Accenture’s Hugh O’Gara and Caoimhe Ryan offer their advice, tips and tricks for navigating an early-stage career.
For anyone, whether you are a student, a graduate or an established professional re-entering the workforce, taking on a graduate position can be an exciting, interesting and even nerve-wracking experience, as you hope to make a good first impression. But for this to happen, new hires need the full support of their co-workers and the organisation, as they take their first steps towards their professional future.
“On your first day, you’re assigned a buddy and a people lead and they really help you work through the different steps,” said Hugh O’Gara, a strategy analyst at Accenture. “As you work up to more senior leadership, they’ll help you adjust your performance to [meet] expectations, through ‘expectations at level documents’ and regular checkups.”
He said that typically in consulting new employees can expect to work their way up from an analyst position to MD and as you do, the level of your responsibilities in regards to projects and your exposure to senior and key stakeholders will also increase.
Not to mention, the role, like almost every position in the rapidly advancing technology space, can change like the wind and professionals, new or old, have to find ways to keep pace.
“GenAI has really changed how the day-to-day role of a consultant works,” explained O’Gara. “And it’s really shifted the emphasis towards more strategic tasks like stakeholder engagement, relationship building and creative problem solving.
“On a daily basis, I’ll use something that we call our core consulting skills. So that could be project management. So making sure that actions are tracked and closed as well as our PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, kind of the classic core components. But we’ll also use things like problem solving, creativity and curiosity as well.”
Who is it for?
And therein lies the joy of student and graduate programmes that empower qualified people to take the next step in their professional journey.
Grad initiatives, while helping students and graduates to become diverse in their skillsets, also expose them to multiple aspects of an organisation, creating the potential for a future in a more specialised field, if that is what the end goal is.
And before it even gets to a stage of finalising your career ambitions, for many graduates, it is an opportunity to apply their current skillset in an area that they are unsure of, but hope to become far more involved in.
“To those considering a career in this area or just starting out, I would say just absolutely go for it,” said Caoimhe Ryan, a business and technology analyst at Accenture.
“I came from a business background. I had an interest in tech-based change in business but no real technical know how. However, I’ve learned that it’s not about what you know, but that you are willing to learn. Nobody has all of the answers from day one, and those who say that they do probably don’t. So, I would just say to ask questions, be curious and you’ll grow into it.”
Currently working with a large resources client, Ryan supports delivery governance across IT applications, that is, a wide spectrum of tasks that includes financial oversight, revenue forecasting, managing key trackers and preparing for service reviews. She is also in the process of testing an upgrade for the client’s HR platform.
All of this, Ryan explained, supports a broader impact when it comes to establishing both a reputation with a client and your own career, in order to create more opportunities. “By helping the client to run more efficient IT systems, it means that we are making space for innovation both for them and for us at Accenture.
“Last year I had the opportunity to visit one of our advanced technology centers in India. We spent some time in the office in Mumbai where the team showcased some innovative technology.”
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