Talent Development

We prioritize the continuous development and growth of our people. Our career model framework establishes expectations for professional growth, and our talent management strategy enables leaders to align, support, grow, and recognize employee performance. In FY24, we will benchmark our processes and practices to ensure we offer effective mechanisms to facilitate employee and company growth. Over the past year, we invested in enhancing our learner experience and learning technology ecosystem, expanding badging and certification programs, and evolving our leadership development programs to meet the needs of a fast-evolving business environment.

We align our learning and development programs to Booz Allen’s overarching VoLT strategy. VoLT positions us to leverage our knowledge, technical capabilities, and talent as we solve our clients’ most critical challenges. Throughout their journey with our firm, we empower our people to grow, encourage them to never stop learning, and provide industry-leading learning tools to do just that. We continue to evolve our training portfolio, test incentives and rewards for skill development, and scale our efforts to empower their learning.

Career and Leadership Development

Learning begins during the first days at Booz Allen through our New Hire Orientation program, which helps employees successfully navigate their first year with the firm. The Year One Journey map provides guidance and resources for those new to consulting to build relevant skills, explore our Technical Experience Groups (TXG), shape their own path, set goals, and be appreciated for their contributions.

We also support leaders with ongoing learning opportunities. Our Effective People Leadership (EPL) program, targeted to all people leaders, is designed to help frontline leaders better enable and engage their people through transformative change. Since we introduced the program in January 2023, 1,276 people leaders have completed it. Our Leadership Immersion (LI) program focuses on equipping newly promoted and externally hired mid-level senior leaders to drive our strategic objectives. In FY24, we continue to enhance the LI program with new modules that help participants build belonging in their teams, maximize the natural talents of their team members, and create the trusted internal and external relationships that power rapid growth.

Functional Learning

Our Technical Excellence and Emergent Certification programs offer employees the opportunity to gain high-demand skills in critical areas. The Technical Excellence program offers targeted training in cyber, data science, software development, AI, Salesforce, and cloud engineering. Since introducing it in 2019, we have hosted 160 courses and 4,473 participants. Besides supporting internal career mobility, the program fosters employee retention: 82% of past participants are still with Booz Allen today.

In support of our company-wide AI strategy and to best position Booz Allen as an AI-first organization, we developed an AI Ready Training Program, which is set to launch in FY24. This program provides a multitiered learning experience for ALL employees leveraging the firm’s badging framework, enabling our employees to choose their own AI Ready learning path journey and progressively build an AI knowledge and skillset. The AI Ready Training Program includes AI Aware enablement training for all Booz Allen employees and a series of role-based badges with two distinct learning paths to enhance technical skills for AI engineers and adoption skills for our AI consultants.

The Emergent Certification program includes tracks for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, DevSecOps (Development Security Operations), Databricks Data Science and Engineering, and Cyber Threat Hunter. From January to March 2022, 400 employees joined one of the tracks, helping Booz Allen increase highly skilled capacity by 30% across six emergent job families.

Skills Credentialing

Our digital badging program is an avenue for employees to demonstrate their expertise, recognizes the development of new skills, and provides leadership with insights that inform workforce analysis, succession planning, and development. In FY22, Booz Allen rolled out the first digital badges across five key technologies (Docker, JavaScript, Python, React, and SQL) at three levels: foundational, practitioner, and expert. Since then, we have added new badge categories (business role and enablement), technologies (Machine Learning, Java, and Angular), and a leadership badge on Effective People Leadership (EPL) totaling nearly 40 badges, with more badges on the horizon based on the firm’s direction and demand signals. By the end of FY23, nearly 3,000 employees earned over 3,400 badges.

Business Learning

Through the Growth Academy—Contract Ceiling Creation Guided Apprenticeship Certification program, Booz Allen leaders create and manage large (greater than $100M) contract vehicles across our markets. The Academy is invitation-only, and the participants partner closely with facilitators, mentors, and firm leaders to implement a custom strategy to develop opportunities with select clients.

Ongoing Education Benefit

We also empower employees to seek learning and development opportunities outside Booz Allen. Our FlexEd benefit provides employees with education reimbursement from $5,250 to $10,000, depending on their tenure. Our team members use FlexEd for academic programs, functional and technical training, licenses and certifications, and attending conferences. In FY23, 25% of the firm leveraged this benefit. Our internal analysis shows that use of the FlexEd benefit correlates with higher retention rates and employee experience survey scores.