Hello everyone,
From the book Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman.
Added Donovan: “We have employees here who want to make the pivot—employees who built this company that they would die for—and we need to give them the opportunity to pivot. Many of these were traditionally blue-collar folks, who just finished high school, and we need to constantly retrain them to work in a networked house.”
To act on that bargain, AT&T five years ago asked all 107,000 of its managers (which is how it categorizes all its professional employees not covered by union contracts, regardless of whether they are a supervisor or an individual contributor) to set up internal profiles similar to LinkedIn accounts, detailing their job experiences, skills, education, certifications, and specialties. Today, 90 percent of the 110,000 managers have done so. Now when a new job opens up, the first thing Blase’s team does is check those profiles for internal candidates who have the necessary skill sets. At the same time, the company posts the hot new jobs and identifies where they are located, the exact skills needed to get those jobs, and how to get the training for those skills .
To help deliver on the latter, AT&T partnered with many universities—from Georgia Tech to Notre Dame to Oklahoma to Stanford to online universities such as Udacity and Coursera—to provide affordable graduate and undergraduate degrees or just specialized training for each one of the skills it needs. AT&T’s only requirement is that you take the courses on your own time , but the company will reimburse your tuition up to eight thousand dollars a year (or more, for certain courses) and thirty thousand dollars over your lifetime at the company.
Does “and identifies where they are located” mean "and describes/indicates where people who will be accepted for these jobs will have to work?
Thank you.