An Introduction to Global Financial Markets

Competing in the global financial services market, the company felt it had to take advantage of all the cost-saving opportunities that its competitors were. CapitalOne began, though, by trying to educate its workers through workshops about the company's competitive predicament. It made clear that there is no safe haven where lifetime employment is possible anymore -inside Capital-One or outside. Then it developed a whole program for cross-training of computer programmers, those most affected by outsourcing. The company would take a programmer who specialized in mainframes and teach him or her to be a distributed systems programmer as well. CapitalOne did similar cross-training on its business side, in everything from auto loans to risk management. As a result, the workers who were eventually let go in an outsourcing move were in a much better position to get new jobs, because they were cross-trained and therefore more employable. And those who were cross-trained but retained were more versatile and therefore more valuable to CapitalOne, because they could do multiple tasks ...»