Accenture gets its sums wrong as Dublin staff take a hit

Accenture is a global player in the consulting and outsourcing market. It has built its name on being able to see what’s coming in a market and advise clients on how to adapt to those changing scenarios.

It appears to be struggling to bring that same “big picture” vision – what it calls 360-degree value – to its own operations.

That will give little reassurance to staff in its Irish operation even if they survive the latest 890-job cull after the company announced a second set of redundancies in just over four months. The news, given to staff on Monday, came just weeks after the last of 400 colleagues departed in a previous round of job cuts announced in March.

At that time, the business said it had decided on the scale of retrenchment required following a “careful review” of its operations here. This announcement portrays the latest cuts – bringing total losses here to more than treble the originally announced number – as part of that same 19,000 adjustment. So what gives?

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Three scenarios come to mind. First, perhaps that “careful review” was less comprehensive and insightful than it needed to be in its assessment of the prospects for the group and its outsourcing clients. Or has it proven less complicated to shed workers in Ireland than in certain other jurisdictions?

Either is preferable to a third possibility – that the company thought it easier to “right-size” the Irish workforce in stages and was less than transparent with its staff on what was required of the team here – but none shows the company in a good light.

[ Accenture cuts 890 more Irish jobs just weeks after 400 redundant staff leave ]

What is clear is that the company’s Dublin headquarters is bearing a disproportionately big hit as the company scrambles to adjust to the new reality in the tech sector with which it is closely aligned, providing outsourcing services to industry giants such as Microsoft and Meta.

The 19,000 jobs Accenture said in March that it was planning to cut amounted to 2.6 per cent of its 738,000 global workforce. Ireland was pencilled in for 400 of those, or about 6 per cent of its local workforce.

The 890 further job losses announced on Monday equate to a further 13.7 per cent of the Irish staff, bringing the total losses here to just shy of 20 per cent, or one in five of all the people employed here by Accenture as recently as March.