As a field tech aspect of things....WS is hiring people with absolutely no experience in telcom. They let them ride with other techs for about a month or so. Many of the techs training the new hires have less than 3-5 yrs service or less themselves. We've seen a new hires be here less than 2 months, start training brand new hires.
They send the new hires to a two week class on how to use a HST and base everything off of using a TDR. They put the new hires in with other techs, yet won't adjust quota to allow the senior tech time to actually train the new hire.
A lot of us feel like new hires should do at least a year of POTS only tasks, to get the basic concept of telco before ever being allowed to touch dsl or anything else. Heck, we have techs with less than 5 yrs that panic if they come across a 66 block.
On the network tech side......training. They have stopped training most NT's. They have been responsible in maintaining all this CO equip with no triaining. E5's, E7's, C7's, Cyan ring, etc.......WS feels that a 30 min CBT is more than enough to teach an NT how to work on these pieces of equip. It's also been almost 20 yrs since they offered any DMS switch class to any of the NT's in my region.
The reason from WS for this, NT's are nothing more than card changers. If they need help, call NOC or DNOC and they can talk them through it. Or just google it and see if they can fix it that way.
So as you can see, unless the tech actual takes their job serious and view it as a career and not just a job, as WS and TT tells us that's all it is, there is no reward for wanting to learn more, do more, etc.....Some will spend the time to research and train themselves to make their job easier and be more knowledgeable, others don't care...."if WS don't care to train me to do my job, why should I worry about it, I'll just keep doing what WS tells me to do"
Really good post by @U7AfVoe-1wxp.