Accenture CEO Julie Sweet on the Most Important Skill Job Seekers Need Today

[Music] hi i'm audi ignatius editor-in-chief of the harvard business review and this is the new world of work on the show every week we explore the future of work in all of its aspects and talk to leaders on the front lines about the challenges they're facing so we have a great guest this week i will introduce her in a second you'll notice we're not in studio we're we're at home if you used to watch our predecessor show hbr quarantined i'm quarantined uh i tested for covid i'm fine but i am at home and broadcasting from home and keeping a safe distance from everyone in the office so anyway i'll introduce our guests in a second but first let's hear from our friends at unisys when you think about how the cloud can help your business are you thinking big enough we can help you drive more value from the cloud we're unisys and we do cloud really well all right so my guest today is julie sweet the ceo of accenture she's been in that job for three years and last year additionally took on the role of chair she brought a legal background to the job having served as accenture's general counsel and before that as a partner at the law firm kravath swain and more accenture has hundreds of thousands of employees and a lot of interesting approaches to talent development so we're going to talk about that and other things today so julie welcome to the new world of work great thanks for having me adi i'm excited to be here great so let's jump right in you have something like 700 000 employees at accenture so i'd love to hear about how you're thinking about winning the war for talent and you know let's start with hiring what does it take to win the hiring wars these days well that's a great question and i think hiring is the right place to start when we think about talent we actually think about how do you access talent so how do you hire it how do you become a creator of talent so that you don't always have to hire it and then once they're here how do you unlock the potential of talent and when you think about hiring we've actually added to our workforce in the tightest labor history a market in history at least our history 200 000 people in the last 18 months and we've done so over that time we've had 4.6 million resumes and so we use what's called a high tech enabled high touch recruiting model so we use technology to help us match the resumes with our needs and our needs are really broad for example we have nurses and mds as well as you know deep security professionals as well as cloud professionals and people who do supply chains so it's really really broad talent um that we seek and uh and so we do so starting with you know this high-tech enabled high-touch recruiting model uh which is kind of the how we do it and of course the the reason people come uh is you know all about what we offer uh our future employees um so i have a lot of follow-ups there and there's a lot to unpack there let me just say to the audience watching this i'm interviewing accenture ceo julie sweet if you have questions for her type them in and we'll try to get to some uh fewer questions later um so a few places we could go and and i guess one is the question about skills and as you said you have different types of jobs that require different types of skills but i have a feeling that that both in what you're looking for or the algorithms you've created there there there's some general skills or general attributes that people need these days can you talk about what you think those might be you know we'll see let's just start with uh one of the most important things that we look for actually no matter you know who you are is your ability to learn learning agility uh because we know that while we may hire you for a certain set of skills the rate of change and the need for skills is quite rapid so there's you know lots of research on this that skills that were around in the fortune 500 for example in 2017 that approximately 40 are no longer relevant and so as we think about our own business we start with learning agility and we ask a very simple question uh to all of our applicants senior and junior those who are coming from school we ask it slightly differently because they're in school so what we'll say is what have you learned in the last six months that was not part of school is what we add for those who are recruiting on campus and what we're looking for are individuals who naturally learn things now the answer could be i learned to cook right the answer could be i learned how to change a tire the point is can the applicant respond to that question it's a really simple but very effective way of understanding whether you're hiring hiring someone who likes to learn and actually one of our leadership essentials for all of our leaders is to lead with excellence confidence and humility and the humility we find as a leadership quality is uh what allows people to be natural learners and to build great teams and so they're really connected when we think about uh you know the kinds of people and kinds of skills then you take a step back and we do think that digital literacy is absolutely critical and so actually all of our 700 000 people regardless of where you sit if you're you know working in our mail room we still get mail or you know you're on the front lines with our clients uh you have to go through something we call tq so it's your technology quotient where you take and have to pass assessments in 10 areas because we really believe that basic technology skills are critical in every aspect and that sort of links to the secondary talent that we focus on which is being a creator of talent um now so so rescaling in part i guess would mean making sure that people reach that that general threshold of whatever it is digital literacy um but at times you're doing you know pretty profound reskilling and i'd love to hear you know again because you have such a large workforce what does what does reskilling look like at accenture well let's take let's go back to the pandemic in march of 2020 and when the pandemic hit uh there was a big shift online as we all know and all of a sudden we had incredible demand for example for uh our clients to help them use you know digital collaboration tools which had to be implemented and then training of people and there was far more demands than there was literally the day before the pandemic was declared uh similarly there was a big acceleration of the move to the cloud of needing cloud skills and so what reskilling for accenture looks like is we actually have a database of all our client-facing people we know what their skills are we're able to use ai algorithms to identify who could be re-skilled what family of skills are close to what we have more demand on and then we can actually do the reskilling so in the first six months after the pandemic we upskilled about a hundred thousand people with programs that range from sort of eight to fifteen weeks depending on what we were upskilling them for uh and we were able to do so very rapidly which enabled us to emerge from the pandemic much faster because we could shift our people towards the new places of demand and of course it's part of what makes our accenture such an attractive place to work because people feel like they're constantly being invested in fact we spend about a billion dollars a year an average of 40 hours per person of training which is a you know really strong reason why we are able to recruit quarter in and quarter outs it's amazing talent so that's pretty interesting so so you know normally you're the deputy head of something and you're obviously a candidate to be the head of something but you know when you're talking about using ai to to figure out the the the future possibilities you know they may not be so obvious or may not have been so obvious in the past can you talk a little bit more about that like like you know are there specific examples of where skills in one area actually translate into preparation for something else that we might not have thought about without without ai showing the way well the easy examples are really examples that around technical skills so certain kinds of programming enable you to you know move more easily into other kinds of programming uh certain platforms so for example uh if you're you know working on one kind of a cloud-based uh platform moving to another cloud-based platform are easier but there's also um more less obvious things so for example in security uh you know the skills around security are very akin to what our professionals might be doing in risk and compliance because there's some deep analytical skills and so those are the kinds of things where you might not have first looked at people doing risk or compliance for our clients to say oh yeah they could easily become a security professional because of course security was another area that was triggered high demand when the pandemic hit and yet the algorithm will identify those who have those sort of deep analytical skills that are very useful in the security area so those are the kinds of examples and at the same time it's not always the algorithms that do it but also we actually can create skills so for example every part of every you know business right now is being transformed by technology but if you think about most of our clients they don't like someone maybe doing supply chain doesn't have necessary technology skills they have the supply chain skills but to really be able to transform it you need more of those technology skills now we provide that for our clients and so one of the things we have to do is to have both deep domain knowledge as well as technology skills so we've in india for example this past year we've recruited about you know building the past six months say 500 uh leaders with deep domain knowledge like in supply chain with no technology knowledge and then we've put them through a boot camp of eight to 12 weeks depending on the domain so that they can be working with our clients with the right domain knowledge but also the technology skills and so these are the kinds of things that we're doing with our clients so you take someone like chevron uh a leader in the energy fields fields they know that technology is and digital is really transforming and willing to transform every part of their enterprise and they partnered with us to create a school for them tailored to their different departments to teach already 20 000 people the digital skills they need to take their deep domain knowledge of working at chevron in these departments couple it with the right technology knowledge so that they can lead the reinvention of their particular part of the company and so it's really important to be sort of understanding you know what are the outcome that you need and what are the skills and can you educate in skill to get to those outcomes and that's why when i talked about what companies need to do around talent this idea of both accessing talent but becoming a talent creator is also very very important um so i'm going to go to an audience question right now because it's it's pertinent um and this is from maryland in virginia um her question is do you have his or her question do you have specific areas where you are experiencing skill shortages and you know what are they are they functional are they industry based and if so how are you addressing those well you know it's a great question that i think everyone is asking uh and what i would say is that the we have a lot of what we call hot skills so in demand skills and those range from uh deep technology skills all the way to the industry and domain skills i would say that we don't have a we don't have like a gap in the sense of our ability to hire and part of that is that we do use technology to anticipate based on our demand even early stages our knowledge of our skills our knowledge of who we could reskill or not reskill to anticipate and so while i'm sure any of my leaders would say i'm always in demand of skills when you really look at you know are we able to hire for everything we are need we can but behind that is a pretty sophisticated way of anticipating uh the needs for skills and of course the technology to do that is really important it's certainly important for accenture but it's also critical you know for our clients it's driving a lot of our demand because it's hard to be able to predict and therefore make informed decisions about hiring or creating your own talent unless you have a single source of truth around your employees and so part of what's driving uh the need for you know new cloud-based solutions which is a big part of our demand on the hr side is this need to be much more sophisticated around your talent strategy which does start with technology and then if you want we can later get into you know really the twin t's of trust and technology because they do go hand in hand as you think about the changes you need to make in your organization to use technology effectively so again if you have questions for for julie sweet please uh type them into the uh the chat and we'll try to get to them soon thank you for those who have put in the chat that they're wishing me a speedy recovery i appreciate that um i want to follow up on some of this you know when you're talking about um you know about hiring and and and you know pipelines and skills um you know we're all we're all trying to diversify our workforces a lot of us are coming to grips with the fact that we've not successfully diversified our workforces to the extent that we would like to um and i guess there's a risk that the you know the algorithm will exacerbate the problem rather than fix the problems i'd i'd love to hear how you you know you must be thinking about this a lot and and how you're trying to solve for diversity again as you as you hire and maintain a workforce of 700 000 people well great i think um maybe to start with before i turn to diversity your point around the algorithms can be you know a problem is i would point uh the audience to a great um body of work that i actually helped lead at the u.s business roundtable on responsible ai and that is available on their website and talks about and this came from cross industry ceos saying that it's really important that as companies we have a road map to making sure that ai which is so important from a competitiveness perspective does get deployed responsibly and in fact to that end when we were starting to deploy ai and some of the ways i've described to you we first did a complete view and review of the different technologies that we had how we were going to use ai so that we made sure that it was clear it was transparent there were guardrails there was testing because you really can't re-engineer for responsible ai you have to do it from the beginning and so i just encourage uh everyone and to make sure they do have the right governance and that when they start to use these things that they are building in this idea of responsible ai you know from from the beginning and not having a problem and then trying to uh to do it back going backwards but um and that's that's also important not just for making sure that algorithms you know work well when you do things like match resumes with jobs um but you know for other uses as well now with respect to diversity it's a huge focus of ours we have committed to being by 2025 reaching gender parity we have very specific goals around racial and ethnic diversity in the countries we're allowed to set them we have a broad view of diversity that includes persons with disabilities veterans uh lgbtqi and so all of those um goals are treated like business priorities so just like business priorities they start with data and they start with making sure that we use the data to inform not just goal setting but tracking progress and i think that's a really important part of what you need to do to be committed and so we look at that very carefully to make sure we have very diverse pools for example when we're doing hiring because you can't get to your numbers if you haven't a broad enough hiring pools um talk talk more about that i mean so so you know i know that you have explored you know dropping certain requirements degrees you know things like that that once would have been you know just what you did and and now you know thinking more broadly i you know i i think you have an apprenticeship program in this area too i'd love to hear more specifics about you know how how you're trying to tackle this well it's starting in north america although we've now done this globally with respect to skills is we re-looked at our job requirements and so for example in north america about 48 nearly 50 percent of our job openings do not require four-year degrees and they used to all require four-year degrees and so that immediately opens you up to a broader pool of people that you can hire from and in fact about 20 of the people we actually hire for those openings do not have four-year degrees so we've expanded the pool of people who we can go after to fill these jobs at the same time we've explored other ways of both expanding our access to talent making a positive impact on our employees i mean on our communities and also creating a more diverse workforce and we've done that through the apprenticeship program so it started actually when i became the ceo of north america uh in the u.s back in 2015 i looked at we had this amazing program called skills to succeed where we were skilling people in the community but we weren't actually hiring people at accenture and so we started with seven apprentices in chicago and we've now since 20 um and that program started actually in 2016. we now had over 1200 apprentices go through our program we hire most of them we have incredible retention and 20 of our hiring in the u.s our entry-level hiring in the u.s will be through our apprenticeship program which is about 50 50 men and women uh about nearly uh 60 or more racially or ethnically diverse and all almost all come from very challenged socioeconomic backgrounds and these are individuals who would not have been on a path to get a job at accenture using kind of our old way of hiring because we had to think out of the box and really look at skills and potential and then be willing to train ourselves so that kind of comes back to that need to be a talent creator and i would tell you it's a huge win because these are some of our best employees great retention great learners and of course they've opened up terrific new pathways for them i want to shift gears a little bit and you know this may be due to the surprise of of uh some of our viewers but you know accenture is often mentioned as you know a leader in this the kind of corporate applications of the metaverse so i'd love to hear you talk about what does the metaverse do for accenture well great so we're really excited about the metaverse we just put our tech vision out called the metaverse continuum so if you haven't read it please take a look at it we think the metaverse is as impactful as the tech vision that we did back in 2013 when we said that every business would be a digital business which has definitely come true a decade later and we think the metaverse is that significant in terms of what it'll do for the next decade and this year we will onboard about 150 000 people by going through accentures metaverse called one accenture park which we think is the largest enterprise metaverse uh in the world i used a beta version of enmesh by microsoft and what it does is it brings together people who've joined accenture in the metaverse to explore accenture to have a shared experience with other new joiners when we're still not having in-person shared experiences and our research shows that immersive learning for short sprints so not all day in the metaverse this is about a 30-minute experience is actually more impactful it's been extraordinarily well received by our people who are onboarding who find it uh both learning but also it creates bonds of these shared experiences with other people who are going through it so i just took my board through it just recently and uh they absolutely loved it it's super innovative and if you're an innovative company and you're trying to show that innovation then there's no better way than introducing your company to new joiners through some of the most cutting-edge technology so so i've i i can imagine what you're talking about but for for for viewers who may think you know okay i don't get this i really don't get what the metaverse is to talk a little bit about you know what is the experience what are what are what are people doing what are they seeing how are they interacting in ways that they wouldn't be just by let's say the conversation that we're having like this great so instead of like just looking at each other and having someone explain well here you're going to learn about tq and hear the different things that our services do instead when you join accenture someone will take you through building your own avatar which you get to do yourself you'll put on some glasses some people do it in 2d most most use glasses and do it in 3d and when you step into the metaverse you're literally with say 30 other people who are also on their first or second day at accenture you start by talking to them they like get you familiar with how you move around and if you've had a metaverse experience you actually it's like going to a cocktail party where you only hear the people near you you don't hear the people far away so there's 30 people saying the experience you're not hearing 30 people talk at once you're actually talking to people just as if you were in person next to them then we explore we you know take you to different parts of the metaverse so for example you'll go to an area where you learn about rtq training and you can tap on something it'll actually immerse you in hey this is what you're going to learn and you'll actually see it it'll then take you to other parts of accenture so we have an innovation lab in san francisco and you'll actually go to in our metaverse there's an identical replica of that so you get to go experience and say hey this is what it's going to look like when you're there here's what we have you can touch buttons and see the actual you know um uh different example things like drones etc that we have in some of our things and so it basically brings to life in 3d you know the world and you're doing it with people all over the world so you're beginning to have these shared experiences you're talking you're able to react with the people standing next to you you're able to ask them questions like hey where are you from oh i'm gonna do this uh and so it's literally as if you've been taken someplace physically and are experiencing it with in many ways the ways we used to do onboarding because people did come to offices and they would get to experience things and at the time we might take them on teams to another innovation hub but they really get to experience it we're also doing client visits in the same way and so i stood up you know with 30 clients in our innovation hub entirely in the metaverse i showed them you know 3d examples of the things that we have there as if they were actually sitting and getting to see it it's it's super powerful and we've been doing this since uh doing sort of the underlying technology since 2007 and i will tell you i joined accenture in 2010 and i remember my first you know technology showcase which we would have at all internal leadership meetings and i remember putting on glasses for the first time and i was a lawyer and i was like this will never make sense and back then it was super clunky it wasn't real it is amazing if you haven't experienced it what technology does today and you know we're working on it to do everything from unbloading experiences and doing training it is literally for a if you're a retail or any consumer facing it will be just another way to engage like um we're overwhelmed by demand right here because now leading brands all believe they have to have a metaverse customer engagement and then even um maybe even more exciting is how it's going to be used to actually run the enterprise like the work we're doing with mars where uh there's digital twins that we're building around their production sites and then going from the digital twin to the actual site making changes and sort of sort of part physical part digital uh it's it's really going to be transformative uh in the way that you work uh and the way that you engage with each other and the technology is only going to get better i mean we spent a lot of time this season talking about you know dispersed work versus being in office how many days and you know this is something else entirely and and it it almost seems like that question could seem quaint if the if the experiences are so i i don't know engaging that uh it will blur what we thought was the value of the in-person experience i almost question myself as i say that sentence but that's sort of the inevitable um place to end up right yeah i i would say that we will always have physical and digital and that's the power of um you know the future is that it's not all physical or all digital it's the mix and to your point the technology is at very early stages and so while we've been literally experimenting and using the underlying technologies going all the way back to 2007 and while the comparison from then to now is amazing we're just getting started and there's a ton of technology developments that need to occur until we really can be operating uh in the in the metaverse in a persistent way across platforms in your personal and professional life and at the same time what i would say is the future is we sometimes call it fidget physical and digital uh and it's just that the ease of going in between those worlds and using the digital worlds and technology to augment connections relationships and productivity will remain the goal as opposed to digital being the destination i mean a fully virtual being the destination yeah so i want to i want to ask another question from our viewers and this is from adna in brunei so you know people are people are listening closely to what you're saying about about skill sets and hiring so obvious question is in your personal opinion what would be the most essential skill sets that graduating students should equip themselves with a technology literacy and what i mean by that is you need to treat computer science like reading not that you need to ever be a programmer but you have to have experienced it you know you need to have basic knowledge about what is the cloud what is ai and some of the best schools really are creating technology curriculums that are not intended to graduate a technologist so someone who's actually going to either program or build technology but to build technology literacy and until then you know really you know sort of curating your own program so that if you're graduating you understand your basic um understanding of um these skills are are really important here's another question this is from steve in california um and it gets to the sort of full-time employees versus gig workers you know do you find that you're using more freelancers as part of your workforce as a way to access the you know the hot skills that you need you know we are not uh and so um our employees we don't really use the gig economy at scale that may be something that we do in the future it's uh in large part because of the you know sort of demand that we have the needs for security uh the you know the training that goes on it's harder to for us we haven't found it that productive to do a lot with the gig economy certainly many of our clients are successfully accessing those skills uh but so i think it's gonna depend on the industry uh and the kinds of demand uh that they have um as you can imagine for us our you know because we create skills and the skills change a lot and we have that ability uh we're not sort of dabbling it sort of in and out so we haven't really had a big use yet of the gig economy so this is from manuela in frankfurt what role do soft skills play in your hiring process and do you consider soft skills as the new hard skills it's a great uh phrase and i think that uh soft skills were um always in a hard skill in our view and it goes back to sort of that view about leadership we certainly ask a lot about how people think about for example leaders coming in about how they lead people which are our soft skills and so soft skills are absolutely important such as communication skills and in fact when we were trying to expand our ability to hire more women into technical jobs because we can do so much training we actually have gone to for example liberal arts schools and hired in more people with great critical thinking skills really good soft skills and then train them on the technology uh and so i certainly uh think that soft skills are absolute critical and they're an important part of the interviewing process so here's one from siva or shiva in new york city who notes that it is mental health awareness month and the question is what steps do organizations need to take to improve the mental health of their employees one of the i think big benefits uh which it's hard to say that because the pandemic was so difficult but i think there has been in the corporate world at least a real focus on mental health that i believe will will continue and we we have a leadership essential called caring for your people personally and professionally and mental health is it certainly an important part of that and so i think as organizations understanding you know do you offer the right benefits do you um you know doing listening for your people in terms of what they think they need around mental health and then having a strategy around it and so if you're a leader in a company and you can't say here's how we are uh working on making sure that we are helping the mental health of our employees then it probably is a signal that you're not doing enough one of the things we're really proud of is a partnership that we have with thrive ariana huffington's company where we've had over 180 000 people complete a mental wellness uh computer and science-based program it's it's been the most probably successful program that we've provided our employees the the numbers grow each each week because it does have really good results in terms of helping people be less anxious and feel more able to um care for themselves and so the big question in my mind is do you know what your strategy is we just hired a chief health officer and one of the things that she does look after is ensuring that we've got the right strategy and execution of that strategy so this might be the the last question that we that we take but i i want to ask you um you know you've been lauded as one of the most powerful women in business you know there are of course many other celebrated female ceos of big companies but there's still clearly an underrepresentation of top women of women at the top in business so what's your view how will that change i think there's so much room for hope not just optimism because the fact is that it is changing i remember when i became ceo back in 2019 it was uh shortly around when indira uh stepped down at pepsico and there was this this huge limitation lament because she was so um so much a role model for all of us and it seemed like we were moving backwards and since then there have been so many exceptional women uh you know karen lynch at cvs ross brewer at walgreens jane fraser at city sonia's uh seattle at uh gap like the list goes on and on actually which is really nice uh and you know tiaa uh you know just the list is great and uh so i think there's a lot of hope and what you're starting to see is that the work that's been done to create a pipeline of ceos is starting to happen as there's generational change so i think it's good to end perhaps on uh my you know on a hopeful note is that i do believe that there's a ton of reason for hope and i see so many great women uh continuing to rise in companies and that's what you need right you need a pipeline in order for it to be at the top all right well that is good that it is a good place to end there were tons of tons more audience questions i wish we could get to them but that was a great discussion julie thank you for being on the new world of work thank you so much it was great to be here and thanks for all the great questions from the audience all right so that was julie sweet the ceo of accenture uh our guest next week will be daniel lamar the former president and ceo of cirque du soleil the canadian entertainment circus company daniel recently stepped down after two decades in those roles and he still serves as cirque du soleil's executive vice chairman he's also the author of the new book balancing acts unleashing the power of creativity in your life and work so that will be at the usual time next wednesday may 11th at 12 noon uh eastern time i want to thank all of you who are watching if you like this stuff uh please sign up for our newsletter go to hbr.org newsletters and you can sign up for the new world of work newsletter again thank you for for being with us i'm adi ignatius this is the new world of work [Music] you

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Length: 39min 11sec (2351 seconds)

Published: Tue May 03 2022