It’s arguable that employee training has never been more important. Enterprises are operating in a rapidly-changing business environment that’s exacerbating skills gaps, which in turn are hampering their ability to remain competitive.
87% of executives are experiencing or expect to see skills gaps within the next few years, and PWC found that 55% of businesses in 2019 were unable to innovate effectively due to skills gaps in the organizations. Certain key fields are showing a lack of trained talent just as demand is spiking.
At the same time, employee training is still crucial for traditional tasks like onboarding new hires, and to ensure that employees are up to date with your workflows, company messaging, and how to use your tools and platforms.
Organizations that offer effective employee training programs create an atmosphere that values employee professional development, driving up employee engagement and retention and improving their appeal to top talent. Today’s job seekers are 73% more likely to remain at a company that helps them improve their skills, and 56% say that career growth opportunities are more important than compensation when choosing a workplace.
With employee training playing such an important role across the organization, you need to make sure that it remains relevant to your business needs and matches employees’ learning preferences. AI is entering the employee training space, bringing new benefits for employee training that are making savvy HR managers sit up and pay attention.
1. Increase knowledge retention
It doesn’t matter how many hours of training programs your employees complete if they can’t remember them a few days later. Unfortunately, research by the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus found that people forget close to three-quarters of newly-learned material within 24 hours.
AI can help change this sad statistic. Ebbinghaus also found that repeating new material at intervals dramatically improves memory. With AI-driven, digital training programs, the user can repeat each section as many times as they like, without feeling ashamed about going back over the same material. There’s no human tutor who would lose patience or run out of time. You can also create AI-powered popups and chatbots that deliver integrated reminders and hints at calculated intervals.
We also all learn new skills much faster through active learning, namely trying it out for ourselves, instead of being passively told what to do. AI programs can create realistic scenarios that mimic real-life, allowing employees to gain skills through action.
2. Raise employee participation
No matter how many incentives you offer, it’s really hard to get employees to take part in training programs that are boring, stale, or uninteresting. But AI-powered programs can be engaging and entertaining, enticing employees to want to take part and holding their attention until they complete the entire program.
You can use AI to create company-wide competitions that encourage workers to compete against each other, and design video-game-style challenges that stretch employee skills. Newer, AI-powered training programs also incorporate a mix of formats that increase employee concentration and focus, with entertaining styles like videos and animation.
3. Train for soft skills
Up until now, organizations have struggled to train employees in soft skills like management, leadership, and conversation for situations such as sales pitches. But AI applications make it possible to create effective employee training programs that cover these soft skills and more.
For example, conversational AI can be used to run training conversations for sales reps to practice their pitches, or for managers to practice delivering criticism to employees. Self-learning models can simulate realistic scenarios so that employees can practice delivering a talk at an important conference, or managing tempers at a contentious meeting.
4. Personalize training sessions
Every employee has different learning styles, learning speeds, and background knowledge, but without AI it’s difficult to create multiple training programs that match each individual’s needs. AI programs, however, can pick up on user preferences and adapt their pace, format, and level accordingly.
AI programs are also able to accurately track whether users have understood the material, and can provide tailored feedback about what they should improve. If they notice hesitation in delivering a sales pitch or a lack of clarity when answering a quiz, for example, they’ll direct the user to a refresher course. As well as teaching the user in the way that they are best able to learn, this also makes training sessions more valuable to employees and increases employee engagement.
5. Make learning easier to
consume
Everyone struggles to stay focused throughout long training sessions and seemingly endless lessons. You don’t want employees to drop out of your training programs because they are simply too long, or avoid starting because they feel that they don’t have enough time to dedicate to it.
AI offers many ways to break up your materials into bitesize units that your employees can consume more easily. Embed them into employee workflows as practice tasks or informational wizards, so that employees carry out training tasks without even noticing. Invite employees to dip in and out whenever it’s convenient because the AI program automatically restarts where they left off and provides a brief review of past material.
AI makes employee training
programs exciting again
Employees can come up with numerous excuses for not
completing training programs, but they are still crucial for your business
stability and growth. Bringing AI into the equation can transform employee
training programs into engaging, easy to consume, personalized experiences that
help employees remember more, learn faster, and improve soft skills as well as
hard knowledge to advance your business in the long term.
