Today’s learning and development (L&D) professionals find themselves managing increasingly diverse workforces with wide-ranging development needs and learning preferences. As a result, L&D teams are finding that the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to professional growth isn’t working anymore. Fortunately, as the workforce evolves, technology is advancing too, offering us exciting new ways to adapt our strategies.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken off in the L&D industry, and it’s dramatically changing what workforce learning looks like. We’re seeing AI’s impact across all industries, for all employees who are looking to grow and develop. Amid this change, we must learn how to use AI to create personalized learning experiences that are as unique and dynamic as the employees they serve.
The State of Curation
Not so long ago, in-house curation teams spent an inordinate amount of time manually selecting content and creating learning pathways and playlists. Today, AI gives L&D professionals the ability to automate the once manual, time-consuming curation process.
There are a variety of ways to integrate AI into your curation processes, from generating content recommendations to building more detailed learning plans. All you have to do is provide your AI tool of choice with detailed context about your company, like specific information about the roles and responsibilities of a particular employee or team, and the overall goals or mission of the company. AI takes that information and uses it to suggest relevant, personalized learning content in seconds.
To get more detailed recommendations, include information about your desired outcomes in AI prompts. Maybe your organization needs to improve its customer satisfaction score, for example, and your team has been tasked with providing training for customer success managers. By communicating your organization’s goals and the outcomes needed from a specific role, AI can tell you what skills are necessary to achieve an outcome, what order the skills should be learned in and which pieces of content can teach employees those skills.
Understanding Engagement Through Assessments
After you’ve assigned employees a specific piece of learning, consider using AI to create a course assessment. This will help you understand how thoroughly employees have understood the content, and it also expands your content options.
Perhaps you find a compliance course that’s engaging, informative and meets your compliance needs—but there’s no assessment included, which means you have no way of knowing if employees retained the information. Or maybe you just want to assign an article for employees to read. Using AI, you can design an assessment that both ensures employees are retaining information and gives your team insight into which pieces of information employees struggle to understand.
The Power of Summaries
Generating content summaries is one of the simplest but most powerful ways to integrate AI into learning. This capability is particularly beneficial when employees need to understand the essence of various sources quickly. While summaries cannot replace in-depth study, they can act as an invaluable tool for skimming through extensive material, or as a refresher on key points and concepts.
For example, let’s say you have articles or long PDF reports on a certain topic, but you’re not sure which will be most valuable to you. Using AI, you can generate a detailed summary of each article or PDF, enabling you more efficiently decide which will help you reach your goals.
You can also create a summary after consuming a piece of learning content. You might plan to return to this summary and review it every other week, which will help you retain the information so you can put it into practice.
The summary doesn’t have to be written, either—it can take whatever form you prefer to learn in. Use AI text-to-speech to create an audio summary of an article, or text-to-avatar for an audio-visual review. Imagine being able to listen to a content summary while commuting—this is the epitome of flexible learning.
L&D’s Responsibility
Equipping teams with the knowledge they need to leverage AI isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. However, adopting and applying AI involves a considerable shift in mindset and skill set, which is where L&D teams come in to lead the rest of the organization in upskilling.
The good news is, there are low financial and technical barriers to getting started with AI. Most well-known AI tools are inexpensive, and you don’t have to be a tech expert to understand artificial intelligence. Still, L&D can lower the barrier even further by prioritizing AI learning.
Consider blocking a day of learning in your organization. Employees can spend this dedicated time understanding how AI can be useful in their roles, which AI tools make the most sense for them to invest time in and learning how to use those tools.
In an age where adaptability is key, being comfortable with AI is a skill that will only grow in importance, so create a culture of learning where employees are given the time and resources to learn how to effectively make use of AI tools.
A New Era of L&D
Artificial intelligence is paving the way for a revolutionary era of education and growth, enabling personalized learning experiences that are both effective and engaging. Still, AI is not here to replace L&D teams but to provide support, generate impact and help employees transform their skills. This is a testament to the adaptability and innovation at the heart of L&D, reinventing itself to meet the demands of a workforce that is evolving at breakneck speed.
With AI’s support, L&D teams can tailor each step of an employee’s professional development journey to their aspirations, marking a significant shift toward more cohesive and strategically planned learning experiences. L&D can’t ignore AI—it’s time to harness its potential to significantly improve learning experiences across your organization.
