Current job roles are being reimagined: Srijata Sengupta, Accenture

The accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, data analytics, and extended reality has lead to various new job roles in the IT industry. While it is true that these technologies are leading to automation, it has also increased the demand for skilled employees across almost every sector that exists. How are companies now coping with this demand, and what are they doing to help existing employees re-skill in these technologies? Srijata Sengupta, Lead – Human Resources, Accenture’s Advanced Technology Centers in India (ATCI) tells us that and more.

DQ: How are you handling the issue of talent transformation?

Srijata Sengupta: At Accenture, we are leading with new capabilities for our clients and new experiences for our people. We know that the future requires technology-led capabilities to work in tandem with functional and industry capabilities. To build this, we have devised a strategy which includes hiring people from different academic disciplines and domains and pivoting them to technology, through experiential learning. This helps create value for our clients and their businesses and make our people future ready. In short, we don’t see talent transformation as an issue but as a huge opportunity for our people.

Alongside this, we provide our people with best-in-class experiences that helps them be their best at the workplace. A very good example is the location flexibility that we have enabled to ensure people are close to where they want to work from.

DQ: What about the issue of skilling and reskilling? How do emerging / deep tech skills fit into all of this?

Srijata Sengupta: As a talent- and innovation-led organization, we consider it our responsibility to prepare our people for the future and to create rich and rewarding careers. We are continuously calibrating our learning and development programs to ensure our curriculum is focused on new and emerging technologies such as such as Cloud, Data, AI, IOT or Extended Reality. We continue to invest nearly USD 1 billion every year globally in the learning and development of our people, and the centerpiece of this investment is Accenture Connected Learning, our global inhouse learning environment which enables us to deliver highly personalized, continuous learning, anywhere and anytime.

People development is an integral part of organizational development, and the ownership lies with both the organization and its people to inculcate a culture of continuous learning. We are creating customized learning paths based on the learning needs and career aspirations of our people and converting them into training modules and certifications. We are inducing newer learning methodologies and leveraging rich and diverse wealth of instantly available content to deliver on this. We are also enabling new experiences for people through planned role rotations, to help skill development and meet people’s aspirations.

DQ: How is Accenture driving inclusion through leadership and mentoring programs?

Srijata Sengupta: Accenture is an equal opportunity employer and is committed towards providing equal opportunities and fulfilling careers to people from different gender identities, sexual orientations, ages, abilities, and ethnicities. We have several programs to enable our people throughout their career and life cycle stages. For instance, our High-Tech Women Edge, CyberHer and Quantum Impact programs are focused initiatives towards helping high performing women technologists fast-track their careers through training and mentorship. Similarly, for persons with disabilities, we have dedicated teams working with hiring managers to attract persons with different disabilities, or to enable them through bridge programs that make them employable at Accenture or externally.

We take an intentional approach to equality as we believe it is an essential ingredient for innovation and enabling our people to think out-of-the-box.

DQ: What are the new kinds of job opportunities that are coming up?

Srijata Sengupta: With the rapid adoption of AI and related technologies, we see that current job roles are being reimagined. The focus on skills in areas such as migration, deployment and maintenance across multi-cloud environments and need for data and AI professionals with a focus on skills in Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Virtual Agents, Computer Vision, Data Visualization are becoming important. Similarly, security skills are a key focus to support the rapid pace of cloud deployments. Further, future roles will require a combination of technology, domain and industry skills, along with critical reasoning, creativity and soft skills to help our clients approach real-world problems in a holistic manner. It presents countless career and learning opportunities to both employees and budding technology professionals.

DQ: Key tech skills that will help solve real-world industry problems

Srijata Sengupta: Technologies are evolving at a wrap speed and their impact is becoming central to businesses and society. Cloud, artificial intelligence, extended reality, and internet of things are systematically becoming an important part of the world. Some of the advanced engineering technologies such as quantum computing will enable a new wave of scientific innovation and disruption in biotech, food tech etc. Further, a new niche known as green code is also an emerging sustainable trend targeted to diminish the relative energy consumption demanded by a particular code.