Telkom acting CEO Jeffrey Hedberg wants Telkom's extensive training programmes to focus on improving the company's margins and not “to train for training's sake”.
Speaking at Telkom's annual SATNAC conference, Hedberg emphasised the need for training to be measurable, to ensure that business skills are taught through Telkom's various training programmes, and that it benefits the company and society.
He also emphasised the need for training to transform Telkom from where it is now to where it needs to go.
Measurement believer
“I am a great believer in measurements. And I appeal to us all to meet back here in a year to state what we have achieved in training and how it has contributed to the company's margin,” he said.
Hedberg said that, while a company has to allocate its resources for capex (capital expenditure) and opex (operational expenditure), it also has to know how to allocate resources in terms of its people.
“The ICT sector has tremendous opportunities and challenges ahead of it. We have to know not only how to drive these opportunities and challenges, but we have to know how to segment our customers and our markets and how to place what products and bundles where,” he said.
Right people
Hedberg said Telkom needed the right people in place to drive these opportunities and challenges, and that these challenges were not only commercial, but come with social responsibility as well.
“We need to learn, as an organisation, how to lead. What we are doing as a company and an industry is learning how to lead. Leadership and learning are intractably intertwined,” he said.
Hedberg said that, with the great amount of information now available to the public, it has become a task for Telkom, and the industry, to help communities learn how to deal with and process this deluge of information.
He said the combined capex for fixed and mobile growth in the African marketed is expected to be $141 billion in 2013.
“We have to prioritise ICT as an enabler for economic and social growth. Broadband and Internet is a must to enable e-education, e-business, social networking, but there is a scarcity of skilled labour in the market.”
Unless organisations can develop capable and motivated employees who can deal with ambiguity and make effective decisions that meet customer expectations, competitiveness will suffer, Hedberg noted.
The concept of margin, or profit, was a recurrent theme throughout his address. “My job is to ensure that we have a return for our customers, for our shareholders and for our people.”
He also said technology is a great training enabler. “What we love as Telkom is that we provide connectivity for those individuals to access information. We have to segment how we best go about processing that information, and it is about training the people on how to best absorb it. Because the tech is there, it is good and it is an enabler,” he said.
Hedberg's connection between trained people and the profitability of the company was further underscored when he said: “With the best roadmaps, with the best margins on paper, it is not going to happen without the best people. It is incredibly important that we do not just train for the sake of training, but there is a strong alignment to how we are training for the organisation and to review the training continuously.”
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