When your new job description is actually a countdown timer

IN MY life, I have been called many things, mostly while I had been mercifully out of earshot. But at least I’ve never been called a “reinventor”, which is apparently what will happen if you work at Accenture.

The consultancy’s chief executive, Julie Sweet, started referring to employees by that label earlier this year, and now the term is reportedly set to be used more broadly across its payroll of almost 800,000 people.

This reinventor term came from a reorganisation that Accenture announced in June, in which it merged its various service units – strategy, consulting, interactive, technology and operations – into a giant one called “reinvention services”.

But there is something worse than being called reinventor, and that is to be called unemployed. In September, Accenture said it would “exit” employees who were unable to reskill in artificial intelligence (AI). “We are investing in upskilling our reinventors, which is our primary strategy,” Sweet told analysts.

“We are exiting people on a compressed timeline where reskilling, based on our experience, is not a viable path for the skills we need.”

Some 11,000 people were eventually laid off – I mean, “exited”. Now, this resourceful use of a noun as a verb is telling in its deliberate blandness, an act of linguistic tai chi that conjures up an image of 11,000 people wandering out the door of their own volition.

Equally telling was the term awaiting those who’d survived the cull, their reward for which was to be repackaged as reinventors. You might scoff at this instance of yet more consultancy-speak, but the moniker ought to send shivers down the spine of anyone who works anywhere air-conditioned, and not just at Accenture.

With this rebranding, the consultancy is ostensibly focusing on the ability of their employees to reinvent the firm from within, even as they are paid for their expertise in helping their clients remake themselves at a time when AI has forcibly reshaped everybody’s commercial reality.

That is a reasonable response to some very disorienting developments – adapt or perish, et cetera. But anyone can see that this reinventor label cuts both ways, with one pointy end of the “exiting” dagger permanently levelled at any employee who fails to reinvent themselves.

The consultancy is simply being more forthright than most companies about the new terms of labour-capital engagement, one undergirded by perpetual precarity.

You will only be as valuable as your last Sisyphean newfangled skill acquisition, only as quickly as you can roll that reskilling stone up the hill over and over again, until the day your body or mind inevitably runs out of “viable paths”, upon which you will be exited on a “compressed timeline”.

This isn’t new, but the pace and ferocity of professional displacement are. Now, “reskilling” means competing with software that improves exponentially even as the human merely improves incrementally. Given this gulf in intrinsic capabilities, the half-life of professional competence is shrinking as we speak, from years to months.

I am sure that greater minds than mine are toiling away at an economic or existential solution to this problem. But in the meantime, we will need to make peace with the fact that anything your company calls you, be it reinventor or something else, will be a silken euphemism for “not yet unemployed”.