Executive Insight: Challenge Your Employees

Give your people what they want: the opportunity to continually exercise and build on their skill set.

Employees across today’s workforce oftentimes want new challenges. After all, talented people try to stretch themselves to grow their skill set—and also because stretch assignments can be motivating and satisfying.

At Accenture, we like to meet that challenge under our own roof. As part of this effort, we offer our employees a steady stream of diverse and meaningful career opportunities throughout their time with the company, including in different parts of our business, and across industries and geographies.

The success of our people is everything. To empower that success, we create a work environment and unique culture that enable employees’ professional growth and enhance their ability to deliver high performance to our clients

For example, we invested more than $850 million in training our people last year. In this rapidly evolving business environment, we know we have to continue to sharpen and develop our team members’ skills, and our training and development programs prepare them to bring innovation and excellence to their clients, communities and colleagues.

“The success of our people is everything”Jill Smart

Training begins when our people first join Accenture, and it continues throughout their careers. Education is hosted on site, online, in teams and via mobile learning. Core programs, required for all of our professionals, provide employees with the foundational skills they need, including courses on company culture and values, ethics, leadership behaviors and business acumen. We then build on that foundation with specialized skills training. At the same time, we tailor training programs to individual needs, and the courses that employees choose depend on their skills, experience and areas of interest.

But training is just one dimension of the challenges one will face in his or her career. My group fosters a culture of collaboration, which translates to getting help when you ask for help. Taking on new challenges is a lot less risky when you know there are supporting resources available.

Growing professionally in an environment where top performance is recognized drives both satisfaction and success. It is one of the many ways we let our employees know that they don’t have to leave Accenture to get a new job.

Jill Smart is the former Chief Human Resources Officer at Accenture. She was featured in Issue No. 7 of Forefront magazine.