Accelerating upskilling and reskilling in the age of AI
Every learning and development team aims to upskill or reskill in a cost-effective, fast, and at scale manner. Generative AI and a build-first approach could be the solution.
Chances are your organization’s highest performers know their trade, know your business, and know how to navigate the written, unwritten, and interpersonal dynamics to get work done. Intuitively, then, learning and development (L&D) teams in every organization have long been on a quest to impart these high performers’ knowledge, skills, and abilities across their broader workforce. The challenge has always been how to do this cost-effectively, with speed, and at scale, knowing the demand for skills is ever-changing and each learner has their own unique needs. Generative AI will help.
Today’s reskilling strategies
Buy (Curated Learning)
Curated courses from third-party learning platforms deliver speed and scale but sacrifice the organizational context that enables optimal on-the-job application.
Borrow (User-Generated Content)
Content created by high performers provides job and organization-specific context but may lack the instructional design rigor that leads to the best learner outcomes.
Build (Original Development)
Custom training delivers instructionally-sound, organization-specific learning but can be time- and resource-intensive to develop.
Thus, the ambition of propagating these real (or notional) high performers has required a challenging balancing act of build, buy, and borrow decisions for L&D teams.
Rethinking when to build
While most organizations see value in providing customized content, contextualized to their own specific mission, priorities, and ways of working, the choice to “Build” is often reserved for a select handful of critical skill needs where the return on investment can be more easily justified. The remaining needs are addressed through other methods, accepting the tradeoff of more generic learning content in the interest of scalability at lower cost.
L&D teams that embrace GenAI capabilities and adopt a “Build-first” mindset are more likely to meet today’s upskilling and reskilling imperative in a way that translates to business and mission outcomes.
Generative AI (GenAI) requires that L&D leaders revisit this calculus.
This emerging technology can be safely leveraged to generate multi-media content—text, image, and even video—in a matter of seconds, and at relatively low cost. Of course, human reviews are still essential to ensure accuracy and instructional quality, and to mitigate risks like bias. [Ed. Learn how we apply human-centered design and responsible AI principles to build effective solutions and guard against bias.] So, building new, production-ready courseware will not and should not happen instantly. But it can happen faster than ever before.
When customized, instructionally-sound learning becomes the default instead of the exception, learners will feel even more confident applying their newly acquired skills. They will know what they have learned is relevant to their job and fits within their organization’s policies, processes, and norms. This suggests that L&D teams that embrace GenAI capabilities and adopt a “Build-first” mindset are more likely to meet today’s upskilling and reskilling imperative in a way that translates to business and mission outcomes.
How generative AI changes the game
Traditionally, instructional design teams have adopted “waterfall” approaches to training design and development. First, an outline is developed. Then a storyboard. Then a script. These steps are taken iteratively because the time and costs associated with rework only grow as the work progresses. Implementing a highly structured process of drafting, reviewing, and revising these various deliverables has historically mitigated those risks and increased the likelihood of satisfaction with the final learning product. This approach, however, can be quite time-consuming.
In the interest of efficiency, instructional designers have been encouraged to move away from waterfall approaches and toward more agile ways of working, much like in the field of technology. In fact, ICF has used an Agile Instructional Design (AID) model for years. By chunking the work into smaller, iterative sprints, our teams have, indeed, been able to make meaningful efficiency gains.
What’s exciting is that GenAI opens the door to an altogether different approach, further accelerating time to delivery.
Imagine two scenarios:
- In the first scenario, you are asked to review a training outline to see if it will meet the desired learning objectives. The outline provides the skeleton of the lesson with several descriptive bullet points to help you envision how the course will flow.
- In the second scenario, your charge is the same—to see if the learning solution will meet the desired learning objectives. But this time, you are given an 80% learning solution, complete with a fully drafted narrative script, visual imagery, or even video.
Scenario two is, of course, preferred. You get a better sense of the content, look, feel, and tone of the learning session right from the outset. This more complete picture allows you to provide more constructive feedback and to reach a shared understanding of “good” much more quickly.
Scenario two didn’t make sense before GenAI, though. Instructional designers would have had to spend weeks to get to an 80% solution, and then multiple additional weeks to incorporate any changes. Because GenAI allows multi-media content to be generated, edited, and re-generated in a matter of seconds or minutes, instructional designers can present a more complete draft and get to a final product in a fraction of the time.
Get started today
Scenario two isn’t a notional future. This technology can serve you today. ICF has safely used multiple text-, image-, video-, and voice-generation technologies in a secure environment to accelerate e-learning production for multiple public and private sector clients.
GenAI flips waterfall instructional design methodologies on their head. ICF’s experience working with GenAI has taught us that it is possible, preferable even, to blur the lines between design and development. Doing so helps us to reach the desired outcome—an instructionally-sound, organization-specific learning solution—faster and more cost effectively. Organizations that embrace this “Build-first” mentality with the help of GenAI are most likely to be those who realize the dream of replicating the knowledge, skills, and abilities of their highest performing employees across the broader workforce.
For more information about both generative AI and human capital, see our insights.
