Copyright Newsweek
Recent layoffs from companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce have caught the attention of the working world. Many are surprised to see successful tech companies making decisions to restructure their workforces and reduce headcount even as they’ve experienced growth. At Salesforce, workforce planning and learning and development (L&D) leaders are working together on a wide-scale employee retraining strategy, while their CEO is publicly saying they aren’t hiring junior engineers and have decreased need for customer service staff. “Salesforce firmly believes…that an AI transformation is really fundamentally human, and we need to help our talent and our business to keep up with the pace of change,” Ruth Hickin, vice president of workforce innovation at Salesforce, told Newsweek. In July, Salesforce published a Workforce Innovation Playbook, and over time has expanded the suite of offerings available on its internal Career Connect platform, which launched at the end of last year. The platform supports skills identification for employees and guidance for pursuing leadership or a different career track, as well as side projects or "gig" opportunities on other teams. “We launched it with this concept of career mosaics…don't just think of your career as this upward trajectory in your one specific vertical,” Hickin explained. The platform assesses employees’ skills and experience to provide guidance “in a more meaningful way.” Through these updated support efforts, a talent lead moved to cybersecurity at Salesforce, Hickin shared, leveraging existing skills in project and program management while upskilling around new technical subjects. Similar pivots have been achieved by many people, inside and outside of the company, through Salesforce’s publicly available Trailhead program, which provides free online Salesforce administration training. Within customer service, Hickin and vice president of enterprise learning Jenny Simmons employed a more hands-on approach, given the company’s assessment, confirmed by their CEO, that customer service would be experiencing a significant transition. “Customer support is where we have seen probably the biggest change in jobs in the short term, just simply because the agent takes on a lot of the case management for our support team,” Hickin said. They developed a formal training program to find new tracks for customer service representatives, with a new position emerging, called "customer service architects." “They were basically one-day trainings with the technical support engineers, they all qualified to be architects, and they were able to apply for those roles directly,” Simmons said. “That was very hands-on training.” Another job changing is the sales development representative (SDR), a popular entry-level and early career role. The Salesforce SDR agent is “really augmenting a lot of the work that an SDR can do. We still need SDRs, but the capacity that they have is significantly increasing,” Hickin said. For continued broader support, the company identified the top 10 skills that any employee needs for the AI-powered future, “a mix of business skills, human skills and AI agent skills,” Simmons said. “Through the platform, we pushed those skills out to everyone to assess where they are and also give them tailored learning pathways to upskill in those core 10 skills,” she added. Salesforce reports 76 percent of employees are using the Career Connect platform, which was built for internal mobility and skill development and also contains the gigs and networking opportunities. Salesforce has also seen a significant increase in employees reporting that they are aware of career opportunities available to them. “We know that the demand is there, and we saw our scores in our internal survey go up immediately in terms of people understanding where their career opportunities are,” Hickin said. “We've also seen a massive amount of internal hiring.”
