AT&T's Workforce 2020

I am duly impressed by AT&T’s Workforce 2020, wherein the Company identified the skills it needed to compete in the future, and created a blueprint for sourcing them ***internally*** This entailed collapsing 250+ traditional roles into 80 more integrated future roles, and clarifying to employees that they had first dibs on those roles, provided that they spent their own time (sometimes money) to acquire the skills for same. This is a brilliant strategy, because hiring for skills in an age where technology evolves so rapidly would be futile, and engaging in traditional training and skills development would be prohibitive. It also aligns with the idea that we are all responsible for our skills and careers, and companies can only provide and environment to for us to exercise that responsibility, nothing more. In the long run, this type of approach might return us to the so-called 'golden age' of employment, where you could potentially spend your entire career with a single company, because the internal ecosystem within the [sufficiently large] company will approximate the external market in terms of creative-destruction and related opportunities for advancement.