Situation

The professional services industry, specifically management/strategy consulting, is being disrupted by new service providers, technology and a growing clientele that doesn’t believe that they can draw value from consultants. Our client Roland Berger, a global strategy consultancy headquartered in Europe, wants to leapfrog and become the consultancy of the future. The biggest obstacle to achieving this goal was rethinking the essence of what it means to be a consultant - and how this role will transform in the future. Roland Berger’s HR and Operations departments had some initial thoughts, but quickly realized they would need to refine their ideas and make them actionable. MCL was appointed to help with this challenge statement: what skills will our future consultants need for Roland Berger to be competitive in the marketplace.

Solution

The first phase of our work with Roland Berger utilized MCL’s deep expertise in the category of Future of Work to help their HR department understand what their future work world of tomorrow could become. The next phase was a coordinated series of Innovation Journeys designed to their objectives to look at the Future of Work, bringing together innovative spaces, such as New Lab, WeWork, Betaworks, innovative reskilling providers such as Hyper Island, Galvanize and General Assembly, and innovative methodology providers such as the Design Gym and A/D/O. Our position is, to understand the working world of tomorrow you have to have an exchange with those that are already working in the world of tomorrow.

Throughout the course of these Innovation Journeys we developed narrative-driven sessions between Roland Berger’s CEO, C-suite, and top partners and our various Journey partners. In one of our sessions focused on reskilling workforces, we created an in-depth session with General Assembly’s CEO, Jake Schwarz, which enabled Roland Berger to share their challenges in an open, collaborative environment. It was through these sessions that Roland Berger was able to obtain a larger grasp of the importance that data science would play in the future world of consulting, and as a result has now partnered with General Assembly.

Result

Roland Berger selected General Assembly to reskill a significant portion of their workforce. Through a skill assessment program designed by General Assembly specifically for Roland Berger, analysts, project managers and consultants who previously held a cursory understanding of data science applications were transformed into data scientists.

Program Overview:

250

New-hire 'data analytics' training for 250 employees

60

Internal 'data analytics' training for 60 employees

60

Internal 'data science for consultants' for 60 employees

Over 350 Roland Berger employees will eventually be reskilled for the future as a result of our Innovation Journey sessions. Furthermore, there is the potential to expand training toward Product Management to support their end customer transformations.

This case illustrates just one of many Innovation Journey outcomes. To date our program with Roland Berger has brought over 200 partners to Shenzhen, Beijing, Singapore, New York and San Francisco to help them develop their ‘future consultancy’.

Design your Future Workplace journey

Contact Us