The document discusses Accenture's efforts to implement a personalized learning solution for its 200,000 employees worldwide. It overhauled its learning management system to provide a personalized learning environment tailored to each employee's current job, future career goals, and skill needs. The new system highlights the most relevant training content and connects employees to learning communities and resources to help them continuously build their skills and expertise.
Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$21.6 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2010. Its home page is www.accenture.com.The Talent Development Innovation & IT Solutions team creates, enhances, and manages technologies across talent development to help sustain Accenture’s high performance. Talent development is critical not just to our Human Capital strategy, but to our business strategy as well. Which is not to say we don’t have challenges…
The Accenture of today is not the same Accenture that we were 10 years ago. And Accenture in 2021 will be different as well. As we were looking to drive out our technology vision, we anchored it around four key challenges facing our business:Rapid Business Change: We’re operating in an unpredictable market. And Accenture needs to execute faster, better, and with more flexibility and agility than our competition. This drives two things for us as a talent development organization: first, we need to build both breadth and depth of skill in our people, but at the same time, we need to respond quickly to point in time business need and rapidly scale up proficiency. Competition for Talent: This is not a new challenge for us, but it is intensifying, particularly as the economy improves. As a talent development organization, we need to promote opportunities for long-term career growth.Globalization: Emerging economies are altering how work is sourced and executed. As a company, we are shifting to the East and as a talent development organization, we need to address new learning needs and new infrastructure challenges. We need to be globally consistent, but locally relevant. We also need to leverage familiar devices that will allow our employees to leverage collaboration tools and performance support and to tap into the “power of the many” no matter where they are.Changing Demographics: Accenture employs multiple generations of workers, each with different value propositions and assumptions, and increasingly higher expectations about the use of technology. As a talent development organization, we need to provide more choice in how, when, and where learning happens, greater recognition of expertise and collaboration efforts, and a phenomenal user experience.And we have to address these challenges while balancing simplicity, cost, quality, and speed.
As we digested that analysis, it really came down to this one theme: the deep specialization of our people provides a competitive advantage for our organization. The Good Thing was that we had a curriculum framework designed to build that expertise (continuous learning model, deliberate practice, shifts in emphasis as proficiency deepens). The Great Thing was that we also had content.
We have a global methodology site with links to sample documentation and templates.
Over 30,000 training courses…
More than 500,000 knowledge assets…
Access to hundreds of thousands of external content sources… and all you have to do is enter in the precise combination of descriptive keywords and our search engine with return the 70,000 most useful items in our content repositories!!!
Guiding people to the learning activities that would best help them build skills and knowledge was… is… challenging. How do we create a One-Stop-Shop for our employees? A single place to quickly find the learning content they need?Pause for a disclaimer: Our vision is firmly anchored to our talent development challenges, but we’re in Phase 1 of the implementation of that vision. Walk you through the components, feel free to interrupt at any point to ask questions or tell me what you have done instead. In all honesty, there are a few social learning buzzkills in the first release, but we have a lot queued up for Phase 2 and as time permits, I’ll talk to that.
Phase 1 focused on the two components most frequently used to manage talent supply and demand.
Job Competencies include Professional (core, leadership, languages) and Work (vocation, delivery skills and knowledge). Typically 8-12 competencies.
Specialty Competencies include Technical (Platforms, Vendors), Industry, Functional (Business Processes). Up to 4 Specialties can be identified for an employee. A global assessment process is used to measure proficiency in specialty competencies.
Holistic picture for development planning.
A single place to find the learning content they need as quickly and as easily as possible. The best learning content in one place in an engaging format.Greater visibility to the resources we have to build deep specialization and job skills. Learning activities that span job experience, collaboration, and formal learning, with shifts in emphasis as proficiency deepens. Training plays a key role in lower levels, while experience and collaboration are more critical at higher levels. Content tied to the changing demands of an employee’s role within the organization. Guidance in alignment with their current job and specialization and anticipated business need. Support to build new skills or enhance existing skills. Opportunities to develop their careers. The foundation for developing skill is supporting deliberate practice for the individual – giving people ways to constantly work on their “growing edge.”
Personalized learning is driving real improvements in productivity and quality. Industrialization of the infrastructure is allowing us to achieve greater automation, re-use assets, leverage user-generated content, and deliver learning appropriate to both the short- and longer-term needs of our audiences.Moving beyond the LMS, our new infrastructure creates a personalized learning environment for our employees based on both the demands of their current job or role as well as their future career direction, and proves that, even for 200,000 employees, learning can be personalized at scale.