納撒尼爾·邁耶的舊辦公室，坐落在夏洛特市外龐大的AT&T網(wǎng)絡可靠性中心猶如海洋般的格子間之中。2013年，32歲的邁耶仍然在他入職時進駐的同一棟設施工作。19歲那年，他追隨父親的腳步，加入這家彼時還叫南貝爾的公司，從事技術(shù)員工作。在這家電信巨頭供職十多年，并獲得多次晉升之后，邁耶的工作仍然圍繞著同樣的基本技術(shù)。他日復一日地監(jiān)測大規(guī)模交換機（它們運行著一個分布在20多個州的老式電話網(wǎng)絡），遠程測試新設備，更新數(shù)據(jù)庫。

然而，隨著時間的推移，邁耶開始覺得這是一份沒有前途的工作。他之所以有這種感覺，是因為事實如此。

邁耶當時不知道，在千里之外，位于達拉斯市中心的AT＆T總部大樓里，最高領導層已經(jīng)意識到，這家公司有很多像邁耶這樣一直跟舊電話線和其他過時技術(shù)打交道的員工。內(nèi)部研究發(fā)現(xiàn)，在AT&T的24萬名員工中，有多達10萬人正在從事該公司在未來十年可能不再需要的工作。

彼時的AT&T正處在巨大的變革陣痛中。現(xiàn)在仍然如此。數(shù)十年來，客戶一直在斷開他們的固話線路，移動網(wǎng)絡流量則呈現(xiàn)爆炸式增長。自蘋果公司于2007年推出iPhone手機以來，AT&T的數(shù)據(jù)使用量已經(jīng)飆漲了250,000%。

隨著各大企業(yè)在辦公室，以及亞馬遜和微軟等公司運營的云服務平臺之間傳送日益巨大的數(shù)據(jù)，AT&T的企業(yè)級業(yè)務也開始蓬勃發(fā)展。現(xiàn)在，AT&T網(wǎng)絡每天處理130 PB的數(shù)據(jù)——相當于國會圖書館數(shù)字館藏的40多倍。

有一段時間，該公司試圖更新其現(xiàn)有的技術(shù)零件，投入數(shù)十億美元購買更多的交換機，增添新的手機信號塔，并鋪設更多的光纖電纜。但這番努力并沒有長時間地遏制這股潮流。

2012年，這家擁有132年歷史的公司啟動了一個更具戲劇化的解決方案：到2020年，AT&T將用計算機軟件系統(tǒng)替換75%的硬件。這是一項極其艱巨的任務。比如，該公司仍然擁有一套服役40年之久，每天處理1.28億個800免費電話的交換機，但它的計算能力還不如一對iPhone 7手機。

迄今為止，借助分布于世界各地的近100萬臺“盒子”（即執(zhí)行諸如路由數(shù)據(jù)包或阻止黑客襲擊這類功能的專用計算機），AT&T已經(jīng)將34%的網(wǎng)絡轉(zhuǎn)化為軟件定義的模型，并計劃在2017年末實現(xiàn)55%的轉(zhuǎn)化率。“今年我們將達到臨界點。”該公司首席戰(zhàn)略官約翰·多諾萬說。“開弓沒有回頭箭。”

然而，比更換硬件更難的是，他們必須找人來運行和維護它。2013年，當時負責監(jiān)管技術(shù)和服務部門（該部門雇傭了包括邁耶在內(nèi)的13.5萬名工人）的多諾萬，與人力資源部總裁比爾·布拉斯聚在一起鼓搗數(shù)據(jù)。盡管他的員工中只有50%的人接受過科學、技術(shù)、工程和數(shù)學培訓，到2020年，該公司預計需要多達95%的員工擁有這類背景。

首席執(zhí)行官蘭德爾·斯蒂芬森表示，“很明顯，我們的員工還沒有掌握運行大規(guī)模軟件基礎設施所需的技能。我們面臨一個巨大的人力資源問題。”

為解決這個問題，AT&T啟動了一項或許是美國企業(yè)史上最雄心勃勃的再培訓計劃。這種人力資源投資，是員工們熱愛這家公司的原因之一：今年，AT&T首次躋身《財富》最適宜工作的100家公司榜單。盡管如此，這家公司仍然面臨讓人望而生畏的挑戰(zhàn)：2015年收購DirecTV之后，AT&T現(xiàn)擁有近27萬名員工，堪稱全球最大的企業(yè)雇主之一。其目標是，到2020年重新培訓其中的10萬人從事新工作。這項被該公司稱為“勞動力2020倡議”的工程，是一筆需要耗費逾十億美元的投資，涉及一系列新項目、新設施和旨在推動員工再教育的協(xié)同努力。

如果AT&T能夠成功這項浩大的工程，它就將避免大規(guī)模裁員，并可能讓其整個軟件網(wǎng)絡戰(zhàn)略獲得一項關鍵的競爭優(yōu)勢。

如果不能，就像斯蒂芬森自己承認的那樣，AT&T將成為一家陷入長期衰落的公司。

技能差距

AT&T致力于解決的技能差距，一點都不罕見。從許多方面看，該公司與美國經(jīng)濟面臨的是同一道難題。根據(jù)非營利性組織“國家技能聯(lián)盟”提供的數(shù)據(jù)，需要熟練掌握計算機的所謂“中等技能”工作占美國所有就業(yè)崗位的54%，但只有44%的工人擁有這些技能。人力資源機構(gòu)萬寶盛華集團對4.2萬家公司進行的調(diào)查發(fā)現(xiàn)，2016年，有多達40%的雇主難以找到人才來填補空缺的工作。這是2007年以來的最高數(shù)字。

部分問題是，各大公司向來不愿意挖掘內(nèi)部潛力來滿足它們對技術(shù)工人的需求。勞動部的統(tǒng)計數(shù)據(jù)顯示，2001年至2016年，作為在職培訓的最佳方式之一，企業(yè)學徒計劃的數(shù)量下降了三分之一。根據(jù)沃頓商學院教授彼得·卡佩利的研究，或許是考慮到員工的平均任職時間縮短，企業(yè)提供的培訓比過去更少。他發(fā)現(xiàn)，1979年，年輕工人每年平均獲得21/2周的培訓。幾十年后，這一數(shù)字已下降至僅僅11個小時。

其結(jié)果是一個利害攸關的經(jīng)濟挑戰(zhàn)。“我們不能讓人們的技能落后于前沿，否則的話，他們將被替換。”馬薩諸塞大學阿默斯特分校教授，《美國再培訓》(Reskilling America)一書的合著者凱瑟琳·紐曼說。“文化資本被不斷浪費，由此形成一個惡性循環(huán)。”

一個亮點：萬寶盛華集團估計，在2015年，只有20%的公司專注于培訓自己的員工；然而，截至2017年，有一半以上的公司報告稱，他們將專注于員工培訓。

如果你想了解這些公司將如何培養(yǎng)自己的員工團隊，以滿足它們對于熟練勞動力日益增長的需求，AT&T的再培訓努力或許是一個極好的案例。其龐大的培訓規(guī)模不僅有望避免數(shù)以千計的裁員，而且有可能成為面臨人才短缺的其他企業(yè)效仿的榜樣。紐曼說，像許多公司一樣，AT&T“意識到這種技術(shù)提升對他們的未來至關重要。”

AT&T并非一開始就構(gòu)想出這個解決方案。大約五年前，最初的問題是，如何應對流量迅速增長而收入增長不能保持同步這種情況。在愈演愈烈的價格戰(zhàn)中，移動電話市場越來越接近飽和點。

因此，首席執(zhí)行官蘭德爾·斯蒂芬森召集約翰·多諾萬商討這個問題。作為斯蒂芬森麾下為數(shù)不多的幾位沒有貝爾系統(tǒng)公司工作背景的直接下屬之一，時任AT&T首席技術(shù)官的多諾萬來自硅谷，深諳其文化，并擁有互聯(lián)網(wǎng)基礎設施領域的背景。個性穩(wěn)重，目光如炬的多諾萬，最初為移動數(shù)據(jù)的增長方式想象了三種情境，從迅速增長到天文數(shù)字般的增長。2012年，他告訴斯蒂芬森，“情境三”，即最極端的一種，即將成為現(xiàn)實。

由于斯蒂芬森立即排除了向客戶大幅漲價這一選項，多諾萬需要找到一種方法來降低AT&T傳統(tǒng)網(wǎng)絡的成本，同時還需要為新的移動和業(yè)務平臺增加巨大的容量。關鍵是，所有這一切必須以不增加資本預算為前提。

該公司起初的應對方式是軟件升級。對于AT&T來說，大規(guī)模技術(shù)升級意味著不再依賴諸如諾基亞、愛立信和阿爾卡特-朗訊這類大型電信設備制造商。AT&T不能坐等設備制造商加快創(chuàng)新步伐，制造更快的產(chǎn)品。隨著半導體創(chuàng)新消退，整個產(chǎn)業(yè)頻頻陷入資金困境，這一動態(tài)已顯著放緩。這家運營商將不得不依靠自身的力量，從根本上簡化其數(shù)據(jù)和交換中心的硬件。通用的低成本計算機盒可以代替專用于特定功能的專有設備。所有功能將由在通用計算機上高效運行的軟件應用提供，而不是一組盒子來路由數(shù)據(jù)，另一組建立安全防火墻，還有一組用來創(chuàng)建加密專用網(wǎng)絡。

按照技術(shù)標準來衡量，一些正在更新的硬件屬于史前水平。在舊系統(tǒng)中，當AT&T想升級的時候，比如安裝更快的路由器，它必須在物理意義上更換所有舊設備。目前負責企業(yè)級業(yè)務營銷的AT&T 資深員工史蒂夫·麥高解釋說，“我們將不得不動用叉車拉出舊設備，放入新設備。實際上，我們真的稱之為‘叉車升級’。”

在新系統(tǒng)下，容量升級只需通過增添更多的普通計算機就能迅速達成。技術(shù)開發(fā)總裁梅麗莎·阿諾爾迪說，在極端情況下，向網(wǎng)絡添加一個主要功能可能需要18個月，現(xiàn)在只需一周。阿諾爾迪負責監(jiān)管該公司80多個全球數(shù)據(jù)中心站點。她說，“我們所有人都沒有這種技術(shù)背景。”

接下來，AT&T必須解決其員工問題。隨著新系統(tǒng)相繼鋪就，多諾萬意識到，填補成千上萬的軟件和工程工作來構(gòu)建和管理新的AT&T網(wǎng)絡，可能是一項不可能完成的任務。但如果該公司不可能招募到如此多技術(shù)工人，唯一真正可行的選擇就是向現(xiàn)有工人傳授如何做這些新工作。

在多諾萬和人力資源主管布拉斯向首席執(zhí)行官解釋了人手短缺的嚴重性之后，斯蒂芬森準許他們采取戲劇性行動。他們需要一個能夠為工人傳授新技能的全新培訓系統(tǒng)。此外，隨著AT&T向軟件變遷，這個系統(tǒng)還要幫助這些工人制定他們未來可能需要做出的決定。

為了創(chuàng)建該系統(tǒng)，布拉斯特意拜訪時任AT&T北卡羅來納州分公司總裁辛西婭·馬歇爾。作為另一位終生獻身于貝爾的資深員工，馬歇爾是她們家走出的第一位大學生，畢業(yè)于加州大學伯克利分校，于1981年加入太平洋貝爾公司。在隨后的30年，她幾乎從事過所有的工作，從爬電話桿，到運營總部事務，再到游說州長批準兼并交易，不一而足。她現(xiàn)在是AT&T人力資源高級副總裁兼首席多元化官。馬歇爾回憶說，這項使命極其清晰：“我們不只是告訴那些工程師他們可以離開，另一個人會來做他們的工作。”她獲得的指令是“我們必須接納這些人。”

“勞動力2020倡議”從徹底重組公司組織圖開始。馬歇爾將這家電話公司的2000個職位簡化為擁有類似技能，數(shù)量少得多，職能更廣泛的崗位。比如，17種不同的程序類職位轉(zhuǎn)變?yōu)椤败浖こ處煛薄Ｃ總€新職位都與特定的技能或能力相關聯(lián)，比如精通特定軟件開發(fā)語言，或擁有擔任項目領導者所需的技術(shù)。

接下來的任務就是解釋這些變化，并幫助員工探索這個全新的局面。AT&T創(chuàng)建了一個名為“職業(yè)情報”的在線系統(tǒng)，讓員工瀏覽可能獲得的工作，了解該工作要求的技能，有多少職位空缺，調(diào)查這部分業(yè)務的增長或縮小前景，并查閱潛在的薪水區(qū)間。

然而，對于員工來說，其缺點在于他們必須主動進行再培訓。一些工作可以在上班期間完成，但該公司提供的全新在線課程涉及更加廣泛的內(nèi)容，需要員工付出大量的下班時間。鑒于一些無法在家中騰出培訓時間的員工可能會發(fā)現(xiàn)，他們的工作正在被淘汰，經(jīng)濟社會學家紐曼指出，該項目“并非完全令人愉快，這一點令人印象深刻。”（在《財富》最適宜工作的100家公司榜單上，AT&T的員工培訓時間相對偏高，人均每年約75個小時。）

再培訓工程

在北卡羅來納州，供職于網(wǎng)絡可靠性中心的技術(shù)專家納撒尼爾·邁耶已經(jīng)習慣于看到許多經(jīng)驗豐富的同事慢慢消失——順利退休，沒有被替換。在他周圍的書架上，擺滿了一些曾經(jīng)作為網(wǎng)絡基礎設施的設備的培訓材料和原理圖，比如1970年代的1AESS交換機。邁耶逐漸發(fā)現(xiàn)，他正在花費更多的時間與薩克拉門托、堪薩斯城和密爾沃基的AT&T員工進行電話溝通，與員工數(shù)量不斷減少的夏洛特辦公室的交流則越來越少。

然后，在2013年5月，邁耶聽聞AT&T即將啟動一項大規(guī)模的再培訓計劃。AT&T聯(lián)手喬治亞理工學院及其位列全美前茅的計算機專業(yè)，正在推出一個專門面向像他這樣的技術(shù)專家，完全在線的計算機科學碩士課程。

差不多在第一時間，邁耶申請成為首批學員。他早就意識到自己需要一個研究生學位來獲得他想要的那類計算機科學工作，以脫離夏洛特辦公室。邁耶此前一直考慮辭職，注冊成為北卡羅來納或北卡羅來納州立大學的全日制學生。現(xiàn)如今，他不僅能夠參與喬治亞理工學院的在線課程，而且無需支付學費——AT&T負責全部費用。“這正是太美妙了。我獲得了碩士學位，而且沒有背負任何債務。”

但這并不容易。邁耶不得不利用下班時間參加必修課程，同時還得完成日常工作，并幫助太太照顧兩個小孩。在線和校內(nèi)學位課程使用的學習材料完全相同，并有著同樣細致的要求。邁耶需要觀看視頻課程，做家庭作業(yè)，并完成廣泛的項目。但在線課程的靈活性允許他在晚上和周末擠出學習時間。此外，他迅速地承認，“我的太太給予我很大的幫助。”

AT&T表示，讓員工承擔起自我提高的責任是一個特色，而不是錯誤。“你可以選擇你的未來，你如何抵達那里，以及你將多么積極地追求這個目標。如果你不選擇加入，你將無法使用所有的工具，也自然不會融入AT&T的愿景。”

為了提供進一步的鼓勵，并明確AT&T多么嚴肅地看待這個項目，該系統(tǒng)也會評估員工當前的技能，并安排這些員工從事他們在未來幾年內(nèi)借助額外培訓有可能獲得的工作。如果愿意的話，員工可選擇不同的未來目標。與期望技能相匹配的心儀工作出現(xiàn)時，他們還可以讓系統(tǒng)提醒自己。

34歲的卡拉·里維斯就是這樣獲得晉升的。在該公司的零售店工作八年之后，她有意轉(zhuǎn)向更具技術(shù)含量的工作。里維斯將她現(xiàn)有的技能和興趣輸入系統(tǒng)，后者隨即建議她爭取成為一位“流程管理員”。這是AT&T新設立的職位之一，其職責包括領導一個項目團隊，擔任調(diào)解人，并幫助該團隊制定決策，與公司其他部門無縫合作。

里維斯此前從未接受過這方面的正規(guī)培訓。所以，她轉(zhuǎn)向AT&T為再培訓項目創(chuàng)立的短期在線課程目錄。這個與Udacity合作開發(fā)的培訓項目，已經(jīng)幫助像里維斯這樣的員工完成了逾250個迷你課程。如果某位員工完成了一套特定領域（比如網(wǎng)絡安全或項目管理）的課程，他或她的個人資料頁面就將獲得一枚虛擬“勛章”。到目前為止，AT&T已經(jīng)頒發(fā)了大約17.3萬枚勛章。去年三月，里維斯成功地過渡到她的全新工作。

再培訓項目的另一個關鍵環(huán)節(jié)是AT&T的實習計劃，也就是讓獲得額外技能的員工在一個有限的實習期嘗試從事新工作。供職時間長達20年的資深員工蘇珊·比克，正是利用這個實習計劃從計費系統(tǒng)轉(zhuǎn)入軟件界面開發(fā)部門，擔任流程管理員。完成這一轉(zhuǎn)變，只需要她從AT&T圣路易斯辦公樓的7樓搬入22樓。

邁耶早已成為一位大數(shù)據(jù)科學家，這份新工作需要他更加頻繁地飛赴各地。他如今在得克薩斯州普萊諾市的AT&T辦公室工作。熔巖燈和Nerf玩具槍等奇異設備，讓這里看上去更像是一家新潮的硅谷初創(chuàng)企業(yè)。邁耶看上去非常自在。他手捧一個“我愛我”主題咖啡杯，不時地引用電影《黑客帝國》的劇情，激動地解釋他是如何挖掘此前躺在各類數(shù)據(jù)庫，從未被使用的海量信息，來確認一些過去被AT&T互聯(lián)網(wǎng)和有線電視服務忽略或錯過的潛在客戶。“我真心覺得這里棒極了。”他笑著說。

首席執(zhí)行官斯蒂芬森希望，在這項培訓計劃完成之后，AT&T將獲得一支更加靈活，更有能力應對未來競爭對手的員工隊伍。然而，AT&T的轉(zhuǎn)型之路才剛剛過半。如果該公司希望完成在未來三年擁有一支技術(shù)精湛的勞動力大軍這一目標，它還需要再培訓成千上萬的員工。此外，超過一半網(wǎng)絡仍然需要轉(zhuǎn)移到軟件平臺。

但他們已經(jīng)看到進步的跡象。去年，AT&T用內(nèi)部人選填充了4萬個空缺崗位的40%以上。該公司估計，有多達14萬人正在接受某種形式的培訓，這將有助于他們迎接未來新工作的挑戰(zhàn)。然后，根據(jù)該公司的預測，如果電信業(yè)以目前的顛覆和發(fā)展節(jié)奏奔涌向前，在短短4年后，這些剛剛“充完電”的員工將不得不為另一種新工作做好準備。

斯蒂芬森說，“技術(shù)變遷似乎已經(jīng)成為常態(tài)。但隨著技術(shù)的變革，誰能以如此大的規(guī)模推動員工團隊完成技術(shù)升級呢？”無論是對于AT&T，還是對于美國所有的勞動力來說，這都是一個更加重要的問題。這位CEO表示，其答案將決定一家公司究竟是茁壯成長，還是淪為歷史的塵埃。（財富中文網(wǎng)）

作者：Aaron Pressman

譯者：Kevin

本文刊發(fā)于2017年3月15日的《財富》雜志。

Nathaniel Meyer’s old office was nestled in a sea of high-walled cubicles in a hulking AT&T network reliability center outside Charlotte. In 2013, at 32, Meyer was working at the same facility where he had started when he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the company, then BellSouth, at age 19 as a technician. After more than a decade with the telecom giant, and several promotions, Meyer’s work still revolved around the same basic technologies. He spent his days monitoring the massive switches that ran an old-fashioned telephone network scattered across more than 20 states, testing new equipment remotely, and updating databases with any changes.

Increasingly, though, Meyer was beginning to feel like he was in a dead-end job. He felt that way because, well, he was.

Meyer didn’t know it at the time, but a thousand miles away, in the executive offices of AT&T’s headquarters in downtown Dallas, the company’s leaders were realizing that they had a lot of people like Meyer working with old phone lines and other technology that were quickly becoming outdated. Internal research found that 100,000 of AT&T’s 240,000 workers in 2013 were in roles that the company probably wouldn’t need in a decade.

AT&T was, and is, in the throes of a huge transformation. Customers have been disconnecting their landlines for decades, while traffic on the company’s mobile network has exploded. Data usage at AT&T has increased 250,000% since the 2007 introduction of the iPhone.

Its corporate business has also boomed, as companies zap increasingly huge amounts of data among offices and the cloud-server farms run by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. Now, every day AT&T’s network handles 130 petabytes of data—equal to more than 40 times the digital holdings of the Library of Congress.

For a while, the company tried updating its existing technology piecemeal, pouring billions of dollars into buying more switches, adding new cell towers, and laying more fiber-optic cables. But that didn’t stem the tide for long.

By 2012 the 132-year-old company had landed on a much more dramatic solution: replacing 75% of its hardware with computer-operated software systems by 2020. The task was immense. AT&T still has one set of 40-year-old switches, for example, that handle the 128 million 800-number calls a day, all with less computing power than a pair of iPhone 7s.

With almost 1 million boxes in service around the world—dedicated computers that perform functions like routing data packets or blocking hackers—AT&T has so far managed to convert 34% of the network to the software-defined model, with a goal of 55% by the end of 2017. “This year we will have hit the tipping point,” says John Donovan, AT&T’s chief strategy officer. “There’s no turning back.”

But even more difficult than replacing the hardware is finding the people to run and maintain it. In 2013, Donovan, who was then responsible for overseeing the company’s technology and services unit that employs Meyer and 135,000 other workers, got together with human resources chief Bill Blase. Together they crunched the data and found that, although only about 50% of his staff had training in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, the projected need for employees with that training by 2020 would hit 95%.

“It became clear that our people did not possess the skill set required to run a massively scaled software infrastructure,” says CEO Randall Stephenson. “We were facing a massive people issue.”

To address the problem, AT&T has embarked on what may be the most ambitious retraining program in corporate American history. That investment in its people is part of why its workers love it: This year, for the first time, AT&T made Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. Still, the challenge facing the company is formidable: With nearly 270,000 employees after its acquisition of DirecTV in 2015, AT&T has one of the largest workforces in the world. By 2020 it aims to retrain 100,000 of those people for radically new jobs. The project, referred to at the company as the Workforce 2020 initiative, is a more than billion-dollar investment that comes with a suite of new programs, new facilities, and a concerted push toward worker reeducation.

If AT&T can pull it off, it will avoid sweeping layoffs and perhaps give its entire software network strategy a critical competitive edge.

Meyer didn’t know it at the time, but a thousand miles away, in the executive offices of AT&T’s headquarters in downtown Dallas, the company’s leaders were realizing that they had a lot of people like Meyer working with old phone lines and other technology that were quickly becoming outdated. Internal research found that 100,000 of AT&T’s 240,000 workers in 2013 were in roles that the company probably wouldn’t need in a decade.

AT&T was, and is, in the throes of a huge transformation. Customers have been disconnecting their landlines for decades, while traffic on the company’s mobile network has exploded. Data usage at AT&T has increased 250,000% since the 2007 introduction of the iPhone.

Its corporate business has also boomed, as companies zap increasingly huge amounts of data among offices and the cloud-server farms run by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. Now, every day AT&T’s network handles 130 petabytes of data—equal to more than 40 times the digital holdings of the Library of Congress.

For a while, the company tried updating its existing technology piecemeal, pouring billions of dollars into buying more switches, adding new cell towers, and laying more fiber-optic cables. But that didn’t stem the tide for long.

By 2012 the 132-year-old company had landed on a much more dramatic solution: replacing 75% of its hardware with computer-operated software systems by 2020. The task was immense. AT&T still has one set of 40-year-old switches, for example, that handle the 128 million 800-number calls a day, all with less computing power than a pair of iPhone 7s.

With almost 1 million boxes in service around the world—dedicated computers that perform functions like routing data packets or blocking hackers—AT&T has so far managed to convert 34% of the network to the software-defined model, with a goal of 55% by the end of 2017. “This year we will have hit the tipping point,” says John Donovan, AT&T’s chief strategy officer. “There’s no turning back.”

But even more difficult than replacing the hardware is finding the people to run and maintain it. In 2013, Donovan, who was then responsible for overseeing the company’s technology and services unit that employs Meyer and 135,000 other workers, got together with human resources chief Bill Blase. Together they crunched the data and found that, although only about 50% of his staff had training in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, the projected need for employees with that training by 2020 would hit 95%.

“It became clear that our people did not possess the skill set required to run a massively scaled software infrastructure,” says CEO Randall Stephenson. “We were facing a massive people issue.”

To address the problem, AT&T has embarked on what may be the most ambitious retraining program in corporate American history. That investment in its people is part of why its workers love it: This year, for the first time, AT&T made Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. Still, the challenge facing the company is formidable: With nearly 270,000 employees after its acquisition of DirecTV in 2015, AT&T has one of the largest workforces in the world. By 2020 it aims to retrain 100,000 of those people for radically new jobs. The project, referred to at the company as the Workforce 2020 initiative, is a more than billion-dollar investment that comes with a suite of new programs, new facilities, and a concerted push toward worker reeducation.

If AT&T can pull it off, it will avoid sweeping layoffs and perhaps give its entire software network strategy a critical competitive edge.

If it can’t, as Stephenson himself admits, AT&T will be a company in long-term decline.

The skills gap AT&T is now addressing is far from unique. In many ways, the company’s conundrum is the same one facing the larger American economy. According to the nonprofit National Skills Coalition, “middle skill” jobs like those that require computer proficiency account for 54% of positions in the U.S., but only 44% of workers have those skills. One survey of 42,000 companies by HR consultancy Manpower Group found that 40% of employers in 2016 were struggling to find talent to fill available jobs—the highest number since 2007.

Part of the problem is that companies have historically been resistant to look inside their own workforce to meet the demand for technical workers. The number of corporate apprenticeship programs, frequently cited as one of the best ways to get workers on-the-job training, fell by more than one-third to 21,339 from 2001 to 2016, according to Department of Labor statistics. And businesses—perhaps looking at the shrinking average tenure of their employees—provide less training than they used to, according to research by Wharton School professor Peter Cappelli. In 1979 the average young worker received 21?2 weeks per year of training, he found. A few decades later the average had fallen to just 11 hours.

The result is a high-stakes economic challenge. “We cannot afford to let people’s skills fall behind the cutting edge, or they will be displaced,” says Katherine Newman, provost of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and coauthor of Reskilling America. “It becomes a cycle of wasted cultural capital.”

One bright spot: Manpower Group estimates that only 20% of firms were focusing on training their own employees in 2015; however, as of 2017, more than half reported that they will focus on training.

For an indication of how—and if—those companies will manage to develop their workforces to meet the growing demand for skilled laborers, a good place to look may be AT&T’s retraining push. The sheer scale of the company’s programs not only has the potential to avoid thousands of layoffs, but also could serve as a model for other businesses facing their own talent shortages. Like many companies, says Newman, AT&T “has realized that this upskilling is critical to their future.”

AT&T didn’t come to this solution immediately. About five years ago, the initial problem was how to deal with the skyrocketing traffic while revenue growth wasn’t keeping pace. The landline business was dying, and the mobile market was nearing a saturation point amid growing price wars.

So CEO Randall Stephenson brought the problem to John Donovan. One of Stephenson’s only direct reports who had not spent his career in the Bell System, Donovan, then AT&T’s chief technology officer, had come from Silicon Valley and was steeped in its culture, with a background in Internet infrastructure. A rock-steady presence with a laser stare, Donovan had initially imagined three scenarios for the way mobile data growth might play out, ranging from quick to astronomical. In 2012 he told Stephenson that scenario three—his most extreme case—was the one that was coming true.

With Stephenson immediately ruling out big price hikes for customers, Donovan needed to find a way to reduce the cost of AT&T’s legacy network while adding huge amounts of capacity to its newer mobile and business platforms, all without any increase in its capital budget.

First, the company responded with its software push. The wholesale update of AT&T’s technology was a risky move away from depending on the big telecom equipment makers like Nokia, Ericsson, and Alcatel-Lucent. AT&T couldn’t wait for the gearmakers to innovate and make faster products, a dynamic that had slowed as semiconductor innovation ebbed and the industry had suffered from repeated financial difficulties. The carrier would have to move on its own to radically simplify the hardware in its data and switching centers. Generic, lower-cost computing boxes could replace the proprietary devices that had each been dedicated to a specific function. Instead of having one set of boxes that could route data, and another bank that established a security firewall, and then yet another that created encrypted private networks, all of the functions would be provided by software applications running more efficiently on the generic computers.

Some of the hardware that was being updated was prehistoric by tech standards. In the old system, when AT&T wanted to upgrade—to install faster routers, for example—it had to physically replace all the old gear. “We would have to use a forklift—we literally called it that, a ‘forklift upgrade’—to pull out the old piece of equipment and put in the new piece of equipment,” explains Steve McGaw, an AT&T veteran who currently runs marketing for its corporate business. Some gear stayed in service for decades.

Under the new system, capacity can be increased quickly just by adding more banks of simple computers. At the extreme end, adding a major function to the network might have taken 18 months before and now can be done in a week, says Melissa Arnoldi, president of technology development, who oversees the company’s more than 80 global data-center sites. Says Arnoldi, “This isn’t technology that any of us grew up with.”

Next, AT&T must tackle its workforce issues. As the new systems rolled out, Donovan realized that filling the tens of thousands of software and engineering jobs he needed to build and manage for the new AT&T network might be an impossible task. But if the company couldn’t hire skilled workers at that scale, the only real alternative was to teach their existing workers how to do the new jobs.

After Donovan and HR chief Blase explained the severity of the shortage to the CEO, Stephenson gave his blessing to taking dramatic action. They would need a new training system capable not just of imparting new skills to workers, but also of helping those workers make decisions about which ones they might need and which would be in demand as AT&T shifted toward software.

To help create that program, Blase called on Cynthia Marshall, then the president of AT&T North Carolina. Another Bell lifer, Marshall went to the University of California at Berkeley, the first in her family to graduate from college, and started at Pacific Bell in 1981. Over the next 30 years, she had done everything from climb telephone poles to run central offices and lobby governors to approve mergers. She is now the company’s SVP of human resources and chief diversity officer. Marshall recalls that the mission was clear: “We’re not just going to tell those engineers that they can leave and somebody else is going to come do their jobs,” she says. Her mandate was “We are taking the people.”

The initiative, Workforce 2020, started with a sweeping restructuring of the company’s organizational chart. Marshall helped streamline the phone company’s 2,000 job titles into far fewer, broader categories with similar skills. Seventeen different programming-related jobs, for example, became “software engineer.” Every new title was associated with specific skills or abilities, such as knowledge of a particular software-development language or techniques for being a project leader.

Then came the task of explaining the changes and helping employees navigate the new landscape. AT&T created an online system called Career Intelligence, which allows an employee to surf through possible alternative jobs, see what skills are required, how many positions are available, investigate whether the segment is projected to grow or shrink, and view the potential salary range.

The drawback for employees, however, is that they must take the initiative for their own retraining. Some of the work can be done on the job, but the company’s new, more extensive online courses also require a large chunk of time outside work. Economic sociologist Newman calls the program “impressive in a not altogether happy way,” given that employees who can’t find time at home to participate may find that their jobs are being eliminated. (AT&T’s roughly 75 hours of annual training for employees per year averages on the high end compared with other companies on the 100 Best Companies to Work For list.)

Back in North Carolina, technologist Nathaniel Meyer was getting used to seeing many of his experienced coworkers in his network reliability center slowly disappear—retiring and not being replaced. Sitting among shelves of training materials and schematics for gear like the 1970s-era 1AESS switches that were once the foundation of the network, he gradually found that he was spending more time talking on the phone with AT&T staffers in places like Sacramento, Kansas City, and Milwaukee than with anyone in the shrinking Charlotte office.

Then, in May 2013, Meyer got wind of AT&T’s big retraining push. In partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology and its top computer science program, AT&T was rolling out a fully online master’s degree program in computer science aimed at technologists like him.

Almost immediately, Meyer applied to be in the first class. Realizing he needed a graduate degree to get the kind of computer science job he wanted to break out of the Charlotte office, he had been considering quitting work and enrolling full time at the University of North Carolina or North Carolina State. Instead, he got into the online version of Georgia Tech’s program, and AT&T footed the bill for the tuition. “It was the best of all worlds,” he says. “I got a master’s degree, and I got zero debt.”

But it wasn’t easy. Meyer had to complete the course work for the degree during off-hours, while holding down his day job and helping his wife raise two small kids. The program included all the same material and intensive requirements as an on-campus degree program. Meyer was required to watch video classes, do hours of homework, and complete extensive projects. But the online flexibility allowed him to squeeze the time into nights and weekends. Also, he’ll readily admit, “I had a lot of help from my wife.”

AT&T says putting the onus on employees to better themselves is a feature, not a bug. “You have the choice of what your future is, and how you go about getting there, and how aggressively you pursue that,” Donovan says. “If you don’t opt in, all the tools and the vision [at AT&T] aren’t going to do any good.”

To give further encouragement and make clear just how serious AT&T is about the program, the system also assesses employees’ current skills and assigns them to a specific future job that they could attain in a few years with additional training. Employees can choose a different future target if they’d like. And they can also set the program to alert them when roles of interest matching their desired skills are available.

That’s how Kara Reeves, 34, got her promotion. After working on the retail store side of the company for eight years, she decided she wanted to shift to more technical work. She input her existing skills and interests in the system, and it suggested she vie for the role of “scrum master”—one of AT&T’s new job titles, which entails leading a small team working on almost any kind of project, acting as a facilitator, and helping the group make decisions and work smoothly with other parts of the company.

Reeves had no previous formal training in that kind of project leadership, so she turned to AT&T’s vast catalog of short online courses created as part of the retraining program. Developed both internally and in conjunction with Udacity, the program has helped employees like Reeves complete over 2.5 million of the minicourses, which typically take a few hours or less. Completing a set of courses in a specific area like cybersecurity or project management grants the employee a virtual “badge” on his profile page. AT&T has given out 173,000 so far. And Reeves’ transition to her new job last March has been successful.

Another key part of the retraining effort is AT&T’s internship program, which lets workers who have added skills try out a new position for a limited test run. Susan Bick, a 20-year veteran of the company, used the program to make a jump from billing systems to scrum master for teams in the software interface development unit. To make the move, she simply relocated from the seventh floor of one of AT&T’s large offices in St. Louis to the 22nd floor.

Meyer had to travel a lot farther for his new job as a big-data scientist. He now feels and looks at home amid the lava lamps, Nerf guns, and other nerdy gadgetry in an AT&T Plano, Texas, office that looks more like a hip Menlo Park startup. Toting an “I heart me” coffee mug and making the occasional reference to the movie The Matrix, he gets excited while explaining how he sifts through the reams of information previously lying unused in various databases to identify where there might be potential customers for AT&T’s Internet and cable-TV service who have been skipped over or missed in the past. “I feel like this is an awesome place,” he says, grinning.

CEO Stephenson hopes that after the training is complete, the result will be a workforce that’s more nimble and better equipped to take on future competitors. However, AT&T is only midway through its transformation. It still has tens of thousands of employees to retrain if the company hopes to meet its goal of having a technically proficient workforce in the next three years. And more than half the network still needs to be shifted to the software platform.

But there are some signs of progress. Last year AT&T filled more than 40% of the 40,000 jobs with internal candidates. And the company estimates that 140,000 people are undergoing at least some sort of development that will prepare them for a new job in the future—and then another new job only four years after that one, if the industry speeds along at its current pace of disruption and development, according to company predictions.

“Technology shifts have become somewhat routine,” says Stephenson. “But who can transition their talent at scale as the technology changes?” That’s the more important question for both AT&T and the American workforce writ large. The answer, says the CEO, will be the difference between growth and obsolescence.

A version of this article appears in the March 15, 2017 issue of Fortune.