The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has forced organizations to redefine their learning strategies as they strive to equip their workers with the skills necessary to compete in this new arena. Those that prioritize learning will thrive in this new environment, while those that don’t are in danger of falling behind. Ekpedeme “Pamay” Bassey, chief learning and diversity officer at Kraft Heinz, summed up the key role that learning and development (L&D) plays in this new paradigm: “AI will change the skills needed to do the jobs of the future. It’s up to us to create an environment of curiosity and inspire employees to operate with agility and a growth mindset.”
There are four basic foundations that will help you modernize your learning organization. By prioritizing skilling and upskilling, building a relevant, trusted learning ecosystem, working to engage your learners, and embracing the possibilities of AI in learning, you will create more effective learning experiences that drive real value across your organization.
Modern Learning Organization Foundation #1: Prioritize Skilling and Upskilling
Skilling and upskilling initiatives are vital to keeping your employees up to date on AI and other recent innovations. When creating these courses, begin by assessing your workforce and conducting a skills inventory. This will help you identify any skills gaps within your organization. Once you’ve identified crucial missing skills, align your learning goals to established business objectives. For instance, if your organization is struggling to remain productive in a hybrid environment, a course that focuses on building leadership skills for distributed workforces can help offset this disruption.
The Skills Pyramid: Investing in the Different Skills Tiers
Learning budgets are limited, so it’s important for leaders to prioritize skills that will make the most impact within the organization. Job skills can be divided into three basic tiers that take place at different levels of the organization and target different organizational outcomes:
Skills Designed to Help You “Play the Game”
- Include basic essential skills that enable your workforce to perform within your industry
- Prioritize compliance training, curated learning, learning experience platforms, and professional development activities
- Typically require fewer customized solutions
Skills Designed to Help You “Win the Game”
- Include unique differentiating skills that enable your organization to outperform competitors in the field or become the best in class
- Skills are tied to the organization’s Unique Selling Points (USPs)
- Often require highly customized bespoke content, such as those found in organizational universities
Skills Designed to Help You “Change the Game”
- Focus on innovative strategic skills that allow your organization to evolve its scope, enhance its capabilities, and break into new markets, services, and products
- Prioritize senior strategic leaders
- Take place in highly collaborative environments
There is a level of strategy involved in how an organization deploys its learning dollars to remain competitive. If your company is looking to distinguish itself within its industry, you will want to prioritize building skills in the second and third tiers. On the other hand, allocating your entire budget into the second and third tiers won’t benefit your organization if your employees lack essential skills. When investing in learning, strike a balance between basic needs and more specialized skills that will drive organizational innovation.
Modern Learning Organization Foundation #2: Build Healthy Learning Ecosystems
A learning ecosystem is built of all the different systems, platforms, and delivery methods used within an organization. This can include learning management systems (LMS), learning platforms, learning record stores, HR systems, intranet, internet, and so on. To deliver effective learning, your ecosystem must be optimized, transparent, integrated, and UX-focused. If the pieces of your ecosystem don’t fit together, assessing your pain points can provide steps for improvement. Start by asking questions such as:
- How do you host and maintain your content?
- Does your LMS fit your learning needs?
- How do you move from one system to another?
- Do your systems integrate with one another?
- How do you automate processes?
- How do you use data analytics to measure the effectiveness of your learning?
In some cases, optimizing an ecosystem may require new technologies or systems that better align with the organization’s learning goals. In many cases, however, an organization will have a perfectly viable system in place that’s not being leveraged as effectively as possible. In these instances, improving the ecosystem is simply a matter of taking better advantage of the resources already in place.
Customer stories on modern learning organizations
Modern Learning Organization Foundation #3: Supercharge Learner Engagement
Learning content is only as good as its ability to engage the audience. When designing content, remember that time is precious. To truly move the needle when it comes to learning, you need to ensure that your content is as engaging as possible. Here are a few fundamental steps to building audience engagement.
Step #1: Make Learning Usable and Accessible
Integrate learning time into existing workflows and ensure that your content is available on a variety of devices, such as desktops, laptops, phones, and tablets. Make your content accessible to employees who come from different cultures, speak different languages, or who are hearing or visually impaired.
Step #2: Make Learning Relevant
Personalized learning content and adaptive pathways offer much better outcomes than a one-size-fits-all approach. For annual compliance topics, consider adding test-outs that enable learners who already possess the relevant knowledge to skip unnecessary learning. Also, be sure to eliminate any old or outdated material from your curriculum.
Step #3 Make Learning on Brand
Make sure that your learning is in line with your organization and reflects its priorities, culture, and voice where appropriate. That does not necessarily mean that you need an expensive bespoke solution. Designers can alter off-the-shelf learning in subtle ways that make it feel more connected to your organization.
Step #4: Make Learning Social
People learn better when they can discuss, share, and work through problems together. When building a learning program, whenever possible, include some social aspect to the experience. This doesn’t require a live in-person training session; you can drive social learning strategies using a variety of alternate methods. Virtual sessions are perfect for allowing learners to work together, share and collaborate, while gamified elements such as scoring systems, leaderboards, badges, and other awards are effective at driving engagement through competition.
Step #5: Adopt a Blended Learning Approach
Not only is a blended learning approach more entertaining, but it will also provide activities and experiences that deploy the right media to align with the different needs of learners and their learning. When creating a learning program, aim for a combination of various activities, such as virtual and in-person workshops, eLearning modules, hands-on experiences, role-playing scenarios, learning games, manager check-ins, and coaching sessions.
More from the Performance Matters blog
Blended Learning: What It Is and Why It Works So Well
By Emma Jourdan
5 Steps to Creating Better Learning Events
By Emily Walker
Modern Learning Organization Foundation #4: Leverage AI Tools
We recently asked 50 C-suite senior L&D leaders to assess their organizations’ use of AI. This is a breakdown of what they said:
As you can see, most of the organizations surveyed had either not incorporated AI into their work or reported being in the early stages of use. If you are searching for a place to start, here are a few example areas in which AI can provide tremendous value for your learning organization.
Analyze and Optimize Content
Many organizations have a large amount of learning content. If these assets lack metadata such as titles, descriptions, and clear learning objectives, it can be nearly impossible for administrators to assess the full contents of their learning library, much less deliver it to its intended audience.
The GP Learning Content AIQ tool can help organize and optimize your learning library by scanning your catalog and filling in missing meta data. This makes it easy to assess your catalog of content so you can organize your library, identify content gaps, update existing material, and streamline your assets by eliminating old and outdated content.
Create Tests and Assessments
Assessments can play a significant role in measuring the effectiveness of a learning program. There are a variety of AI tools that can quickly generate quizzes and other assessments based on PDFs, documents, web pages, and even videos. These tools can create tests in a variety of different formats and can even import your tests into your LMS or embed them into a website.
Translate Content
By leveraging AI-enabled tools, L&D departments can translate learning content in a fraction of the time, at no additional cost. These tools are simple to use and provide a fast, cost-effective way to translate texts, images, documents, and websites.
AI also offers exciting tools for translating videos as well. These tools can provide subtitles in hundreds of languages. It is also possible to leverage voice-generation technology to clone the voice of the original speaker and create dubbed multi-language speech using the speaker’s original voice and cadence.
Personalize Content
AI can create personalized learning journeys by analyzing the courses that a learner has taken in the past and suggesting similarly themed courses that align with their role and responsibilities. AI can also create adaptive pathways by assessing an individual’s learning pace and performance and adjusting the difficulty of a course to match the learner’s abilities. These systems make it easy to provide additional learning resources or create custom content aligned to an individual’s specific learning style.
Create a Modern Learning Organization
Effective learning is critical for thriving in the face of change. As technology continues to advance, an organization’s successes will become increasingly defined by the effectiveness of its learning efforts. These four foundations provide a valuable starting point. As you continue to improve and expand your learning, strive to build a culture of continuous improvement in which learning is prioritized across the organization and built into employees’ everyday workflows. This will provide your people with the flexibility to successfully tackle the challenges of tomorrow.
Would you like to explore this topic further? Check out our webinar, “Four Foundations for Future Success: Building Your Modern Learning Organization Today,” for additional insights and strategies.
About the Authors
