Talent Strategy Manager

Accenture; Midrand; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Job summary

Accenture, a global professional services leader, is seeking a Manager in its People & Organisation practice in Midrand. This client-facing role focuses on Talent Reinvention, HR transformation, operating model design, and learning strategies to help clients build future-ready workforces and accelerate value through AI-enabled change.

You will lead workstreams and client relationships, collaborating with Senior Managers and Directors, translating insights into structured recommendations.

Qualifications

• 5-8 years of talent, human capital, organisational design, or change and learning with client-facing or consulting exposure.
• Experience managing workstreams or project components in complex, multi-stakeholder environments.
• Demonstrated ability to produce polished, client-ready deliverables and present findings with confidence to senior audiences.
• Exposure to AI, digital transformation, or future-of-work agendas is advantageous.

Responsibilities

• Lead day-to-day client engagements on assigned workstreams, serving as a key point of contact for senior client stakeholders.
• Plan and contribute to client workshops, discovery sessions, and working group meetings translating insights into structured recommendations.
• Prepare and present client-ready outputs including frameworks, diagnostic findings, design options, and implementation roadmaps.
• Support Senior Managers and Directors in managing overall engagement delivery, contributing to quality assurance and milestone tracking.
• Build rapport and credibility with mid-to-senior client stakeholders, laying the groundwork for long-term advisory relationships.
• Target operating model design engagements from current-state diagnostics through to future-state design and implementation roadmaps.
• Contribute to organisational structures, spans and layers, role architecture, and governance frameworks that align to their strategic direction.
• Produce high-quality deliverables including design principles, Target Operating Model blueprints, and role accountability matrices.
• Translate operating model decisions into tangible operational processes - ensuring new ways of working are practical, embedded, and measurable.
• Help shape a clients HR transformation journey by defining their future HR operating model, service delivery approach, organisation structure and capabilities required to support the business strategy.
• Understand the end-to-end HR capability landscape by bringing strong knowledge across areas such as talent, workforce planning, learning, performance, rewards, employee experience, HR operations and people analytics.
• Connect HR operating model to technology by understanding how platforms such as Workday and SAP SuccessFactors and emerging AI solutions to enable HR processes, employee experience, automation and data-driven decision-making.
• Co-design enterprise talent strategies with clients - covering workforce planning, talent segmentation, critical role identification, and capability frameworks.
• Contribute to talent review and calibration processes, supporting clients to make better, more consistent decisions about their people.
• Drive change programmes by shaping and driving the change strategy for large transformations, covering stakeholder alignment, change impact, adoption, communications and business readiness.
• Design learning and capability solutions, translating new processes, technologies and ways of working into practical learning journeys, role-based training, leadership development and on-the-job enablement.
• Support business development and client relationships, identifying opportunities, shape proposals, contribute to pitches and position change and learning as a critical part of transformation outcomes.

Skills

Talent management

Organisation design

Change management

Client relationship management

AI / digital transformation awareness

Stakeholder management

Learning & development

Tools

Workday

SAP SuccessFactors

Job description

About Accenture

Accenture helps the world's leading enterprises reinvent by building their digital core and unleashing the power of AI to create value at speed for organizations across industries. Our strategy is to be the reinvention partner of choice for our clients and lead in the safe, widespread adoption of AI, and to be the most client-focused, AI-enabled, great place to work in the world. We bring together the talent of our approximately 786,000 people with proprietary assets and platforms, deep process and industry expertise, and leading ecosystem relationships to deliver end-to-end solutions and measurable outcomes at scale. Through our Reinvention Services, we offer broad expertise across Cybersecurity, Digital Core, Finance, Industry and Enterprise, Song, Supply Chain and Engineering, and Talent, with advanced capabilities in AI and Data, Industry and Process, and Technology. We serve approximately 9,000 clients and generated approximately $70 billion in FY25 revenue. Visit us at accenture.com. #LI-EU

The Opportunity

This is a client-facing Manager role sitting at the heart of our People & Organisation practice. Talent Reinvention sits at the forefront of the most pressing transformation challenges organisations face today focusing on how to build workforces that are future-ready, how to reimagine talent in the age of AI, how to lead through structural change, and how to design organisations that perform at pace.

As a Manager, you will operate with genuine dual responsibility: leading workstreams and client relationships independently, while also supporting Senior Managers and Directors on larger, more complex engagements. You are a credible, confident practitioner, someone clients trust to show up prepared, think on their feet, and deliver with rigour and care.

This role spans the full breadth of the Talent Reinvention agenda - HR transformation, operating model and organisation design, talent strategy and change and learning giving you the depth of challenge and breadth of exposure to grow rapidly as a practitioner and as a client advisor.

You will represent our practice externally, shaping client relationships, contributing to client engagements, and translating deep expertise into outcomes that matter. This role demands equal strength in strategic thinking and stakeholder management. You will bring a strategic mindset to the practice and clients as well as be comfortable in the adoption of technology and AI. You are comfortable building relationships with clients to solve their human capital challenges.

What You'll Do

Client Delivery & Engagement

• Lead day-to-day client engagements on assigned workstreams, serving as a key point of contact for senior client stakeholders.


• Plan and contribute to client workshops, discovery sessions, and working group meetings translating insights into structured recommendations.


• Prepare and present client-ready outputs including frameworks, diagnostic findings, design options, and implementation roadmaps.


• Support Senior Managers and Directors in managing overall engagement delivery, contributing to quality assurance and milestone tracking.


• Build rapport and credibility with mid-to-senior client stakeholders, laying the groundwork for long-term advisory relationships.

Operating Model & Organisational Design

• Target operating model design engagements from current-state diagnostics through to future-state design and implementation roadmaps.


• Contribute to organisational structures, spans and layers, role architecture, and governance frameworks that align to their strategic direction.


• Produce high-quality deliverables including design principles, Target Operating Model blueprints, and role accountability matrices.


• Translate operating model decisions into tangible operational processes - ensuring new ways of working are practical, embedded, and measurable.

HR Reinvention

• Help shape a clients HR transformation journey by defining their future HR operating model, service delivery approach, organisation structure and capabilities required to support the business strategy.


• Understand the end-to-end HR capability landscape by bringing strong knowledge across areas such as talent, workforce planning, learning, performance, rewards, employee experience, HR operations and people analytics.


• Connect HR operating model to technology by understanding how platforms such as Workday and SAP SuccessFactors and emerging AI solutions to enable HR processes, employee experience, automation and data-driven decision-making.

Talent Strategy

• Co-design enterprise talent strategies with clients - covering workforce planning, talent segmentation, critical role identification, and capability frameworks.


• Contribute to talent review and calibration processes, supporting clients to make better, more consistent decisions about their people.

Change Management and Learning

• Drive change programmes by shaping and driving the change strategy for large transformations, covering stakeholder alignment, change impact, adoption, communications and business readiness.


• Design learning and capability solutions, translating new processes, technologies and ways of working into practical learning journeys, role-based training, leadership development and on-the-job enablement.


• Support business development and client relationships, identifying opportunities, shape proposals, contribute to pitches and position change and learning as a critical part of transformation outcomes.

What You Bring

Experience

• 5-8 years of experience in talent, human capital, organisational design, or change and learning with client-facing or consulting exposure.


• Experience managing workstreams or project components in complex, multi-stakeholder environments.


• Demonstrated ability to produce polished, client-ready deliverables and present findings with confidence to senior audiences.


• Exposure to AI, digital transformation, or future-of-work agendas is advantageous.

Skills & Capabilities

• Strong client presence: professional, articulate, and able to hold a room in senior settings while remaining genuinely curious and collaborative.


• Structured thinker with the ability to frame complex problems clearly and develop well-reasoned, insight-led recommendations.


• Excellent written and verbal communication; skilled at crafting materials that are clear, compelling, and visually well-structured.


• Organised and delivery-focused with the ability to manage multiple priorities, meet deadlines, and keep engagements moving.


• High EQ and adaptability, comfortable navigating ambiguous client environments and shifting stakeholder dynamics.


• Collaborative team player who can work effectively both independently and as part of a broader engagement team.

What Success Looks Like

• Clients consistently rate your work as high quality, actionable, and tailored to their context and ask for you by name on follow-on work.


• You run workstreams end-to-end with minimal oversight, delivering on time and to scope.


• Senior Managers and Directors regard you as a reliable, value-adding member of the team, someone they actively want on their engagements.


• You are visibly growing taking on broader client responsibility, deepening your expertise, and contributing to the practice beyond your immediate project.