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Unlock your potential with AI in L&D. From fear to excitement, explore how AI empowers professionals for growth. Read now!
Are you excited or scared about the impact AI will have on your job in Learning and Development? Maybe you’re a bit of both and that’s probably a sensible approach right now.
If you’re scared that AI will replace you and your role in L&D then that’s probably justified because the evidence is that tasks you currently do will be done by AI. Futurists predict that the greatest loss of jobs will be in previously protected sectors where your cognitive abilities were at a premium – accounting, copy writing and yes, course design.
But maybe you also feel a frisson of excitement – perhaps you’ve already seen some cool things in action and perhaps you recognise that if AI does some of the drudge work you might get to do more of the creative, innovative and exciting things that bought you into L&D in the first place. Not many people start their careers saying ‘I want to be an instructional designer’. Most L&D people have a bigger mission – something along the lines of improving the lives of people at work or helping people achieve their best potential.
Admit it, quite a few elements of programme design are a bit dull. Building questions from content, following up on people who haven’t completed their training, updating content… the list goes on. When AI does those things instead then you can get on with the valuable, stimulating and career enhancing stuff.
5 things that you can do when AI frees up your time from course design.
Your learners, their managers, operations teams, decision makers. Find out what’s important to them, what do they really need people to do to drive productivity and raise performance?
Ask them how you can help them do that beyond simply creating courses. Do regular skills gap analysis with them and align the required skills to strategic goals that way you’ll do more effective allocation of resources to the things that matter.
When you give your stakeholders what they need, rather than what they say they want, they’ll come back to you again and again. You’ll become a valued and trusted member of the wider organisational team because they can see that you listen, respond and get results.
You know you’ve been wanting to for ages!
Find out about data analysis and discover which measures you really need to prove you’re having an impact. With improved data you can track progress and not just completion rates which means you can intervene where it’s needed either to offer additional support to learners or to help them leapfrog.
With better data you can identify what works and eliminate what doesn’t and make better decisions for continuous improvement.
Choose the data that’s relevant to your stakeholders – and particularly the C-suite. They don’t care about completion rates – they care whether people are more productive. With this sort of data you can show the C-suite that your people development strategies are an investment and not a cost to the business.
One of the biggest challenges for L&D has always been learning transfer. Only about 12-20% of training is applied successfully in the workplace – people do the training but they don’t necessarily remember the information when they need it or manage to change their behaviours.
When the AI does your course design for you then you have the time to influence organisational levers of transfer. You can set up mentoring and coaching programmes to support learners and help managers actively support people to apply their new skills and give appropriate feedforward and advice for improvement. You have more time to actively stimulate and promote communities of practice leading to continuous learning, shared knowledge, skills and collaboration.
Remember the meme that L&D spend all their time developing other people and never have time to develop themselves?!
AI can free you up so you can explore those other areas that contribute to your own professional growth. Learn for yourself about the science of learning or how to use influencing and marketing techniques to increase engagement. Actively take part in upskilling your own team to be productivity focused not just learning focused.
Lastly you’ve now got time to dive deeper into all that technology that’s in your ecosystem and what else is out there? Which technology actively supports people to upskill or reskill? Which technology uses AI to make your job easier? What technology is simply a content repository that you can start to curate and cull?
Course design has been the traditional focus of L&D because nobody else had the time or interest to invest in it. But it’s not really our purpose.
As AI does more of the heavy lifting you can invest more time in creating and facilitating a learning culture in your organisation. You’ll increase your presence, be seen to be a credible contributor to the business, and increase your own professionalism and opportunities for growth.
Maybe AI is not so scary after all?
Get on the front foot and start using AI to do the heavy lifting - your career will thank you later!
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In this episode, our host Stella Collins, co-founder and CLO at Stellar Labs, is joined by Bob Mosher, Chief Evangelist and co-founder at Apply Synergies.
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If you genuinely need to learn new skills, you have to change your behaviours and build new habits, so it's crucial to create and commit to actions that you can sustain.
On June 5, 2024, Stella Collins hosted an insightful webinar, “is social learning dead in the context of AI?” with Nigel Paine
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