Cisco is revamping its Talent Bridge website, updating it from a "traditional job board" to a site designed to help channel partners better prepare employees to support the vendor’s broader adjustments to its go-to-market ambitions.

Lori Holloway, branding and communications manager for Cisco’s Talent Bridge program, explained in a blog post that the updated platform will focus on a handful of “practical partner needs” and look to diminish “hiring noise.”

These updates include alignment of candidate skills with roles; better visibility into certifications and credentials to support evaluations; integration into existing hiring tools; support for partner branding to help align candidate opportunities; and platform compliance with privacy standards.

“Cisco Talent Bridge is evolving from a traditional job board into a comprehensive career-support ecosystem designed to help partners identify and engage talent with greater confidence,” Holloway wrote on what Cisco is attempting to do with the changes. “Rather than focusing solely on job postings, Talent Bridge supports the hiring journey – from talent discovery to candidate engagement. By bridging learning, skills, and opportunity, the platform helps partners build consistent and relevant talent pipelines aligned with real business needs. The intent is straightforward: reduce friction in the hiring process and improve clarity at every stage.”

The updated site is set to launch July 13, with initial availability for partners in the U.S., Mexico, the U.K., Spain, the Philippines, India, and South Africa, with expansion plans through 2027.

That new platform focus aligns with challenges Cisco itself is battling through as it reconfigures its operational model. While the vendor has recently announced plans to slash thousands of jobs as part of a new round of “strategic investments” in its workforce, Cisco Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel recently told SDxCentral that finding talent with the right skills was one of the vendor’s biggest challenges.

“We're always short on really highly capable technical talent,” Patel said. “We need more talent in silicon. We need more talent in cyber. We need more talent in networking.”

Partner talent in support of new operational models

The Talent Bridge site update is the latest in a string of changes Cisco has rolled out to its partner ecosystem.

The biggest was a complete revamp of its legacy 360 program that overwent a year-plus overhaul. That new offering came online in January, and has since seen adjustments and additions to meet partner demands.

Tim Coogan, SVP for global partner sales at Cisco, explained to SDxCentral in a recent interview the importance of its channel partners and in adjusting training support to help them take advantage of the new channel program opportunities.

“We are deeply committed to treating our partner ecosystem as a logical extension of the Cisco field teams,” Coogan said, adding that “the way we share use cases, the way we share training materials, the way we share tools and resources internally, should as closely as possible mirror the deliverables that we give to our partners.”

Coogan did add that while this mirroring might not perfectly align at times, “but what we need it to be is arming our field teams and our partners' field teams in a parallel fashion that allows us to accelerate into the market and not have everything be a shock to the system.”

These moves have so far seen traction.

“We have asked our partners to invest differently in their training,” Coogan said, adding that “the appetite for an adoption of … certifications, the use of the training materials we've made available to our partners indicates that they're not just doing that to get certified, they're doing it because they see value in those learnings translating into their ability to deliver outcomes to our customers.”

Coogan added that these changes were also tied to Cisco’s focus on driving more robust support from those partners, something the legacy partner program was not designed to accomplish.

“I want to be sensitive to not speak negatively of the old program – the old program was fabulous, but it was very volume centric, and there's nothing wrong with volume. That's part of the growth and growth is that big number,” Coogan said. “But I think that the big change has been is we are now really clearly aligning investments to rewards in a way that embraces the portfolio. You can call it the portfolio, the platform, the foundation, because, again, can we sell each piece of the Cisco portfolios independent of one another? Of course, we can. We are huge believers in open standards and open APIs, but we recognize that there is an intrinsic value when we sell across our portfolio with our partners.”