeing emails about the new training program (AT&T later produced those emails to the New York Times). She explained her decision, saying, "this new concept of training on your own time, everything changing all the time, if you want to keep working, do more things on your own time, I guess they have to do it… but I don’t see a need to be involved."97

On June 14th, 2018, AT&T finalized a merger with Time Warner, which effectively combined “a gigantic telecom operator… and a massive producer of entertainment content.” The deal left AT&T with nearly $185 billion in debt,98 sparking layoff rumors.99 From January 2018 to May 2019, AT&T reportedly cut 23,000 jobs.100 The cuts reinvigorated debates about WF2020.

Many AT&T workers criticized the program online. “With the benefit of hindsight,” one commenter wrote, “I think we can see what a blatant scam the Workforce 2020 thing was. When I started, they were pushing the Coursera courses, then Udacity, then Nanodegrees, then AT&T University. They kept moving the goal posts. It was yet another ploy to mask a greedy executive plan to cut headcount in fluffy, feel good employment pseudopolicies.”101

Another thread involved “a recent college grad” who claimed to be an intern in AT&T’s Technology Development Program (TDP). He worried AT&T would not hire him after the program ended, saying the layoffs showed “that AT&T just sees us as a number, and that even with hard work and being ‘future ready’ with completing my M.S in Data Science, I’m just going to be chopped as fat. AT&T wants top talent, but this round of layoffs has shown that they don’t prioritize skill at all.” One respondent told him to leave, as the merger left “little room for a data scientist in the telco side of things.” Some suggested he quit once he no longer had to pay back his master’s degree. Others warned that his skills may obsolesce at AT&T.” One respondent simply said, “RUN!”102

Workforce 2020 and beyond?

At the time of the merger, AT&T was still investing in WF2020, and later that same year the company rebranded Workforce 2020 to “Future Ready,” signaling the company’s commitment to retraining employees beyond 2020. John Palmer, then AT&T’s Chief Learning Officer, explained the decision, saying “we don’t see momentum [for workforce retraining] slowing down. We only see it increasing.”103

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Exhibit 1 Overview of Consolidation in the U.S. Telecommunications Industry, Mid-1990s through 2017

Source: Chris Kuiper and Shang Y. Chuah, “Industry Surveys: Telecommunications, January 2018” (CFRA Research, January

2018).

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Exhibit 2 Overview of SDN Transformation Framework

Source: Chris Rice, “Harmonizing of Open Source Networking,” (February 20, 2017),

https://www.slideshare.net/OpenNetworkingSummit/harmonizing-of-open-source-networking.

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Exhibit 3 Diagram of AT&T call center closures between 2011 to 2018 in the United States

Source: “AT&T 2018 Annual Jobs Report.” Communications Workers of America, April 25, 2018. https://www.cwa- union.org/sites/default/files/att-jobs-report-2018.pdf.

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Exhibit 4 Excerpts from AT&T’s Sustainability Key Performance Indicators

Source: “Key Performance Indicators (KPI)” (AT&T, 2017), https://about.att.com/content/dam/csr/sustainability- reporting/PDF/2017/ATT-KPI-Table.pdf.

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AT&T, Retraining, and the Workforce of Tomorrow 820-017

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Endnotes

1 Aaron Pressman, “Can AT&T Retrain 100,000 People?,” Fortune, March 13, 2017, http://fortune.com/att-hr-retrain- employees-jobs-best-companies/.

2 “Great Place To Work For All Agenda Page,” Great Place to Work, accessed July 18, 2018, https://www.greatplacetowork.com/2017-conference/agenda.

3 “Table 1. Civilian Labor Force and Unemployment by State and Metropolitan Area - Not Seasonally Adjusted,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, June 27, 2018, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/metro.t01.htm.

4 Susan Caminiti, “AT&T’s $1 Billion Gambit: Retraining Nearly Half Its Workforce for Jobs of the Future,” CNBC, March 1, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/13/atts-1-billion-gambit-retraining-nearly-half-its-workforce.html.

5 Matt Parke, “Thomas Friedman: Technology Is Accelerating Faster than Our Ability to Adapt. We Can Catch Up,” Working Nation, August 2, 2017, https://workingnation.com/thomas-friedman-technology-accelerating-faster-ability-adapt-can-catch/.

6 “U.S. Talent Shortage Survey” (ManpowerGroup, 2016), https://www.manpower.us/Website-File- Pile/Whitepapers/Manpower/2016-Talent-Shortage-Whitepaper.pdf.

7 John Donovan and Cathy Benko, “AT&T’s Talent Overhaul,” Harvard Business Review, October 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/10/atts-talent-overhaul.

8 Quentin Hardy, “Gearing up for the Cloud, AT&T Tells Its Workers: Adapt, or Else,” New York Times, February 13, 2016, sec. Technology, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/technology/gearing-up-for-the-cloud-att-tells-its-workers-adapt-or-else.html.

9 Scott M. Lewis, Jeffrey L. Covell, and Paul R. Covell, “AT&T Inc.,” ed. Jay P. Pederson, International Directory of Company Histories 137 (2012): 62–72.

10 “Technology Transformation” (AT&T, 2016), https://www.business.att.com/content/dam/attbusiness/insights/casestudiesandpdfs/ATT-Tech-Dev-Transformation- Whitepaper.pdf.

11 “AT&T 2007 Annual Report” (AT&T, n.d.), https://www.att.com/Investor/ATT_Annual/downloads/07_ATTar_FullFinalAR.pdf; “AT&T 2012 Annual Report” (AT&T, n.d.), https://www.att.com/Investor/ATT_Annual/2012/downloads/ar2012_annual_report.pdf.

12 Pressman, “Can AT&T Retrain 100,000 People?”

13 Pressman.

14 Pressman, “Can AT&T Retrain 100,000 People?”

15 Pressman.

16 Pressman.

17 Thomas L. Friedman, “Ma Bell’s Intelligent Assistance,” in Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, 2016, 213–24.

18 “Technology Transformation.”

19 “Technology Transformation.”

20 “Technology Transformation.”

21 Randall Stephenson, AT&T: Retraining 100,000 Employees for a Digital Future, YouTube (Great Place to Work, 2017), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65xcjwuNbQ8.

22 Randall Stephenson, AT&T: Retraining 100,000 Employees for a Digital Future.

23 Randall Stephenson, AT&T: Retraining 100,000 Employees for a Digital Future.

24 Randall Stephenson, AT&T: Retraining 100,000 Employees for a Digital Future.

25 Pressman, “Can AT&T Retrain 100,000 People?,” 000.

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26 Randall Stephenson, AT&T: Retraining 100,000 Employees for a Digital Future.

27 Caminiti, “AT&T’s $1 Billion Gambit: Retraining Nearly Half Its Workforce for Jobs of the Future.”

28 Caminiti.

29 Pressman, “Can AT&T Retrain 100,000 People?,” 000.

30 Pressman; Chris Kuiper and Shang Y. Chuah, “Industry Surveys: Telecommunications, January 2018” (CFRA Research, January 2018).

31 Barbra McGann, “Training for Jobs That Don’t yet Exist: The AT&T Story,” May 30, 2017, https://www.horsesforsources.com/blog/barbra-mcgann/Training-for-jobs-that-dont-exist-story_053017.

32 Pressman, “Can AT&T Retrain 100,000 People?,” 000.

33 Randall Stephenson, AT&T: Retraining 100,000 Employees for a Digital Future.

34 John Donovan and Cathy Benko, “AT&T’s Talent Overhaul,” Harvard Business Review, October 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/10/atts-talent-overhaul.

35 “Key Performance Indicators (KPI)” (AT&T, 2017), https://about.att.com/content/dam/csr/sustainability- reporting/PDF/2017/ATT-KPI-Table.pdf; Hardy, “Gearing up for the Cloud, AT&T Tells Its Workers: Adapt, or Else.”; Ben Munson, “AT&T-Time Warner Merger Earns IBEW, CWA Union Support,” Fierce Video, November 30, 2017, https://www.fiercevideo.com/broadcasting/at-t-time-warner-merger-earns-ibew-cwa-union-support.; “AT&T News Page,” Communications Workers ofAmerica, n.d., https://cwa-union.org/att.

36 Pressman, “Can AT&T Retrain 100,000 People?”; Donovan and Benko, “AT&T’s Talent Overhaul.”

37 Donovan and Benko, “AT&T’s Talent Overhaul.”

38 Donovan and Benko.

39 Donovan and Benko.

40 Rachael King, “AT&T Ambitious Effort to Retrain More than 100,000 Workers,” Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2016, sec. CIO Journal, https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2016/03/17/atts-ambitious-effort-to-retrain-more-than-100000-workers/.

41 Donovan and Benko, “AT&T’s Talent Overhaul.”

42 Donovan and Benko; Caminiti, “AT&T’s $1 Billion Gambit: Retraining Nearly Half Its Workforce for Jobs of the Future.”

43 Snap Event Productions, “AT&T University,” Vimeo, July 8, 2014, https://vimeo.com/100233974.

44 Sorabh Saxena, DevOps: AT&T’s Saxena on Building a “One-Team Culture,” interview by Mike Robuck, August 22, 2016, http://www.telcotransformation.com/author.asp?section_id=401&doc_id=725559.

45 Saxena.

46 Randall Stephenson, AT&T: Retraining 100,000 Employees for a Digital Future.

47 Hardy.

48 Ryan Craig, “A Brief History (And Future) Of Online Degrees,” Forbes, June 23, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryancraig/2015/06/23/a-brief-history-and-future-of-online-degrees/#101ab0f448d9.

49 Laura Pappano, “The Year of the MOOC,” The New York Times, November 2, 2012, sec. Education Life, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/education/edlife/massive-open-online-courses-are-multiplying-at-a-rapid- pace.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0&mtrref=en.wikipedia.org&mtrref=undefined&gwh=C53CC5A746D6F557184C2B34102E82A F&gwt=pay.

50 Hardy.

51 Hardy.

52 “Press Release: Efficient, Accessible, Affordable, Online Program Will Help Job Seekers Get High-Demand Technical Skills,” AT&T, June 14, 2014, http://about.att.com/story/att_and_udacity_launch_online_training_program_nanodegree.html.; Caminiti, “AT&T’s $1 Billion Gambit: Retraining Nearly Half Its Workforce for Jobs of the Future.”

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53 Lindsay McKenzie, “Online, Cheap -- and Elite,” Inside Higher Ed, March 20, 2018, https://www.insid ehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/03/20/analysis-shows-georgia-techs-online-masters-computer-science.

54 Caminiti, “AT&T’s $1 Billion Gambit: Retraining Nearly Half Its Workforce for Jobs of the Future.”

55 Kevin Carey, “An Online Education Breakthrough? A Master’s Degree for a Mere $7,000,” The New York Times, September 28, 2016, sec. TheUpshot, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/upshot/an-online-education-breakthrough-a-masters- degree-for-a-mere-7000.html; Tamar Lewin, “Master’s Degree Is New Frontier of Study Online,” The New York Times, August 13, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/education/masters-degree-is-new-frontier-of-study- online.html?mtrref=www.google.com&mtrref=undefined&gwh=DAE5EEED42234F1AA212A036B4CA82BB&gwt=pay; Pappano, “The Year of the MOOC.”

56 “AT&T 2017 Annual Report” (AT&T, 2017), https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR/financial- reports/annual-reports/2017/complete-2017-annual-report.pdf.

57 Sue Ryan, “Notre Dame announces collaboration with AT&T for online master’s degree in data science,” Notre Dame News, August 30, 2016, https://news.nd.edu/news/notre-dame-announces-collaboration-with-att-for-online-masters-degree-in-data-science/.

58 Friedman, “Ma Bell’s Intelligent Assistance.”

59 “Nanodegree: Transforming IT Training by Making It Affordable, Relevant and Available Online,” National Network, February 2016, http://nationalnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/ATT-Nanodegree-Model.pdf.

60 Eduardo Porter, “A Smart Way to Skip College in Pursuit of a Job,” The New York Times, June 17, 2014, sec. Economic Scene, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/business/economy/udacity-att-nanodegree-offers-an-entry-level-approach-to-college.html.

61 “Nanodegree: Transforming IT Training by Making It Affordable, Relevant and Available Online.”

62 “Accelerating Workforce Reskilling for the Fourth Industrial Revolution” (World Economic Forum, 2017), http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_EGW_White_Paper_Reskilling.pdf.

63 “AT&T - Human Resources Team of the Year,” The American Business Awards, 2017, http://stevieawards.com/aba/att- human-resources-team-year.

64 “Technology Transformation.” Page 39.

65 “Technology Transformation.”

66 “Technology Transformation.”

67 “Technology Transformation.”

68 AT&T, “AT&T Aspire,” Connect to Good (blog), accessed July 19, 2018, https://about.att.com/content/csr/home/possibilities/at-t-aspire.html.

69 “Accelerating Education: Applying the Venture Model to Education,” AT&T, 2014, https://www.att.com/Investor/ATT_Annual/2014/aspire_accelerator.html.

70 AT&T, “AT&T Supports Khan Academy App To Empower Learning On The Go,” Connect to Good (blog), January 20, 2015, https://about.att.com/content/csr/home/blog/2015/01/at_t_supports_khana.html; AT&T, “AT&T Aspire: Mobilizing Learning,” Connect to Good (blog), accessed July 20, 2018, https://about.att.com/content/csr/home/blog/2015/01/at_t_supports_khana.html.

71 AT&T, “AT&T Aspire: Powering Career Skills,” Connect to Good (blog), accessed July 19, 2018, https://about.att.com/content/csr/home/possibilities/at-t-aspire/powering-career-skills.html.

72 Rachel Kirkland, “AT&T Trains Future Cybersecurity Workers,” WashingtonExec (blog), August 28, 2017, https://www.washingtonexec.com/2017/08/att-trains-future-cybersecurity-workers/.

73 Donovan and Benko, “AT&T’s Talent Overhaul.”

74 “Technology Transformation.”

75 Donovan and Benko, “AT&T’s Talent Overhaul.”

76 Sean Buckley, “AT&T Raises SDN Network Transformation Goal to 55% for 2017,” Fierce Telecom, February 2, 2017, https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/at-t-raises-sdn-network-transformation-goal-to-55-for-2017.

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77 Chris Rice, “Network AI: AT&T’s Framework for Its Open Source Efforts That Will Drive Our Software-Defined Network in 2018 and Beyond,” AT&T Technology Blog (blog), March 27, 2018, https://about.att.com/innovationblog/att_framework.

78 “AT&T 2018 Jobs Report” (Communications Workers of America, April 25, 2018), https://www.cwa- union.org/sites/default/files/att-jobs-report-2018.pdf.

79 “Key Performance Indicators (KPI).”

80 “AT&T 2018 Jobs Report.”

81 “AT&T 2018 Jobs Report.”

82 Anonymous Commenters, “Thread Regarding AT&T Inc. Layoffs: AT&T’s Ambitious Effort to Retrain More than 100,000 Workers,” TheLayoff.Com, March 18, 2016, https://www.thelayoff.com/t/GtJsHAH.

83 “AT&T - Human Resources Team of the Year.”

84 Lauren Weber, “Why Companies Are Failing at Reskilling,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2019, sec. Management, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-answer-to-your-companys-hiring-problem-might-be-right-under-your-nose-11555689542.

85 Donovan and Benko, “AT&T’s Talent Overhaul.”

86 Cathy Benko, Molly Anderson, and Suzanne Vickberg, “The Corporate Lattice: A Strategic Response to the Changing World of Work” (Deloitte Insights, January 1, 2011), https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/deloitte-review/issue-8/the- corporate-lattice-rethinking-careers-in-the-changing-world-of-work.html; Donovan and Benko, “AT&T’s Talent Overhaul.”

87 The Solution to the Skills Gap Could Already Be Inside Your Company, interview by Eben Harrell and Cathy Benko, Magazine, September 27, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-solution-to-the-skills-gap-could-already-be-inside-your-company.

88 The Solution to the Skills Gap Could Already Be Inside Your Company.

89 Friedman, “Ma Bell’s Intelligent Assistance.”

90 Pressman, “Can AT&T Retrain 100,000 People?”

91 The Disrupters: AT&T’s John Donovan on Building the Broadband Network of the Future, YouTube (American Enterprise Institute, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqteQaM060I.

92 Hardy, “Gearing up for the Cloud, AT&T Tells Its Workers: Adapt, or Else.”

93 Hardy.

94 Hardy.

95 Caminiti, “AT&T’s $1 Billion Gambit: Retraining Nearly Half Its Workforce for Jobs of the Future.”

96 Caminiti.

97 Hardy, “Gearing up for the Cloud, AT&T Tells Its Workers: Adapt, or Else.”

98 Jessica Toonkel, “AT&T Plans Layoffs,” The Information, January 8, 2019, https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/0a0c0c.

99 Michael Sainato, “‘They’re Liquidating Us’: AT&T Continues Layoffs and Outsourcing despite Profits,” The Guardian, August 28, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/28/att-earns-record-profits-layoffs-outsourcing-continue.

100 Jon Brodkin, “AT&T Promised 7,000 New Jobs to Get Tax Break—It Cut 23,000 Jobs Instead,” ars Technica, May 14, 2019, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/att-promised-7000-new-jobs-to-get-tax-break-it-cut-23000-jobs-instead/.

101 Anonymous Commenters, “Thread Regarding AT&T Inc. Layoffs: Workforce 2020 Program,” TheLayoff.Com, February 18, 2019, https://www.thelayoff.com/t/Dhdcpyx.

102 Anonymous Commenters, “Thread Regarding AT&T Inc. Layoffs: Any Advice For a Recent College Grad/TDP,” TheLayoff.Com, February 15, 2019, https://www.thelayoff.com/t/Dhdcpyx.

103 Ave Rio, “AT&T: Committed to the Future,” Chief Learning Officer, May 24, 2018, https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2018/05/24/att-committed-future/.

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