First Wednesday Group

Home The Producers Roundtable Conference

Talking Points
	"Here, There Are No Dead-End Jobs" August 6, 2008 Presenter: Ernie Racine Senior Manager of Technical Support, The Mathworks eracine@mathworks.com

Company background: Developer of software for engineers and scientists (90 products). 25th year as a company, privately held, one million+ customers, $500 million in revenues, 2,000 employees, 120 in support organization.

How the program evolved: About ten years ago, our CEO noticed that many of the best performers in other departments were ex-support people. Asked us to create a formal program to use support as a recruiting and training channel for the whole company. "It helped a lot that we had high-level support for the plan."

My advice is to start small and take a long-term view of the results. It's hard to ask for enough money so that you can let support employees spend half their time on something nebulous like training and career development. We emphasized hard numbers—the cost of recruiting that other groups face, the losses they face when an employee washes out, their own internal training costs. Also, we started by asking for budget to provide slack—support coverage when one of our employees moves to another group and has to be replaced.

We make sure we know exactly what kind of requirements other departments have when we recruit for the program. The biggest problem for me is to have someone in the program who no one else needs.

Currently, we have 80-90 employees in the program. We hire 40-50 new people every year from colleges, and place an equal number in other MathWorks jobs. Average tenure in the program is about 1 1/2 years; some go through in as little as six months, others may hang around for 2 1/2 to 3 years. "We're a hiring and training machine."

We hire just college grads with masters or Ph.D degrees. We don't overpay—salaries are comparable to industry norms, maybe a little above the midpoint. The attraction we offer is the program itself. The people who are most attracted a) have used our products before, b) know a particular industry, such as automotive or aerospace, or c) want to explore several career options.

We visit a lot of colleges to present the program. Potential recruits first go through a phone interview, which screens for phone skills and technical knowledge. Then we invite 15-20 prospects to a "college day" at the company. This involves presentations about the company and multiple interviews. We show projects that other people have done during the program. Everybody in support (except for those on the phones) focuses on these days. At the end, we make offers to an average of three prospects per day.

During the program, employees spend 50% of their time (one week on, one week off) on a project for another group, such as marketing, training, or development. These projects involve real work that has tangible value for the target department, such as a new demo video. When the project is finished, it's scored by the target group, which also provides feedback.

During the program we also provide extensive career coaching. A big area of attention is time management skills, an area where college grads typically need help. We make sure they know how to define requirements, estimate the time frame for delivery, provide status reports to other people, and watch for potential failure points. "We teach them what work is all about."

For the other 50% of their time, people in the program work in regular phone support jobs. If they want, they can stay in support after they finish the program. Typically, they'll move to our advanced support group or into support management jobs. Customer satisfaction is very high with our people, partly because they have exceptional educational backgrounds and also because they're not burned out by being on the phone all the time. They view every support case as a learning opportunity. They brag about how they "got a really cool case today."

After about a year in the program, we push a lot of typical management roles down to program people to teach leadership skills. E.g., "group leader for the day" (managing a group of first-level phone agents), internal training, root cause analysis. We also often use our program people to launch new company initiatives—e.g., root cause analysis—because they're resistant to change or new ways of doing things.

When a new recruit starts with the program, we give them "full frontal attention" on support training, with no time off for projects for about three months. At the end of their first year, they become "specialists" in a product area. At the end of their second year, they begin to move out to jobs elsewhere in the company.

One benefit of the program is that our alumni work everywhere in the company. We publish an alumni list, so our support agents can usually get help from our alumni network.

ooo

If you'd like to post a comment or question on this discussion, please send a note to Jeffrey Tarter (jtarter@asponline.com).

2008 Calendar

October 8
"The Voice of the Customer"
The annual First Wednesday conference.

We're currently looking for meeting topics and speakers for our 2009 Roundtable programs. If you'd like to offer a suggestion, please contact Jeffrey Tarter at
jeff@first-wednesday.com.