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Nithya Vaduganathan is a BCG Fellow and a core member of Boston Consulting Group’s Education, Employment, and Welfare leadership team and the Public Sector practice. Before coming to the Boston office, Nithya worked in the Chicago, San Francisco, and Houston offices. She has deep experience across the entire education value chain, including early education, K-12, higher education, and education technology. Nithya has functional expertise in growth strategy, strategic planning, Smart Simplicity, agile operating models, shared services, organizational redesign, and change management.

Within higher education and education technology, Nithya has deep expertise on student success strategies and the role of digital learning. She has supported higher-education institutions with growth strategy, operating model and organizational redesign, and merger support. She has helped publishers and ed tech firms understand key market trends and reimagine their operating models in the face of digital disruption.

Nithya coleads BCG’s education work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has involved developing a model for large-scale transformation in higher education, analyzing the ROI of digital learning and student success interventions (advising, developmental education and emergency financial aid), and conducting segmentation and dissemination work. Most recently, Nithya coauthored the report Making Digital Learning Work, which highlights findings on the return of investment of digital learning across six case study institutions.

Nithya’s early education and K-12 experience includes strategic planning and organizational redesign. She has helped the Dallas and New Orleans school systems develop strategic plans for scaling personalized learning. Nithya co-led the strategic plan development and implementation support for the Memphis City-Shelby County schools merger, which led to identifying more than $100 million in efficiencies for the combined district, and she helped develop a birth-to-third-grade strategy for that district. In addition, Nithya supported rebuilding the K-12 system in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

EDUCATION

  • MBA, Harvard Business School
  • MS, Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University
  • BA, Economics, Stanford University

Publications and Videos

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How to Attract, Develop, and Retain AI Talent

The market for AI professionals is tighter than it’s ever been. Use these strategies to attract top AI employees—and hold on to them.
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Five Hiring Tips Every Company (And Job Seeker) Should Know

To keep up with a rapidly evolving job market, hiring practices must also change. BCG managing director and partner Nithya Vaduganathan shares how to cultivate an inclusive work culture, inspire productivity, and unleash talent hiding in plain sight.

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Think Expansively and Creatively About Talent

HR cannot be the sole owner, driver, and creator of great talent strategies. Leaders need to share the strategic imperative to think differently about external—and internal—talent.
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Internal Talent Mobility Programs Can Advance Gender Equity. Do Yours?

By reshaping the way employees find challenging opportunities, new ITM programs are helping women grow their careers.
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Tapping into Fluid Talent

Companies take three key actions to find talent in new and hidden places.
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Education as a Catalyst for Climate Progress

Education is a powerful means of spurring behavioral change and collective action, cultivating green skills, ensuring a just transition to a sustainable economy, and building communities’ adaptive capacity.
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The $12 Billion Opportunity in HR Technology

A flood of new solutions is vying to help companies manage their workforce. In this crowded market, players can pursue three strategies to win share.
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Closing the Digital Divide in US Education—for Good

Inspired collaborations among educators, business, and policymakers to close the K-12 digital divide are paving the way for a brighter postpandemic future for US education.
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The How-To of Hybrid Work

A systematic approach to postpandemic ways of working can capture the upsides of these models while mitigating the risks.

Business Model Innovation at AVID

AVID’s investments in digital and data capabilities proved critically important when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It was late February of 2020, and AVID had just opened registration for its summer training programs, which were expected to draw 40,000 educators; as people continued to register, Thuan Nguyen, the nonprofit’s COO, developed AVID’s COVID-19 response plan and established an emergency command center.

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A Strategic Approach to On-Demand Talent

New research from BCG and Harvard Business School's Project on Managing the Future of Work suggests how companies can make the most of new talent models.
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Rethinking the On-Demand Workforce

Digital talent platforms have matured, offering on-demand access to highly skilled workers. Given the talent problem posed by demographic changes, rapid automation, and digital transformation (and intensified by COVID-19), many companies are using digital platforms to hire gig workers with the capabilities they require—but in an ad hoc way. Now they need to get strategic about it.
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