One of my firm's major clients is BellSouth. Years ago BellSouth would send its switchboard operators to class after training class. They took foreign language classes, people management classes, technical classes, operations classes, you name it, they had access to it...and many of them took full advantage of it.
But computers from the 1970's on have slowly replaced the need for BellSouth's customers to ever need operators...so thousands of them have been "retired" or laid off over the years.
What are you going to tell them? That you want to pay *more* to make your phone calls so that they can still have their old jobs...or that they should forget all of their switch operator training and go get a *different* job?