Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) Chairman and CEO John Chambers is transforming the hardware-focused networking gear giant into what he wants to be the world’s No. 1 “full IT” company. That means offering more services.

And the executive leading that transition told an investors conference in New York on Wednesday how Cisco is creating a services-oriented workforce. The company  has laid off thousands of workers over the past two years, including more than 200 recently at its campus in RTP. An internal reorganization has affected some one third of its global work force. 

However, Cisco has continued to hire in service-oriented areas and in new efforts such as its “Intercloud” with an emphasis on the “Internet of Everything,” as Chambers ddescribes the growing surge in Internet-connected devices.  A net growth of more than 500 jobs is planned in RTP in the next few years.

So What did Edzard Overbeek, senior vice president for Cisco Services and the head of Cisco Services for the past 17 months, have to say? here’s a key portion of his remarks from a transcript of the presentation as provided by financial news website SeekingAlpha:

Three-Step Process

“What we’ve done over the last two years, we have started a concept, what we call internally as services academy,” Overbeek said.

“So what we’ve done is we’ve mapped out the skill set, the roles and responsibilities that we need to live up to this. Then we offered a lot of our people that journey and all of us signed up. So how do we come from a technical orientation more into a business orientation? What the curriculum? That’s the first thing.

“The second thing is we have very deliberately recruited different talent from the market. When I look take a look at our consulting business the consultants that we have today, I would argue are very different people than we had in our IBSG time when we were three, four years ago and the people that we recruit from the top consulting houses like McKinsey … or Forrester … that we attract because we have something that clearly they get excited about, as we do, which is a very different proposition than doing just the regular consulting engagements that many of these consultant houses are doing today. …

“And then the third piece of what we’re doing is finding how much talent you actually have in the company. So we’ve looked backwards. … Where do all our people come from? Because I’m sure in your company it’s the same that once you’re in the company, sometimes people forget what your history is and we’ve just taken a look at hey, we have a lot of software people, we have a lot of people coming from systems integration, and lot of people coming from professional services and proactively address them and say hey we’re thinking about this, would this be a nice step for you to do something different or would you just like to help us out.

“So those three are what we do around talent. And I would argue we’re pretty well ahead of what we are planning to do … We’re ahead of that return internally. And more importantly it starts to create that buzz again in the Company about Cisco showing up, not just as — and I mean in a good way in networking and attached service company but as a full IT company and this is what you hear John talk about when we positioned ourselves as a potential number one in IT …”

The full transcript can be read online at financial news web site SeekingAlpha.