The Wall Street Journal - 28.10.2019

B4| Monday, October 28, 2019 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Warren Atchley, 59 years old, immersed himself in 6 a.m.-to-9 p.m. workdays to learn new skills.

DUSTIN CHAMBERS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

TECHNOLOGY WSJ.com/Tech

next several years. More than

a third said they would mostly

hire new workers with the

skills they need.

The trouble is, “you just

won’t find enough of them,”

Mr. Kerr said, especially in a

labor market already in short

supply of emerging high-tech

skills such as cloud computing

and artificial intelligence.

That was a problem for

TSYS, based in a former tex-

tile-mill hub 100 miles south-

west of Atlanta. The company’s

geography, and its lack of a

tech brand like an Amazon or

Google, made it challenging to

recruit the thousands of cloud-

skilled workers it would need.

So TSYS turned itself into a

laboratory for reskilling a

workforce en masse.

To retrain its more than

4,500-strong tech staff, or 35%

of employees, TSYS had many

of them take dozens of hours

of online courses. Many also

have gone through an immer-

sive two-week digital boot

camp, where they use the on-

line training to create a new

product or feature.

time in the cloud, helping

more recently retrained col-

leagues learn the ropes. He

has since received his certifi-

cation as an Amazon Web Ser-

vices solutions architect-asso-

ciate, which required even

more hours of studying.

“I like being out there,

learning something someone

else might not feel bold

enough to try,” Mr. Atchley

said.

Early on in the process,

though, enthusiasm for train-

ing wasn’t as easy to muster

with some of his cohorts.

TSYS leaders said they ex-

pected hundreds of workers to

sign up for one of the first

digital boot camps. Fewer than

50 applied. Many veteran em-

ployees feared that if they

struggled with the training,

they would end up with no job,

or a pay cut if they were

moved into an entry-level

cloud-computing position,

company officials said.

Some new-product launches

for clients were delayed as the

first team of retrained engi-

neers had to do their new jobs

while also helping retrain the

second and third waves of co-

workers behind them. Having

employees pull double duty,

though, meant TSYS spent just

$1.5 million a year to reskill.

“This is not easy, going away

from what many people here

have done for 20-something

years,” said Patricia Watson,

who as TSYS chief information

officer spearheaded the retrain-

ing effort. “But we knew what

we had to do, and it was impor-

tant that we take our people

with us on this journey.”

The message she delivered

to staff boiled down to this:

We’re facing the biggest tech-

nological shift in our history.

We will give you the tools to

retrain, but it’s up to you to

decide and put in the time.

“We’ve been very transpar-

ent, that ‘If you still want to do

what you’re doing, that’s OK,’ ”

she said. “Just know that in

about five, six years, we plan to

be doing something completely

different, and there are certain

jobs that will go away.”

Ms. Watson is leaving the

company at the end of Octo-

ber. Last month, more than

two years into the retraining,

a rival payment-technology

provider, Global Payments

Inc., bought TSYS for $21.5

billion in an all-stock deal.

The combined company,

with dual headquarters in At-

lanta and Columbus, aims to

cut $300 million in annual

costs by 2022. Executives say

there is little overlap with the

part of the TSYS business that

supports card issuers, where

much of the retrained technol-

ogy staff works, and the

reskilling will continue.

Darrel Schumm, 63, is

among the 9% of the original

TSYS tech staff who chose not

to retrain. Now a few years

away from retiring, he hopes

his mainframe job exists until

then. He figures that he can

add more value keeping the

old technology humming while

younger colleagues transition

to the new.

“I can concentrate on what

I’m doing, make sure there are

no slip-ups,” he said. “The oth-

ers can progress.”

COLUMBUS, Ga.—Warren
Atchley spent more than 30
years working with mainframe
databases, technology that
many in his field call “the di-
nosaur.” Then, about three
years ago, he found out his job
risked extinction.
His employer,TSYS, one of
the world’s biggest processors
of credit-card and other cash-
less payments, was future-
proofing its business with a
shift away from mainframes to
the cloud—and asked its aging
workforce to do the same. Mr.
Atchley considers himself an
avid learner but was still wary.
As a veteran of the old
mainframe team, the 59-year-
old Alabama native often gave
advice to his manager. Yet in
his side role on an early cloud-
computing team, he was
stumped about how to best
connect to Amazon Web Ser-
vices to do his cloud work. “I
had to go to someone who is
younger than all of my chil-
dren and say, ‘Can you help me
get this done?’ ” Mr. Atchley
said.
From banking to manufac-
turing, industries are embark-
ing on a digital transformation
akin to the Industrial Revolu-
tion, but at a much faster
speed. Getting the kind of
workforce needed to survive in
a more automated world will
require companies to retrain or
replace tens of millions of mid-
career workers, labor econo-
mists say. People in all sorts of
jobs will have to learn new
skill sets or risk obsolescence.
“Most of us are going to
have to face this rebuilding,
revamping, reinventing ques-
tion—and at frequent intervals
in our careers,” said William
Kerr, a Harvard Business
School professor and co-direc-
tor of the school’s Managing
the Future of Work project.
Many companies opt to re-
place people rather than in-
vest in retraining. Two-thirds
of U.S. executives recently sur-
veyed by McKinsey & Co. said
they anticipated new technolo-
gies would upend the jobs of
25% of their workers over the

BYVANESSAFUHRMANS

Workforce Retrains Itself for Cloud

Don Valentine, a pioneer

among venture capitalists who

struck it rich with investments

in companies includingApple

Inc.,Cisco SystemsInc.,Ora-

cleCorp. and Atari, died on

Friday. He was 87.

His death was announced

bySequoia Cap-

ital, the venture

firm he founded

in 1972. The

cause of death

was heart fail-

ure, his daughter, Hilary Ayn

Valentine, said.

Mr. Valentine stepped away

from Sequoia’s leadership in

1996, yet the firm still oper-

ates in his image: that of a

tough-guy investor who in-

stills fear in boardrooms and

walks with a swagger. The

self-assurance was earned,

born of the firm’s unrivaled

record spanning five decades.

Sequoia’s investments span

from Atari and Apple in the

1970s to Cisco and Oracle in

the 1980s; Yahoo and Google

in the 1990s;AirbnbInc. and

LinkedInCorp. in the 2000s;

andSquareInc. and Whats-

App this decade.

Compared with most of to-

day’s venture-capital inves-

tors, Mr. Valentine was cut

from a different cloth. He was

a force pressing executives to

save money and maximize

cash flow.

Atari founder Nolan Bush-

nell said Mr. Valentine was by

far his best board member.

“Every board meeting he

would ask me a question about

my company that I didn’t

know but I immediately knew

that I should know it.” Mr.

Bushnell also introduced Mr.

Valentine to a young Atari em-

ployee named Steve Jobs, who

had an idea for a personal

computer but whom other in-

vestors wouldn’t back because

of his messy appearance.

BYROLFEWINKLER

Sequoia’s

Founder

Led With

Swagger

OBITUARY

DONALD

VALENTINE

1932-2019

For nearly a year, Mr. Atch-

ley often arrived at work at 6

a.m. and left around 9 p.m.

He would come home, say a

quick hello to his wife, Elaine,

who is also a TSYS employee

who has retrained, and then

sign onto one of the many on-

line courses he was required

to take.

Mr. Atchley spent much of a

family road trip to New Mex-

ico in the passenger seat, do-

ing coursework on his laptop

or his phone while Ms. Atchley

drove. His coffee intake,

around six cups a day, doubled

to 12 on many days in the of-

fice. “This is what I need to do

to stay in the game,” he told

his spouse.

Mr. Atchley now works full

Some feared that if

they struggled at

training, they would

end up with no job.

Iamthe

beginning

of many

ideas.

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