Automation takes away certain roles, but also creates new opportunity: Rekha Menon, MD, Accenture India – Economic Times

Global professional services company Accenture is sharpening its focus on learning and reskilling in India in the areas of "new IT" which is digital, analytics, cloud, mobility and security at a time when 50 per cent of its global revenue is coming from digital. "We caught the digital trend very early on, and started going down our digital journey and focusing on the 'new'," Rekha Menon, managing director of Accenture India , told ET in an interview.

Edited excerpts:

What is the purpose behind a renewed learning focus and investments?

The massive industry disruption led by digital meant that we needed to rotate ourselves to the new (which is digital, analytics, cloud, mobility and security). Today, 50 per cent of our global revenues come from digital. As a people business, rotating ourselves internally to the new means we must train our people. We spend nearly $1 billion on training globally.

In India, there are investments in infrastructure, such as our new learning centre in Bengaluru, which has a different design principle based on how people learn. There is learning on the gomore than 38,000 learning boards globally that can be accessed on any device, which is like having a big MOOC internally. We also have collaborative learning boards, so people can learn together, and we have gamified learning.

What is the learning focus at the leadership level in the context of the new IT? The focus is on future trends and what this means for our business, what kind of offerings will we take to our clients and what will we do internally. It is less technical, it is less subject specific deep knowledge. Leadership behaviour also needs to change since the workforce is very different. Even if I am working on weekends, I should be okay to not expect responses back. In the old world, that would not be the case. Because leadership mostly has grown up in a different environment, we must learn to work differently.

Do you think the middle management in companies is still under threat despite reskilling and some bit of redundancy is unavoidable due to automation? Automation takes away certain repetitive roles, but at the same time it creates new opportunity, so there are two sides to every change. Look at Uber. Yes, there was a lot of noise about it disrupting the entire vehicle industry, which it did, but look at the number of entrepreneurs it created, the number of jobs it created. It is a part of the cycle.

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Automation takes away certain roles, but also creates new opportunity: Rekha Menon, MD, Accenture India - Economic Times