Growth through innovation

As part of Astra Zeneca’s (AZ) 2025 strategy to produce “growth through innovation”, the company set a progressive People Strategy with a central theme of “being a great place to work”. Underpinning this was a requirement to build a culture of lifelong learning and development.

Deloitte was commissioned by AZ to undertake a review of the current state of learning in 2018, which revealed significant opportunities for improvement. Working collaboratively with the HR sponsors and a group of enterprise leaders, Deloitte developed a far-reaching transformation plan supported by a multi-year business case – identifying significant potential cost savings and additional non-tangible benefits.

On agreement of this business case by the Board and CEO, Deloitte was appointed transformation partner, bringing both deep expertise in learning transformation and the ability to partner with the AZ team to deliver tangible outcomes.

Deloitte’s end-to-end transformation of AZ’s Talent, Learning and Development included an overhaul of all learning products & services, the build of a global technology infrastructure to support learning, implementing learning governance, processes to rationalise vendors, a new funding approach, the design and implementation of a global talent centre of excellence (CoE) and a shared services operation to support over 76,000 learners in 100+ countries.

The transformation also delivered a significant reduction of overall costs to serve and a +75pts change to the overall net promotor score (NPS) for Learning. AZ now has a best-in-class learning, talent and development offering that supports its employees, while being agile and cost effective to continually evolve with its business needs.