Today, AI is forcing us to relook at growth with relevance. Over the next few years, the world of work is on track to witness disruption beyond imagination in every aspect of work, particularly learning, creating a need to reassess and future-proof organisational learning strategies.
In a freewheeling conversation with Udit Bhatia, Director – India Learning Leader, EY, he spoke about how critical upskilling is today, and how organisations can plan their tech investments to create sophisticated learning ecosystems.
The impact of AI and how it has fuelled the urgency for upskilling
Bhatia spoke about leaders across the board who are trying to understand AI while also attempting to figure out how to personalise it for their own businesses, people, and culture. One can see AI impacting everything from geopolitics and economics to business and the regulatory & cyber sectors. “With elections happening in three major economies, we are all gearing up for how will this will impact us in our GCC business,” shares Bhatia.
As the war for the right talent intensifies, Bhatia feels organisations must focus on upskilling and reskilling quickly and effectively – moving away from conventional methods. It is also critical for businesses to tap into diverse talent pools when hiring. The first-mover advantage will belong to those who innovate, he said. GenAI has slowly but surely taken over mundane, transactional jobs, resulting in new skills and roles quickly gaining prominence, including new training needs. Bhatia believes organisations and educational institutions must continuously assess their learning actions. “EY hires extensively from campuses every year, and for the next 1-2 years, if the curriculum does not change, we’ll have to hire basis factors like IQ, EQ, candidate personality and not the technical skills of the person, because the future lies in upskilling people from zero,” he said.
Around 60 – 62% of EY learning is technical, averaging at approximately 312 million hours. The technical learning agenda is business-driven i.e. every solution has a learning partner, who joins hands with the learning team and helps define the yearly learning agenda. Soft skills encompasses around 1.1 million hours of training, out of which 10-11% is business-driven. Overall, 70% learning is driven by the business.
Today, with learning journeys being redesigned to suit the low attention spans of youngsters – two-week courses and self-learning five-minute videos – the right balance of self-paced, instructor-led training and classroom learning is important. Currently, 37% of learning at EY is self-paced, Bhatia explained. Having a small number of classroom participants, making learning more experiential, using a hybrid format, and shifting from theory to practice are key success factors. Large investments have gone into certification sandboxes and labs, where people can actually go in and experiment. The way ahead is to utilize learning data from the past 10-12 years, and use it to train EY databases in a way that it can provide the right learning recommendations to learners.
Investing in tech to create the right learning ecosystems
Investment in the right technology is needed to create new modes of self-learning. Approximately 30% of EY’s workforce belongs to the technology consulting practice, and 51% of the budget is dedicated to technology training. Digital analytics, cyber and technology courses are infused with every employee’s learning journey, through academies, certified courses, sandboxes and labs. Bhatia explained that the learning focus at EY started after they saw that they were doing 3.2 million hours of learning for approximately 40,000 people in a year, enabling them to take the next step and understand learner behaviour.
Questions such as “What kind of programs are getting traction?”, “What is the average consumption?” helped EY build a comprehensive ecosystem of on-demand courses. “Virtual learning was a mere 5% of our total learning in 2015, it jumped to 37% before COVID, and with COVID we moved from 63% classroom training to 100% virtual ecosystem,” Bhatia shared.
What emerged was a need to scale up the available 11,000 courses and go from 25,000 learners to over 45,000 learners in 2-3 years. Today, EY has more than 800 unique learning journeys – depending on the learner’s role or service line, learning is curated and people can select what they want to learn. This is possible through EY’s domain ecosystem and the badges ecosystem wherein EY created ~270 badges across leadership, technology and business. Learners can select a bronze, silver, gold, or platinum badge and work towards fulfiling their learning ambitions, be it a tech MBA or even a Master’s in Business and AI.
Such a global ecosystem – of more than 8,000 courses and 26,000 badges – has helped drive targeted learning at EY. Our organisation’s technical learning is outsourced, while we undertake soft skills training by impaneling qualified external trainers. Such blended offerings are becoming trend-setters in the learning space.
Crafting a culture of innovation and learning
Consulting ecosystems thrive on evolution. This begins with a problem-solving mindset, hence EY learning journeys and ecosystems are built around problem-solving mindsets – the “case teaching” method helps analyse the “what”, “why” and “what needs to be done”. Creativity and innovation mindsets are also built into EY’s content and tech structures through hackathons, sandboxes, innovation labs, and learning licenses.
EY-Parthenon offers the resources, expertise, and platforms for employees to craft a distinctive career in strategy consulting. To further build on AI awareness, EY’s AI Academy defines four learning personas on the basis of expected learning outcomes. Bhatia also talked about AI month – which EY celebrates in May with sessions, keynotes and masterclasses in a bid to not only create awareness but also build skills. “The intent is to create over 5,000 developers in the next six months. AI literacy is set to be a separate head in EY learning journeys, catering to all, from a new hire, to a partner,” Bhatia explained.
Creation of a learning culture at EY is also aided by the Navigator Project, under which candidates get detailed information about their learning journeys, on the day they accept the offer. It outlines a list of “experiences to offer”, from buddy programs to conversations with managers, to solution methodologies. “The Navigator is in its first year, and has a breakdown of day-by-day, week-by-week journey of every employee,” Bhatia shared. This is complemented by the badges ecosystem, which opens only after the 16th day and the “recommended engine” which opens post that. This streamlining has resulted in employees getting the information they need when they need it, rather than when somebody else thinks they may need it. This also helps drive a sense of inclusivity among new employees.
There is also the Milestone Events promotion program which is a role-shift program that offers over 7,000 promotions annually. The moment a person gets promoted, he or she goes through a curated journey to enable role changes.
EY as an organisation works towards building tomorrow’s leaders through various development programmes. For example, an employee plays the role of a partner for three days, and is assessed by 40+ partners, and undergoes personality assessments, conversations, masterclasses, coaching and feedback sessions. This creates a holistic 360-degree development program for directors as they become partners.
Preparing for a digital-first future of work through skilling
While only 4% training at location is done in-house, virtual-led training is a prominent part of EY’s learning ecosystem “Our learning mandates call for minimum of 40 hours of learning per employee per year. But people are able to achieve 48 to 50 hours,” Bhatia said.
But at the same time, Bhatia believes the ultimate measure of learning success is not through mandates but through ROI. EY measures ROI through the client satisfaction score, win-ratio, revenues, and the partner potential program. Learning is sanctioned only after a business case is made answering questions like “What is the assessors’ feedback on these participants?”. Onboarding ROI is calculated through dimension benchmarking, new-hire satisfaction scores, and first-year attrition. Qualitative ROI feedback comes from functional heads, employee experience surveys, and internal quality audit.
“It is important to identify where learning leads want to put ROI and not blindly just talk about ROI for each intervention,” he said.
Despite all efforts, some challenges persist. “Often there is a gap in how vendors understand the business of consulting and how it really is,” Bhatia said. “For consulting firms, case studies are critical. Finding vendors who cater to volumes for content-led courses is about hardcore quality and cost,” Bhatia added.
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