Upskilling and reskilling, part 2: AI as an accelerator

The swift evolution of AI has organizations across industries questioning how to best capitalize on its benefits. One key area that presents new opportunities is in workforce upskilling and reskilling. Using AI technology effectively can help organizational leaders understand in real time what skills are needed—giving them the ability to close skill gaps more efficiently by curating employee-specific learning. 

 For employees to successfully harness the power of AI, though, they must embrace new technologies and the ever-growing role of data in their daily lives. To facilitate that, employers must expose them to AI and illustrate the possibilities for its application in their day-to-day functions. 

The need for data fluency

With today’s work focused less on data entry and more on data analysis and insight generation, it’s critical for workers to possess data fluency—the ability to understand, interpret, and use data appropriately. For organizations to optimize what AI has to offer, they need to ensure that their employees have the requisite skills to understand and engage with data. This often begins with teaching employees how to use AI and then building on that knowledge to be more effective in their work.¹ That in turn enables a workforce capable of conducting analyses that result in meaningful business decisions while establishing a future-focused, data-driven culture.  

Using AI to identify and accelerate needed learning  

Organizational leaders themselves can turn to AI for help with identifying employees’ current-state skills and skill development needs. For example, they can use AI’s large dataset analysis to categorize employee skill capabilities as emerging, currently in use, or declining—then have AI distill that analysis into consolidated findings that include personalized learning recommendations for individual employees.² AI can further offer customized, instantaneous feedback to help employees maximize their opportunities to learn needed skills.³

AI also functions as an accelerator to build and refine learning by generating course content and related materials that meets organizational needs around identified skillsets. While learning and development programs are critical to employee growth and organizational success, it’s time-consuming to manually build and maintain instructional design. Using AI in this arena doesn’t replace the need for learning and development experts to help verify and validate content; it simply enables them to focus more intently on processes, learner interaction, and higher-level coaching. This results in employees capable of mastering multiple, interconnected skills and bringing more value to their organization. 

Embracing AI as an opportunity to grow and thrive