Accenture: High-performance Learning Organization

How Accenture Learning Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Services is helping to drive high performance for Accenture with advanced, cost-effective and high-impact learning programs.

Accenture experienced a series of dramatic challenges that began to affect the company's ability to continue to provide world-class learning experiences for our own employees. By outsourcing to Accenture Learning BPO Services, Accenture transformed our training function to support our drive to achieve high performance.

Accenture, one of the world's leading management consulting, technology services and outsourcing companies, has also been a traditional leader in the area of training and development. Both for our clients and for our own employees, Accenture has been an award-winning developer of advanced learning programs. The company has been at the forefront of many innovations in the field of corporate education that are now accepted as standard.

"Learning at Accenture is changing people's lives; it's giving them more reason than ever to stay with us and grow both personally and professionally."
—Jill Smart, senior managing director-Human Resources, Accenture.

Beginning in 2001, Accenture experienced a series of dramatic challenges that began to affect the company's ability to continue to provide world-class learning experiences for our own employees. Faced with worldwide economic turmoil following the bursting of the Internet bubble, the broad effects of global terrorism and the rapidly changing needs of our clients, Accenture found that the rules of the training game had changed—and changed permanently.

As the company invested more power in our individual industry groups and service lines—strategy, technology and change management—Accenture's distinctive approach to core training had ebbed in strength. Large-scale business changes also were affecting the training curriculum. Accenture was transitioning from a pure consulting organization, one with a fairly large homogeneous workforce, to a consulting and outsourcing company with several different kinds of workforces depending on how the work was to be sourced. Cost was also a looming issue as Accenture historically invested large amounts in our employee training programs.

Accenture's Capability Development group initiated a sweeping transformation of our internal training and development programs, reinventing the way we supported our workforce with world-class learning services, as well as knowledge sharing and collaboration capabilities.

Following the advice that Accenture provides to our own clients, the Capability Development Group looked to improve both the quality and efficiency of our training programs by pursuing an outsourcing model. In an innovative move, Accenture created a separate learning outsourcing service offering—Accenture Learning BPO Services—consolidating our learning, design and delivery resources to serve clients as well as Accenture's own internal training organization.

Accenture Learning BPO Services and Accenture work together today to annually serve more than 125,000 learners through more than 200,000 classroom learning days and more than 1,000 virtual learning sessions. As the outsourcing provider, Accenture Learning BPO Services has ongoing responsibilities for content development, delivery, technology development (application development, hosting and maintenance), help desk support and vendor management. Nearly 8 million hours of training are supported through a global learning management system call myLearning. Accenture Learning BPO Services collaborates with Accenture to deliver world-class experiences in classroom training, e-learning, virtual classrooms and decision support.

The learning transformation program at Accenture was boosted by a major research study conducted by the team into the return that Accenture receives on our investment in learning and training programs. The team discovered that for every dollar Accenture invests in learning, the company receives that dollar back plus an additional $3.53 in measurable value to our bottom line—in other words, a 353 percent return on learning.

Learning at Accenture is now successfully aligned with business strategy and the core curriculum has been upgraded to meet the needs of Accenture's workforces. Consistent, reliable and efficient delivery of training is another positive outcome of the outsourcing relationship. Additionally, Accenture is now saving more than 40 percent on learning and development compared to five years ago, even as the size of our workforce has grown by 50 percent.