Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, November 2025 — Akhila Babu has started a new role as Portfolio Head – Young Talent Management at Aditya Birla Group, taking on a strategic mandate to shape, strengthen, and accelerate the Group’s young leadership pipelines across its global businesses. In this role, she focuses on developing high-potential talent, advancing capability-building frameworks, and enabling robust succession pathways across the conglomerate.
Before taking on this new leadership position, Akhila played a transformative role as Program Director – Gyanodaya at Aditya Birla Group, where she spent nearly three years driving end-to-end learning lifecycle management. She built future-ready capabilities, curated digital-first learning experiences, and collaborated closely with business and HR leaders to ensure that Gyanodaya continued to evolve as a learning excellence hub delivering measurable business and digital transformation outcomes.
Previously, Akhila served at Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd. (ABFRL) as Head Talent & Learning, where she led enterprise-wide talent development, performance management, workforce planning, and organizational restructuring initiatives. She also worked as Group Manager – HR Business Partner, supporting brands like Van Heusen, Forever 21, American Eagle, The Collective, and the IT function. Her experience included building people strategies, managing manpower budgets, driving talent management, and spearheading brand-level HR initiatives.
In an earlier tenure at ABFRL, Akhila held the role of Lead – Performance Management & Job Evaluation; HR Business Partner. She partnered with business leaders to drive HR strategy and built performance and productivity frameworks across functions. Her responsibilities included leading job evaluation, driving structural initiatives, designing people practices, managing employee engagement, and defining standardized roles and goals across the organisation.
Before joining ABFRL, Akhila spent close to two years as Head – Organizational Development, where she designed and deployed large-scale OD interventions across manufacturing units. She led multi-dimensional recognition programs, employee engagement frameworks, learning & development strategies, and talent development initiatives supporting organizational effectiveness and growth. This was preceded by foundational HR leadership assignments at Hindalco Industries Limited and Idea Cellular Ltd, where she worked on absenteeism studies, productivity analysis, recruitment, campus hiring, and HR process design.
Her early foundations were built during multiple internships across the Aditya Birla Group, Hindustan Unilever Limited, Piramal Enterprises, 9X Media, and Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd., where she contributed to projects involving leadership workshops, employee engagement, performance calibration, HR surveys, and HR operations enhancements. Akhila holds a Master of Arts (MA) in Human Resources Management and Labour Relations from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, further strengthening her academic grounding for a career dedicated to people strategy and development.
About Aditya Birla Group
Aditya Birla Group is a US$ 65 billion global conglomerate operating in over 41 countries across key industries including metals, viscose staple fibre, carbon black, cement, financial services, fashion, hospitality, jewellery, entertainment, and B2B digital platforms. Guided by its philosophy of being “A Force for Good,” the Group continues to invest in innovation, new business verticals, and large-scale community upliftment initiatives impacting over 11 million people annually. With a legacy of 165 years, Aditya Birla Group remains committed to enriching lives, pioneering change, and shaping future-ready organisations and communities.
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