Hack your career with Accenture

I was happy to make a flying visit to London last night to attend the latest instalment of the Code First: Girls event series, Hack your career with Accenture.

Previously, the events have focused on themes like fintech, travel tech, fashion tech and cyber security. This time, it was laser-focused on what it’s like to work at global technology consultancy, Accenture.

Aside from being perpetually confused about how to pronounce the name of this, well, behemoth, I really had no idea what they did until this evening. It turns out, technology consulting, so that means providing expert advice for their global clients on technological change.

My only brush with Accenture has previously been knowing a friend of a friend who works there, and indeed the event was focused a lot on recruiting for their grad scheme. I probably wouldn’t be a good fit for their scheme as a tech blogger, but their commitment to promoting diversity in technology was very inspiring.

We heard from a panel of about ten speakers of which the majority were women and everyone was universally positive about working there. Whilst this could well have been scripted, you can tell when enthusiasm is genuine and it certainly sounds like an amazing place to work.

Technology is becoming a bigger and bigger part of our lives and organisations need to embrace change or get left behind. There’s hardly anything worse than lagging along with outdated systems, risking all sorts of security breaches and hindering basic operations.

Accenture’s focus is on the teamwork of their people to innovate and find the best solutions for their clients – a model that is certainly working very well.

It was also good to hear about their piloting an apprenticeship scheme for workers in technology that doesn’t require a degree. I’m very passionate about inclusion, and making sure that alternative educational paths (other than higher education) are promoted more, especially in more hands-on careers such as software engineering.

Once again, it was lovely to see so many faces who had attended other Code First: Girls coding courses and who were dedicated to their professional development. Someone was even there who was due to start their undergraduate course at Warwick next week, which I consider extremely committed!

Like most grad schemes, places are of course very competitive with an online application, video interview and then assessment centre required before an offer is made, Accenture sounds like a wonderful place to work.

You can find discover more free London tech events coming up. If you’d like find out how I can support your blogging strategy, don’t hesitate to email me at catherine@awaywithwords.co.