It’s safe to say that, at the start of 2020, virtually no-one predicted that the consulting industry would experience the level of profound disruption that it has gone through this year. The priorities of clients have changed dramatically, with the result that consultants are now working on very different types of project from the ones they were delivering twelve months ago. At the same time, the way those projects are conducted has also changed a great deal. Once the archetypal jet-setters, consultants have had to adjust to the realities of remote work—and have had to find creative solutions to the challenges that come with it.
As governments around the world announce their vaccination roll-out plans, and the light at the end of the tunnel becomes clearer, consulting firms are naturally asking themselves questions about what comes after all of this. We sat down with Hyong Kim—Global Consulting Deputy Vice Chair at EY—to get his perspective on just how different the industry will look in a post-COVID world, and what firms can do to set themselves up for success in this new reality.
Given that the priorities of consultants have to be dictated by the priorities of their clients, let’s start there. To what extent has COVID-19 affected the issues that are on your clients’ agendas? And how has EY responded to those new priorities?
Our clients are focusing right now on continuing their digital transformation agendas—across front, middle and back office. For many of them, COVID-19 has accelerated that journey; and it's also forced them to think more deeply about how to future proof the investments they're making today. Consulting firms like ours have an important role to play in enabling that future-proofing. We can provide our clients with insights and benchmarking data, and we can help them look not only at the state of play within their own sector, but also find lessons from other industries. And crucially, we can do all of that in a collaborative way. Clients today want us to bring them on a journey in a transparent and interactive way—something that's very different from the traditional ways of working in this industry.
In our diversity and inclusiveness work at EY, we often use the PTR model—'preferences, traditions and requirements'—as a tool for figuring out where we can make changes to our established ways of doing things. And I think that kind of model is a useful way for firms to think about all of the change the industry is currently experiencing as a result of COVID-19. Consultants are going to have to reimagine almost everything they do: how they build trust with their clients; how they link together relevant stakeholders; and how they build effective technology ecosystems
And will that reimagining of the role of the consultant have an impact on the type of skills that will be required to succeed in this industry?
We've all found that our personal and professional lives have become much more intertwined because of COVID-19, including the shift to remote working; it's not uncommon to see colleagues' spouses in the backgrounds of video calls, for example. As a result of that intertwining, a lot of the softer skills—the ability to truly empathise with a client or a colleague, for example—have become more important than ever. Creativity has also become a more important skill for consultants to have. There are so many basic activities that used to be commonplace on projects—like whiteboarding, for instance—that are now no longer feasible; so consultants have had to come up with creative alternatives.
Looking ahead to the future: Once we get to a point where we, as a society, are able to put the pandemic behind us, do you think that there’ll be a ‘return to normalcy’? Do you think that consultants will go back to their traditional ways of working once it’s possible for them to do so?
I think that the notion of ‘going back to normal’ is a fallacy. I don't think working patterns are ever going to go back to the way they were before COVID-19—particularly not in the consulting industry. Prior to the pandemic, there was always scepticism among clients about the effectiveness of remote working; at EY, we were used to our clients asking us to be onsite with them four or five days a week. Now, though, there's a general acknowledgement that remote working can be effective. Yes, there are still some issues that need to be ironed out, and I'm sure technology can help facilitate that. But we expect that many of our clients are going to continue wanting us to work remotely—most of the time, at least—even after the pandemic ends.
If remote working does remain relatively common in the consulting industry, do you think that will encourage firms like EY to do more to operate in more of a borderless way, taking more advantage of their global talent pools?
We've been building up our global delivery capability for over 10 years now. Our earliest offshore delivery centres were in India, but we now also have similar facilities across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and parts of Europe. Now that COVID has made remote working more palatable to clients, our ability to leverage those delivery centres has definitely increased—so I expect we'll continue to invest in this space going forward, while also experimenting more with nearshoring models.
In the long-run, as we move towards a more globalised way of working, I think we're going to have to fundamentally reassess the geographic spread of our human capital. Historically, we've employed large numbers of consultants in cities like London, New York, and Hong Kong—which are some of the most expensive cities in the world But if it gets to the point where most of our clients don't really mind where work is being done, then that gives us the flexibility to move our consulting hubs to alternative locations—or to explore a more decentralised staffing model.
Of course, remote working does bring with it new challenges for firms as well; many clients have told us they feel less of a sense of a cohesive project team culture than they used to, for example. What can firms do to mitigate that particular issue?
There are a few different things firms need to do to ensure that remote working doesn't end up having a negative effect on their ability to create cohesive project team cultures. First, they need to create a consistent set of delivery methods; it's vital that everyone's on the same page about how the project is going to work, whether they're 100 miles or 2,000 miles away from the client. Second, firms ought to use technology to build trust between team members. A lot of our project managers have found innovative ways to replicate the traditional social aspects of team-building in a virtual way—hosting events like virtual happy hours, for example.;
COVID-19 has certainly created a greater sense of distance between firms and their clients; many firms have told us that they’ve looked to technology and their intellectual capital as a way of bridging that gap. At EY, how have you been incorporating technology into the way you deliver projects?
We see technology enabled delivery as the future of consulting services; not all of that technology will be obvious to clients, but behind the scenes a lot of the person hours involved in delivering a project will get turned into machine hours. That's why investing in technology expertise and developing a strong intellectual property portfolio are core pillars of our ‘Next Wave’ strategy. Our virtual internal auditor capability is one example of this strategy in action. Similarly, our supply chain team has built a Supply Chain Intelligence Platform (SCIP) that allows us to conduct automated assessments of operational efficiency within a client's supply chain. And we recently launched ‘Cognistreamer’, a digital innovation platform that ties together external emerging technology vendors and enables more effective ideation and activation.
The investment that we've made in collaboration technology—and the fact that many of our people were used to working remotely on a regular basis anyway—meant that responding to COVID was a lot easier for us than it would have been otherwise. But even so, it was still a challenge to scale everything up at the necessary pace. At the start of March, for example, we had 80,000 Microsoft Teams users in our business; by April 1st, that number became 260,000.
Will that shift to a more technology-enabled model of consulting affect the type of people you’re looking for when making hiring decisions?
When we look for talent to bring into our organisation, we're still looking for deep functional expertise. But that expertise has to be coupled with technology know-how. Consultants can't just look at a particular function or a particular process in isolation anymore; they need to be able to articulate the technology implications. I'm not saying that consultants need to be experts in any one particular piece of software, but they do need to understand how the technology landscape is evolving, and what that means for our clients. So when we're looking at potential hires, STEM capabilities are now just as important as the business and management expertise that we traditionally recruited for.
Like many other professional services firms we are finding that we need to be providing career paths that are increasingly personalised and flexible. The traditional path to Partner is no longer the only one. At EY, we very much recognise that as we hire a greater number of technology-oriented people, our established career frameworks—which were built with audit, tax and consulting skillsets in mind—are going to have to change. We've got to recognise that not everyone wants to become a business leader but instead may wish to focus on their technical expertise. We need those kinds of people as much as we do anyone else, so we have to be able to accommodate them within our career frameworks. This is why we are creating a specific technology career framework at EY—one which defines the technical skills required as well as allows for these different routes to success.
Do you have a sense of how to find and attract those people? What can firms do, do you think, in order to make themselves a more attractive destination for the type of talent they’ll need in their organisation in the future?
When people—at the graduate level or otherwise—are choosing a firm to work for, there are a number of different factors they consider. Culture is probably one of the most important factors; people want to work for a firm whose culture meshes well with their own values. But people also want to work for a firm that's going to provide them with opportunities for personal growth—that will encourage them to be exposed to different skillsets and capabilities. In my experience, Millennials and Generation Z in particular have an insatiable appetite for learning; they want to start learning on day one of the job and then feel that this learning process continues all the way through their careers.
We launched our purpose—‘building a better working world’—six years ago. Since then, it's had an incredible effect on our ability to attract talent into our organisation. I think it's very powerful to be able to say to someone that if they join our firm, they won't just be doing consulting; they'll be playing a part in a much bigger mission.
Of course, we have to prove our commitment to that purpose in order for it to have credibility. And one way we do that is through our focus on sustainability. I think an employer's environmental and social credentials matter a great deal to today's graduates, so it's important for us to position ourselves right at the cutting edge of green technology.
You mentioned earlier the need for consultants to possess deep functional expertise. Many industry leaders have told us they’re concerned right now that, as clients start putting more pressure on them to staff project teams with genuine experts, that will make it harder for firms to continue generating revenue from their more junior resources. What future do you see for the traditional consulting resource pyramid?
I don't think that the traditional consulting pyramid is going to disappear anytime soon. We'll always need a broad base of junior resources, not just from a delivery perspective, but also to protect the long-term future of our business; we need to continue bringing people in at a variety of different levels, so that they can matriculate through the various grades within our business. However, even if our core consulting team remains pyramid-shaped, it will probably start to function more like a diamond once you account for all of the resources we have access to outside of that core—through our ecosystem partners, our offshore and nearshore delivery centres, and so on.
What about freelance talent? Is that another talent pool that firms can tap into if they want to operate as more diamond-shaped organisations?
I expect freelance talent to play a major role in the future of our workforce. We're in the process right now of taking a hard look at our capabilities, and deciding what we need in-house and what we want to get access to by leveraging our ecosystem of partners and freelancers. In our view, you shouldn't have to be a full-time employee to be part of the wider EY community. That's why we launched GigNow—a platform we built in-house to provide contractors and freelancers with a way of finding out about relevant opportunities. Looking ahead, I think that the increasing acceptance of remote working is going to create even more opportunities for us to bring external talent into our delivery model.
So far, we’ve focused primarily on how COVID-19 affects the way that firms interact with their clients. But what about some of the internal effects? For example; how are firms going to need to change their approach to L&D going forward?
Prior to COVID-19, we used to provide a number of in-person training programmes to our staff—which we've, of course, had to start conducting remotely instead. Yes, there have been some courses that might have suffered because of that; but we've also heard feedback that in many cases people actually prefer the online versions. The stereotype of online learning is that it's very one-sided, but we've found that if you properly take advantage of tools like real-time Q&A functions, you can make online learning even more interactive than in-person courses. There will always be some topics that have to be taught in-person, but I still expect that after the pandemic, we'll continue to make much greater use of virtual training than we did in the past.
We've leant on programmes like our Badge scheme to ensure that our employee's training needs are met during the pandemic. Since the start of the year, 88,000 badges have been initiated and 30,000 have been awarded. And in April we launched a fully virtual tech MBA programme, delivered through our technology academy.
We’ve talked about a number of ways the industry might change in response to COVID-19. But if you had to make a prediction, what do you think will be the biggest shifts we’ll see in the industry over the next five years? How different will consulting look in 2025 compared to today?
One of the big stories over the next five years will be firms maturing their approach to remote working. We're going to start to see consultants turn the promises of offshoring—not just the cost benefits, but the whole ‘follow the sun’ model of 24/7 delivery—into reality. Additionally, I think we're going to see a much greater degree of intertwining between clients, consulting firms, technology vendors and freelancers. Already, clients are starting to think much more holistically than they used to about the wider ecosystem of project delivery; and that shift is only going to accelerate over the coming years.
