Knowledge and insights

Deloitte is a knowledge intensive firm. We bring in knowledge and experience by recruiting top graduates and experienced hires. We develop knowledge and aim to keep our talent’s skills and knowledge up to speed through our formal learning curriculum. We actively share our insights to elevate public knowledge and understanding of the complex challenges that we work on.   

Formal learning

COVID-19 forced us to think differently about learning and development and the way we offer learning opportunities. In 2020/2021 the transition to digital and virtual delivery has been our key priority to continue to offer learning and development opportunities to our professionals. As of March 2020, we transformed the technical and professional learning curriculum from in person live trainings to digital and virtual learning, which has accounted for 95% of all learnings in 2020/2021. We worked together with NSE and Deloitte University to successfully transform all Career Milestones programmes for our leadership into virtual development experiences. Due to the transformation from classroom learning to shorter, immersive virtual and digital learnings, the learning hours per headcount in 2020/2021 are less compared to 2019/2020. This year, we invested €5.7 million in learning; we believe this investment is key to supporting our people in their growth and abilities to make a positive impact.

COVID-19 accelerated the transformation of learning within Deloitte into a continuous development approach through formal education but also through environment, experience and comprising blended-learning opportunities. ‘Never Stop Growing’, an important pillar within our Employee Value Proposition, underlines the importance of offering continuous learning and development opportunities with varied career options supported by talent mobility for our professionals. In 2020/2021, we successfully launched the leadership and professional development guide to support continuous learning.

We grow leaders for the future, build world class capabilities for maximum client impact and consistently deliver an exceptional development experience for our people. The opportunity for the future is to improve the impact on our client engagements, to enhance the talent experience of our professionals and optimise learning investments and resources. Therefore, we will continue in 2021/2022 to focus on the future of learning and the technology landscape.

The future of learning will be a learning environment that includes a learning culture and the right use and mix of live in-person, virtual and digital learning. Our new Deloitte University Europe campus in Paris which will open in 2022, will play an important role in our classroom learning curriculum. We will explore other, new, innovative technology to improve and enhance the learning experience of our professionals. Due to ever-evolving trends affecting the workforce and workplace, today's professionals require a development experience that is uniquely their own, where learning is integrated into everyday life.

Therefore, Deloitte is implementing a global learning platform (CURA) that will meet our professionals in their moment of need to provide personalised client, industry and skills-based knowledge as well as social networking and collaboration opportunities. CURA is a learning-driven content curation system that will bring personalised internal and external content to the Deloitte professional. This innovative platform will create learning opportunities and support the personal and everyday learning experience.

Table: 07: Average training hours per FTE

Sharing knowledge

Deloitte depends on renowned academic institutions to educate our future and current professionals and business leaders. Our external costs invested in learning and development amount to €4.4 million. These costs help our employees educate themselves, and in return contribute to the financial stability of educational facilities. Knowledge is not only a key input for our business mode, it actually also is a key output. As an organisation, we partner with knowledge centers on a variety of complex topics. Examples of such partnerships are our associations with Singularity University in Eindhoven and Nyenrode University in Breukelen. Through our partnerships, we are able to further develop content that is mutually beneficial to both the universities involved as well as for Deloitte. Through our ‘Future of’ agenda we create ecosystems in which we input our knowledge and insights for the benefit of our clients and society at large.

Frequently, we publish thoughtware to enrich public knowledge around current themes. Recent examples of such thoughtware are our point of view on creating a viable hydrogen economy, an article series on the future of Dutch state government, and our report on Europe’s future aviation landscape in 2040.

Through our ‘Future of’ agenda we create ecosystems in which we input our knowledge and insights for the benefit of our clients and society at large.

Impacts

Deloitte depends on renowned academic institutions to educate our future and current professionals and business leaders. Our out-of-pocket costs invested in learning and development help our employees educate themselves, and in return contribute to the financial stability of educational facilities.

We see it as our role to participate and actively contribute to the academic world and leading the debate: 268 of our professionals are internally registered to hold additional positions in universities and colleges. In addition, Deloitte actively participates in think tanks such as the Working Groups of the Dutch Chartered Accountants Association and the Foundation on Auditing Research (FAR), to advance professional standards. Furthermore, we cooperate with universities to jointly develop and transfer valuable academic insights to our client base.

The value we create is driven by our talent and intellectual property. Therefore, both training and Inclusion & Diversity are strategically important topics for our firm. The indicator we have developed for training and a further explanation of our approach can be found in this section. For Inclusion & Diversity, please refer to the our people section.