I think hiring is the right place to start. When we think about talent, we actually think about how do you access talent? How do you hire it? How do you become a creator of talent so that you don’t always have to hire it? And then once they’re here, how do you unlock the potential of talent? And when you think about hiring, we’ve actually added to our workforce in the tightest labor market in history, at least our history, 200,000 people in the last 18 months. Over that time, we’ve had 4.6 million resumes. And so we use what’s called a high-tech-enabled, high-touch recruiting model. We use technology to help us match the resumes with our needs, and our needs are really broad. For example, we have nurses and MDs, as well as deep security professionals, as well as cloud professionals and people who do supply chains. So it’s really, really broad talent that we seek. We do so starting with this high-tech-enabled, high-touch recruiting model, which is kind of the “how we do it.” And of course the reason people come is all about what we offer our future employees.

As we think about our own business, we start with learning agility and we ask a very simple question to all of our applicants, senior and junior. Those who are coming from school, we ask it slightly differently because they’re in school. “What have you learned in the last six months that was not part of school?” is what we add for those who we’re recruiting on campus. And what we’re looking for are individuals who naturally learn things. Now, the answer could be, “I learned to cook.” Right? The answer could be, “I learned how to change a tire.” The point is, can the applicant respond to that question? It’s a really simple, but very effective way of understanding whether you’re hiring someone who likes to learn. And actually one of our leadership essentials for all of our leaders is to lead with excellence, confidence, and humility. And the humility we find as a leadership quality is what allows people to be natural learners and to build great teams. And so they’re really connected when we think about the kinds of people and kinds of skills. Then you take a step back and we do think that digital literacy is absolutely critical. We really believe that basic technology skills are critical in every aspect, and that sort of links to the second area of talent that we focus on, which is being a creator of talent.

Let’s go back to the pandemic in March of 2020. And when the pandemic hit, there was a big shift online, as we all know, and all of a sudden we had incredible demand. We’re able to use AI algorithms to identify who could be reskilled, what family of skills are close to what we have more demand on, and then we can actually do the reskilling. In the first six months after the pandemic, we upskilled about 100,000 people with programs that ranged from eight to 15 weeks, depending on what we were upskilling them for. And we were able to do so very rapidly, which enabled us to emerge from the pandemic much faster, because we could shift our people towards the new places of demand. And of course, its part of what makes our Accenture such an attractive place to work because people feel like they’re constantly being invested in. In fact, we spend about $1 billion a year, an average of 40 hours per person of training, which is a really strong reason why we are able to recruit quarter in and quarter out such amazing talent.

We’re really excited about the metaverse. We just put our tech vision out called the Metaverse Continuum. We think the metaverse is as impactful as the tech vision that we did back in 2013, when we said that every business would be a digital business, which has definitely come true a decade later. And we think the metaverse is that significant in terms of what it’ll do for the next decade. And this year we will onboard about 150,000 people by going through Accenture’s metaverse called One Accenture Park, which we think is the largest enterprise metaverse in the world. It used the beta version of Mesh by Microsoft. And what it does is it brings together people who’ve joined Accenture in the metaverse to explore Accenture, to have a shared experience with other new joiners when we’re still not having in-person shared experiences.