May 6, 2009 11:33 AM,

Retraining techs for an IT future

By Carol Wilson

Verizon Business saw the changes coming and created individual training plans for 2200 CPE technicians

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When Verizon Business first started seeing its business customers shift to its IP-based offerings back in 2006, the service provider quickly realized a new challenge: preparing the 2200 technicians who supported the customer premises equipment (CPE) used to deliver those IP services for a new and more complex world.

"It's a wildly different skill set that you need to support IP than you need for TDM," said Betsy Gibson, director of global CPE for Verizon Business. "The work is very much different; it's more server-based, and you are writing programming instructions."

What Verizon Business did was start with the people managing those technicians and provide them with intensive training in IP, Gibson said. "We gave everyone intensive training in IP so they would know what was required."

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Then each supervisor was required to sit down individually with each of the 2200 technicians and assess their skills in both TDM and IP, Gibson said. "In other words, we assessed their current capabilities and their potential capabilities for the future," she said. "Each person was graded from novice to intermediate to expert in each skill. Then we mapped out a career path for each individual technician, to get them trained to support the new equipment."

That training came from multiple places – from equipment vendors such as Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel, which provided the IP PBXs, IP phones and other CPE; from Verizon itself and from third-party vendors, Gibson said. The training also took place in multiple locations, via PC-based classes, in vendor labs and in Verizon's own labs. "In our labs, we are able to do staging, diagnostics and problem-solving," Gibson said.

There was a small group of technicians who chose not to take the IP training, Gibson said. "Most of them were guys who were 18 months to two years from retirement, and it wasn't worth the hassle for them."

Those employees were assigned to cover customers who are also choosing not to make the switch to IP.

"We still have a group of customers who don't want to make the change," Gibson said. "We have customers who are sticking with what they have, either because they can't afford to change or they don't want to take the risk."