AT&T CEO says hard to find skilled U.S. workers

Wed Mar 26, 9:39 PM ET



The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc (T.N) said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India.

"We're having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs," AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio, where the company's headquarters is located.

So far, only around 1,400 jobs have been returned to the United States of 5,000, a target it set in 2006, the company said, adding that it maintains the target.

Stephenson said he is especially distressed that in some U.S. communities and among certain groups, the high school dropout rate is as high as 50 percent.

"If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn't put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down," he said.
Gone are the days when AT&T and other U.S. companies had to hire locally, he said.

"We're able to do new product engineering in Bangalore as easily as we're able to do it in Austin, Texas," he said, referring to the Indian city where many international companies have "outsourced" technical and customer support workers.

"I know you don't like hearing that, but that's the way it is," he said.
Stephenson said neither he nor most Americans liked the situation, and the solution was a stronger U.S. focus on education and keeping jobs. Business needed to help, such as AT&T's repatriation of service positions and education grants, he added.

(Reporting by Jim Forsyth; Editing by Gary Hill)

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

I think everything he is saying is just a copout as to why they havent met their target goal

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If god dropped acid, would he see people?

They're full of shit. It used to be that companys used to do on the job training. They use this excuse to hire out of country workers. I think any co. that outsources it's work should have to pay a import tariff, and high corperate taxes. Most of these comp.'s got that big by gov. tax breaks & now stab the very people that helped them in the back, saying its for better cust. service. SHIT these comp. don't give a rats ass about anything
but their own profit.

Smoke and mirrors. There are plenty of trainable young H.S. graduates that could fill those jobs, and if they paid enough, they could get college grads as well. Put some ads in the Review Journal, The local Las Vegas Paper, and I'll bet those jobs would be filled in no time.

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

I think it's partly true. My high school had a freshman class of about 1300 and a graduating class of 700 to 600. And of those that did graduate, I couldn't see more than the top 10% being useful for anything other than ditch digging, unless they somehow get a kick in the but to do something with their lives, which granted, I have seen happen plenty of times with the kids that go work at wal mart for a year and decide "screw that!" and go get a degree at a local college so they can get a decent job.