Telia drives cloud adoption by upskilling employees on AWS

In collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Telia Company is launching an internal training program to upskill 2,000 employees over the coming three years on AWS and cloud technologies.

The program will broaden Telia’s cloud adoption across key functions as part of executing one of the industry’s most ambitious digital transformations. With the largest in-house AWS training program in the Nordic region to date, Telia is investing in the upskilling of 10 percent of the company’s total workforce.

As new digital technologies are developed in increasingly shorter cycles, there is a growing need for expertise in cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

At Telia, more than 800 software developers already use AWS to build and operate cloud applications. This new training program will speed up the company’s cloud first strategy and ensure Telia employees have the right skills and best practices to build cloud-based machine learning applications.

Rainer Deutschmann, Group Chief Operating Officer at Telia Company, says: “Telia has embarked on one of the telecom industry’s most ambitious digital transformation journeys and cloud, big data, analytics, and AI are at the heart of this transformation. We now extend our collaboration with AWS to launch the Nordic region’s largest in-house AWS training program to date where we over the next three years will upskill 10 percent of Telia’s total workforce on AWS and cloud technologies to achieve cloud fluency for a total of 2,000 colleagues. This initiative complements our ongoing wider product and technology skills augmentation with currently 4,000 active learners. I am very excited to see our talents grow and develop, which is a critical foundation for sustainable delivery of our transformation”.

Fabio Cerone, Managing Director, EMEA Telecom Industry Business Unit, AWS, says: “Telia continues to demonstrate a commitment to pursuing modern and innovative strategies to optimize its business and better serve its customers. From its recent new serverless data platform and AI capabilities, to migration of SAP S/4HANA to AWS, and now its expanded investment in upskilling, Telia proves they are embracing the future and that AWS cloud technology sits at the core of their way forward. We look forward to continue working with Telia to support their digital transformation and their ambition to be one of the best tech employers in the Nordics.”

Examples of Telia Company’s use of cloud, analytics and machine learning capabilities

As part of Telia’s transformation, the Analytics IT team has in less than one year successfully built and launched a company-wide serverless data platform on AWS. The new platform creates a common data foundation that enables democratization of data to enhance data driven decision making across the organization and provides additional advanced analytics capabilities.

Last year Telia’s analytics community invested more than 4,000 hours into training to secure organizational readiness for the shift to the cloud. The journey continues as the company is now upskilling its cloud, data and analytics talents across all markets to amplify and re-use common cloud and analytics assets. Data scientists and engineers across the company are already developing the new capabilities, working on machine learning models to identify new cross-sell offers, new TV recommendations to enhance the customer viewing experience, and improved churn prediction to better understand customer satisfaction levels and increase customer retention.

Within Customer Value Management (CVM), Telia is using advanced analytics to ensure a new customer centric approach for next-best-actions. By using customer data to predict and make decisions on messaging and targeting, Telia has increased its ability to better anticipate the customers’ needs at any given moment, resulting in higher conversion and an improved NPS score among those customers.