8 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW FALL 2019 SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
figuring out smart ways to engage on this
issue — to the advantage of both individ-
uals and the businesses themselves. Here
are three pioneering examples that, al-
though different in their approaches,
together begin to set the scene for what
could become a full-scale transformation.
Re-skilling in
Unexpected Places
The leadership team at Microsoft has made
it a significant business imperative to ex-
pand the provision of the company’s cloud
services. Making this a reality has meant
building data centers in places both popu-
lous, like Dublin, Ireland, and remote, like
Boydton, Virginia (population about 400),
and Des Moines, Iowa (just over 200,000).
The crucial job skills for these new locations
are in data center management, with
particular responsibilities in systems
administration and troubleshooting.
These are tough skills to recruit for,
and they’re unlikely to exist in the smaller
local populations in which some of these
centers are based. What’s more, few cur-
rent Microsoft employees want to relocate
to data locations like these. When they
do, the retention rates tend to be poor.
The Microsoft team embraced this chal-
lenge by expanding its view of who could
do these jobs and deciding to help create
new pools of talent in each local commu-
nity. Portia Wu, Microsoft’s managing
director of U.S. public policy, told me that
the key has been to bring different stake-
holders together. For instance, for the
Boydton and Des Moines locations, the
company has worked with local commu-
nity colleges in southern Virginia and
Iowa t o create new Microsoft Data Center
Academies (DCAs). These schools train
students to work in Microsoft facilities and
other businesses with similar IT needs.
Students have been supported by more
than $315,000 in Microsoft scholarships.
Each DCA has run programs with co-
horts of between 15 and 20 students, and
to date more than 200 students have
graduated. Some joined Microsoft,
while others took their skills to related
companies, helping to grow the overall
technology environment in these regions.Upskilling Using Technology
Deepening existing skills in new ways is
often required when the routine tasks of
a job become automated.
This is what has occurred, for example,
in the role of the bank teller: Many tellers
today are using some of their freed-up
time to become more active ambassadors
for the bank, gently cross-selling custom-
ers by suggesting other bank products.
This “human” part of the job requires
high levels of interpersonal skills such
as empathy, listening, and judgment.
These are fiendishly difficult skills to
develop at scale. Unlike many cognitive
skills, social skills cannot be learned in a
rule-based way — there is no specifiable
path to social effectiveness. Building job-
related social skills for a work environment
requires an immersive learning experience,
rehearsed in situations as close as possible
to the real job, with lots of opportunities
for practice. This kind of skill development
is essentially a process of trial and error,
where we behave in a certain way, get feed-
back through subtle social cues, and try
again. Practice creates the muscle of habit.
It is this complexity that has dogged
efforts to scale upskilling. But new pilots
demonstrate that this sort of wide-scale
training is possible. These training
programs don’t rely on expensive,
classroom-based coaching, using instead
a combination of virtual reality, artificial
intelligence, and human trainers.
The technology learning group Mursion,
for instance, helps develop complex human
skills such as empathy by giving people in
training a chance to listen to and interact
with a difficult customer or employee. It’s a
classic training process — but in this case,
the difficult customer or employee is avirtual-reality avatar. CEO Mark Atkinson
told me that his company’s design team has
figured out how to simulate a stressful
working environment in such a plausible
way that it fools the brain into believing the
VR experience is real.
Trainees are given a scenario such
as facilitating a conversation to hear all
sides and help a difficult employee inter-
act better with colleagues. Trainees are
encouraged to practice across a number
of contexts, trying out different tactics
with an avatar who responds back in an
AI-driven conversation. They receive
feedback and measure their progress in
creating the fluency of conversation that
is so crucial to high-level social skills.
Corporations have begun using this
training at scale. The U.S.-based hotel
company Best Western International, for
instance, used the Mursion system to up-
skill more than 35,000 employees in how
to better express empathy for customers
and take the initiative to immediately
solve customer problems.Leveraging the
Wisdom of Age
The deep, tacit knowledge of how to per-
form a task is often held in the minds of
experienced workers, in what is termed
crystalline intelligence. Many organizations
see the value of capturing this knowledge
and passing it on — but coaching time is
often in short supply.
This was the challenge for the U.S.
telecom company Verizon. Its field-based
technicians are called upon to support
both new equipment and legacy technolo-
gies, such as the use of copper wire to
transmit communications signals. Though
older systems are declining in use, there is
a crucial transition period before these
legacy technologies become obsolete.
For Michael Sunderman, Verizon’s
executive director of global learning and
development, one of the ways forward was
to create trials that use the tacit knowledgeFRONTIERS
Pioneering Approaches to Re-skilling and Upskilling (Continued from page 7)