Orange has committed more than 1.5 billion euros to retraining all employees across the group, saying the plan will play a central role in its recently announced engage 2025 strategy.
Orange pledged in a statement to strengthen expertise in targeted growth areas, including virtualization, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, code and network security. It plans to double the number of employees in these areas to 20000.
The company said it would drive the use and knowledge of data, artificial intelligence and network security across all lines of business. All employees will be introduced to the relevant skills in these three areas, and opportunities will be provided for them to develop soft skills including communication, network and decision-making.
In order to implement the retraining program, the operator will open its orange campus online school to existing and newly recruited employees. This service was previously limited to training management personnel. Some training will provide certificates and diplomas.
An apprenticeship training center will open later this year to train customer service technicians, cloud and Cybersecurity engineers, and data analysts.
In the next five years, large-scale on-the-job training will be deployed. Employees will be assigned special mentors and managers will set goals. The operator plans to significantly increase the number of trainees, from 500 in 2019 to at least 4000 this year.
Valerie Le Boulanger, executive director of human resources at orange, said: "we believe that orange's sustainable transformation will depend on everyone's ability to learn and share knowledge and expertise in new ways, and the combination of technology and soft skills is one of the key factors for our future success."
