Everyone’s hungry for AI. Recent research found that four in five people want to learn more about how to use AI in their jobs. Individual interest in AI could take a number of forms. Professionals may be curious about how they could leverage the technology to streamline common tasks, or they may have concerns over how the technology will impact future job functions.

Jobs will always evolve as new technologies are developed and implemented, and employees need professional development throughout their careers to keep pace with the changes. What’s concerning for those of us in HR and L&D, however, is that by 2030, AI will likely significantly accelerate the already rapid evolution of core skills for most workers. Users in one LinkedIn survey reported that, between 2015 and 2023, 25% of their skills had evolved. By 2030, that figure will likely be 65%. That’s a massive skills overhaul in just over five years.

Organizations need to have a skills development strategy in place to ensure their employees are properly trained to take on new challenges as AI and other emerging technologies continue to change the way people work. This places talent development and learning leaders in a unique position. Tight budgets and economic uncertainty mean L&D teams are being pushed to reduce costs while still achieving their strategic skills development goals. Talent and learning leaders need to embrace AI and other innovative technologies that can help their organizations cut costs while still reaching and even exceeding their targets.

Of course, embracing AI isn’t quite as simple as it sounds, especially for organizations in highly regulated industries. As a learning or talent leader in this industry, you need to exercise caution when implementing AI-driven tools and systems. You have strict regulations and compliance mandates to adhere to, and hefty fines, losses, and potential safety issues to prevent. You can streamline your strategic processes, but you must also be sure to fulfill your compliance and regulatory requirements.

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Enhance Your Skills Development Strategy With AI

Between now and 2028, 85% of organizations plan to increase their adoption of frontier technologies like AI. The possibilities with generative AI are seemingly endless, and many companies are taking advantage of the opportunity to reduce costs, streamline operations, and augment their organizational strategies.

When it comes to skills development, AI can generate many of the essential learning materials your teams need to upskill and reskill. AI technology lets you rapidly generate lesson plans, prompts for written responses, multiple-choice questions, and skills proficiency assessments—just to name a few applications. Your trainers and designers save time with AI because they don’t have to vet third-party courses for relevance and accuracy. They also don’t need to create course content completely from scratch. Instead, they can reallocate their resources toward executing other critical functions of your overall skills development strategy.

But courses are just one component of your workforce development plan. Successful skills-based strategies require you to:

• Identify your desired workforce skills
• Perform a skills-gap analysis
• Offer opportunities for your employees to develop your desired skills
• Track and measure your employees’ progress
• Celebrate employee achievements
• Promote internal mobility
• Foster a continuous learning culture
• Make data-driven decisions for continuous improvement

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How to Achieve Your Desired Outcomes With AI Tools

It’s hard to reach your destination if you don’t know where you’re trying to go. That’s why you need to decide which goals you want to accomplish before you start implementing AI into your skills development strategy. The tool you choose and the way you use it could vary based on the goals you have for your skills development strategy.

Once you have a clear goal in mind, take time to research all the AI tools that could help you reach your intended outcomes. If your goal is to find a more efficient way for your instructional designers to write assessment questions, then a generative AI chatbot might suffice. Your instructional designers could develop a prompt that would give the chatbot parameters for creating relevant assessment items, freeing them up to spend more time on other critical L&D tasks.

On the other hand, if your goal is to improve retention rates and promote internal mobility, then you’ll likely need a more sophisticated AI solution. Look for an AI-powered system that can recommend learning and growth opportunities based on your employees’ current skills, work histories, and other factors. Investigate which features and capabilities best align with your end-goals. AI-powered solutions will rely on data to function properly, and their outputs are only as reliable as the data sets used to train them. Be sure that the tool you choose prioritizes relevant and accurate data that represents the outcomes you’re trying to achieve.

After you choose an AI solution, do a pilot test with a smaller project. Assess the AI’s capabilities and look for any problems that arise with the technology. If there are any issues with the AI tool, correct them before you try to use the solution on larger, more impactful projects. Once you’re confident that you’ve worked out any bugs, you can leverage APIs to integrate your AI tool’s features into your current workflows. You should be able to implement common functionalities like text summarization and image recognition without building complex system models from scratch.

It’s also important to regularly evaluate your AI tools once they’re up and running. Assess the kinds of outputs you’re receiving. If the AI isn’t meeting your expectations, you might need to retrain your models, especially as your business needs change. When you conduct your evaluations, be mindful of potential data biases. Be objective in your assessments and take steps to eliminate bias in your data wherever possible.

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Select Software Vendors Committed to Data Security

Even if every employee in your organization is fully committed to AI security, it won’t matter if your skills development software can be easily breached. Attacks from external parties can still happen, so it’s important to choose a vendor that values security and has a history of keeping its clients’ data safe.

If you haven’t already, choose a learning and talent management vendor like PeopleFluent with industry-recognized security certifications from well-known associations like the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and System and Organization Controls (SOC). To earn certifications from these organizations, vendors have to demonstrate their ability to protect sensitive client information while maintaining compliance with industry and government regulations.

Companies in highly regulated industries should choose software vendors that meet the following standards:

• ISO 27001: This standard is published by the ISO and is used to manage data security. It defines the requirements an information security management system must meet to be compliant.
• SOC 2 Type 2: This assessment was developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and determines how well a vendor’s internal controls and systems protect customer data. Vendors are assessed on security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
• EU-US Data Privacy Framework: A multi-national initiative that ensures U.S.-based organizations provide secure data transfers and protection consistent with legislation in the European Union.

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