Building the KS Academy: A Training Strategy for Company V’s Knowledge Services Organization.

About the Client

Company V is a global management consulting firm. The firm has grown substantially since this engagement, now employing more than 7,000 professionals across 70-plus cities in 30 countries, and underwent a leadership transition recently when a new leader was named President and CEO.

Industry Context

Learning and development (L&D) priorities in professional services have shifted dramatically since 2016, but the core capabilities Company V’s CKO prioritized then remain central today. An Accenture study found that 78 percent of consulting professionals had used generative AI tools within six months of their availability in 2025. Industry researchers now frame the sector’s central L&D challenge as ensuring firms retain and share the human expertise — client insight, judgment, and synthesis — that AI tools alone cannot replicate, rather than letting that knowledge stay “locked in individual consultants’ heads.” Deloitte’s contribution to Coursera’s 2025 Industry Skills Brief for professional services identifies exactly this combination — enduring human skills alongside emerging technical ones — as the priority for L&D leaders today. The KS Academy program Iknow helped design in 2016, built around independent synthesis, high-impact communication, and stronger client-facing capability, targeted precisely the enduring skills the profession now recognizes as the essential complement to AI adoption rather than a capability AI can simply replace.

Current Situation

Company V’s KS organization had grown and matured considerably since 2013, but its training program had not been systematically expanded to match the more sophisticated work the team was now expected to deliver. The CKO identified specific capability gaps in senior staff client service skills, independent research synthesis, high-impact communication, direct engagement with consulting teams, and cross-team best-practice sharing — while also seeing an opportunity to improve training efficiency for more routine KS roles.

• Training that hadn’t kept pace with a maturing function. KS had taken on more sophisticated, client-facing work since 2013, but skills development had not scaled with it.
• A shift from compiling to synthesizing. Senior KS staff needed to move beyond gathering content toward independently producing value-added insight that could “grease the wheels” of innovation for the firm’s practice areas.
• Communication and client-facing gaps. Staff needed stronger written and verbal communication skills and a more direct role on client-serving consulting teams, not just a supporting research function.
• A distributed, growing global team. With new staff added at its European shared services facility, there was no consistent mechanism to share best practices in collaboration and organizational effectiveness across the global KS team.
• Enhancement, not reinvention. A significant portion of the training program already existed, meaning recommendations had to be pragmatic, implementable enhancements rather than a wholesale rebuild.

• Assess Company V’s current training capability and identify critical strategic gaps relative to organizational goals.
• Gather insights from leading knowledge and research training practices at peer professional services firms.
• Recommend training enhancements tailored by KS department and role.
• Develop a roadmap for delivering enhancements, including near-term “quick hits.”
• Recommend success measures and supporting metrics to evaluate training effectiveness going forward.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow took an agile approach, building an initial framework for training and skills development early in the project and iterating it continuously as new information emerged from discovery — allowing the team to rapidly develop and test hypotheses directly with Company V’s KS leadership rather than working toward a single, delayed final deliverable.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Discovery. Iknow interviewed more than 15 internal personnel, including key KS staff and the head of training, and conducted benchmarking interviews with leaders from eight other professional services firms, alongside an analysis of existing training programs, including participation data and course feedback.
• Framework Development. Iknow built a training and skills development framework covering training content — domain knowledge, core job skills, and KS-specific value-added skills. The framework also covered training management topics, including curriculum development across the employee life cycle, use of multiple learning channels, the role of managers in driving learning, and how training fit within OW’s broader human capital model.
• Ongoing Collaboration. Iknow held weekly project update meetings via video conference with the project manager and facilitated two workshops with the leadership team, sustaining close collaboration and knowledge exchange throughout the engagement.
• Recommendation Development. Drawing on the framework and discovery findings, Iknow recommended six major initiatives for enhancing KS training, organized around a new “KS Academy” program and more robust training management and implementation.
• Implementation Charter. Iknow prepared a detailed implementation charter outlining the precise actions, decisions, and challenges associated with each of the six recommended initiatives.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow worked directly with Company V’s CKO and a core team of senior KS managers throughout the engagement, while also engaging the Company’s Human Capital training leadership, more than 15 KS staff across departments, and leaders from eight external peer firms to ground the recommendations in both internal reality and external best practice.

Enhancing an Existing Program Without Disrupting What Already Worked

With a significant training program already in place, a wholesale redesign risked discarding what was already working while overwhelming the organization with change. Iknow addressed this with an agile methodology — building a framework early and iterating it continuously based on discovery findings, testing hypotheses directly with KS leadership rather than delivering a single big-bang redesign at the end of the project.

Balancing Senior Capability-Building With Efficiency for Routine Roles

The CKO wanted both stronger senior-level client-service and synthesis skills and greater efficiency in training for more routine staff roles — two different problems requiring different solutions. Iknow addressed this by structuring its framework explicitly around distinct skill tiers (domain knowledge, core job skills, and KS-specific value-added skills), enabling recommendations to be tailored by department and role rather than applying one solution across the entire organization.

Grounding Recommendations in External Evidence, Not Just Internal Opinion

Relying solely on internal perspectives risked recommendations that felt reasonable to insiders but lagged what leading peer firms were actually doing. Iknow addressed this by pairing its internal discovery with direct benchmarking interviews at eight other professional services firms, ensuring the final recommendations reflected external best practice as well as the Company’s own strategic priorities.

Operational Outcomes

• Delivered an assessment of the current training capability and the critical strategic gaps relative to organizational goals and key training challenges.
• Delivered benchmarked insights from the leading knowledge and research training practices of eight peer professional services firms.
• Delivered tailored training enhancement recommendations by department and role, a delivery roadmap including quick hits, and recommendations for supporting metrics.

Strategic and Organizational Outcomes

Iknow recommended six major initiatives organized around two themes. The first, an enhanced training program to be called “KS Academy,” included an improved master KS training curriculum tied to the staff life cycle, enhanced content on emerging topics adapted from consultant training and tailored with KS-specific case examples, and a peer-to-peer learning program. The second, more robust training management and implementation, included a practice area mentoring program, curriculum management and tracking, and enhanced manager readiness. Iknow’s detailed implementation charter for each initiative gave KS leadership a practical, ready-to-execute path forward, developed collaboratively enough to be well-aligned with the organization’s broader strategy from the outset.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow completed the discovery, framework development, and full set of recommendations and implementation charter within the three-month engagement, giving the CKO and KS leadership a fully scoped plan ready to implement at project close.

Core Skills

• Learning & development strategy
• Organizational capability building
• Talent development benchmarking
• Change management

Methods & Frameworks

• Agile framework development and iteration
• Structured stakeholder discovery and peer benchmarking
• Workshop facilitation
• Implementation charter development