It's what Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chairman and chief executive, claims is necessary, at least as reported by the NYT.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/techno...pt-or-else.html
In an ambitious corporate education program that started about two years ago, he is offering to pay for classes (at least some of them) to help employees modernize their skills. But there’s a catch: They have to take these classes on their own time and sometimes pay for them with their own money.
To Mr. Stephenson, it should be an easy choice for most workers: Learn new skills or find your career choices are very limited.
“There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop,” he said in a recent interview at AT&T’s Dallas headquarters. People who do not spend five to 10 hours a week in online learning, he added, “will obsolete themselves with the technology.”
Kevin? He admires his younger brother, but he is among the many AT&T lifers who are not that keen to participate in this reinvention of old Ma Bell. “I’m riding the copper train all the way down,” he said.
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Personally, I've found it necessary to spend 5-10 hrs/wk in some kind learning every year of my career. It's nice when someone else pays the bill for it, but the quality of online training is low, usually delayed by years after I need the information, and isolated from a heterogeneous reality. A lot of times I'm reading spec sheets and bug reports; sometimes I'm writing up things that appear later in a vendor's solutions.
Anyway, Mr. Randall Stephenson's saying to 280,000 of his that this is your future. I'd be inclined to ignore what he says because of poor customer service from the company in the past, but if I worked there I'd have to be thinking about it. At least thinking about how I can get "online training" credit for all the things I do that are too new or out of scope to be trained online for.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/techno...pt-or-else.html
In an ambitious corporate education program that started about two years ago, he is offering to pay for classes (at least some of them) to help employees modernize their skills. But there’s a catch: They have to take these classes on their own time and sometimes pay for them with their own money.
To Mr. Stephenson, it should be an easy choice for most workers: Learn new skills or find your career choices are very limited.
“There is a need to retool yourself, and you should not expect to stop,” he said in a recent interview at AT&T’s Dallas headquarters. People who do not spend five to 10 hours a week in online learning, he added, “will obsolete themselves with the technology.”
Kevin? He admires his younger brother, but he is among the many AT&T lifers who are not that keen to participate in this reinvention of old Ma Bell. “I’m riding the copper train all the way down,” he said.
-----
Personally, I've found it necessary to spend 5-10 hrs/wk in some kind learning every year of my career. It's nice when someone else pays the bill for it, but the quality of online training is low, usually delayed by years after I need the information, and isolated from a heterogeneous reality. A lot of times I'm reading spec sheets and bug reports; sometimes I'm writing up things that appear later in a vendor's solutions.
Anyway, Mr. Randall Stephenson's saying to 280,000 of his that this is your future. I'd be inclined to ignore what he says because of poor customer service from the company in the past, but if I worked there I'd have to be thinking about it. At least thinking about how I can get "online training" credit for all the things I do that are too new or out of scope to be trained online for.