Lead or Lose!

This post is for L&D professionals who are charged with implementing a skills based employee development program. For those who have spent hrs., days, weeks, even years building a skills model for every role in your company.

This post is for those that have gone through the tedious process, that feels a little like pulling teeth, getting stakeholders to come together in a room, reviewing the spreadsheets of skills, debating, which skills should be included and not, arguing about essential skills, soft skills and definitions, transferable skills, and definitions.

This is for those L&D professionals whose heads are spinning and who’ve quite literally been hypnotized by the process. This post is for you!

What IAM going to share with you will blow your mind because what’s taken you months, years can now be accomplished literally in minutes.

What I am going to share with you means you don’t need to spend thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions on expensive Workday, Microsoft, HCMS or on building and maintaining a skills database or an LMS system and you don’t need to get locked into a three-year agreement. There's no contract and no lock-in that you can’t escape from.

You can jump over all of this and go to the future today and the future is AI and its available and scalable for every employee in your company to use today!

If there’s one post that every L&D Professional should read today, it’s this one. This should be at the very top of the reading list of every L&D leader because L&D professionals must embrace AI technologies like ChatGPT to lead in the development of adaptive, personalized career and learning experiences or risk falling behind in the rapidly evolving professional development landscape.

Lead or Lose!

Challenge

So, here’s the challenge before you read anymore. All the stats show that by this point in the post at least 50% of readers will have dropped off. But this post is different, this post breaks the rules, this post is a game changer that you will think about when you get into your flow state doing your downward dog tonight or, after 1k of your 5k run. But you won’t realize the significance unless you read all the way to the end of this post. Stay with me because there is something big at the end, I promise you.

So, what is this?

It’s not smoke and mirrors and it’s not a SkillsGPT or another Chatbot. This is a fully featured SaaS App built to run on top of AI and when I refer to AI, I mean ChatGPT. This means it meets your scale needs because you can deploy this App to every employee in your company over night and they can start using it, they can control their own career adventures and personalize their own unique skill development journeys with copilots to match that don’t break the bank.

Who is this built for?

This is for employees who are not climbing ladders anymore, for employees that want to piece together their best careers, on their own terms. According to LinkedIn employees that see good opportunities to learn, and grow are 3.6x more likely to report being happy at the company and 2.9x more likely to report that they will stay with the company.

Read the Worklab article: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/its-not-a-career-ladder-its-a-career-playground

Who am I to make such audacious claims?

Seeing is believing, but before you see this amazing App let me make a quick introduction. I’ve been an L&D Professional for 20years. I built Microsoft’s skills engine. The basis of which has become the skills engine in Microsoft Viva and LinkedIn Learning. If you want the evidence, I can show you the hundreds of invoices for my work spanning ten years. I built my company reaching4 based on this work.

So, I understand skills, I get it! I understand the pains, the frustrations, and the blood, sweat and tears that go into building a skills engine for your company. I got it because I’ve done it!

I understand the business of L&D. I’ve walked your talk and been in your shoes. It’s this background that energized me to build the App I am going to share with you.

A lessons learned side alley.

Before we jump into things let’s walk together down a little lessons learned Josh Bersin inspired side alley. If this doesn’t interest you, then jump to the next section.

Let me introduce you to the lighthouse that guides L&D away from the rocks and imminent danger of employees not adopting your skills programs. Unless your breakthrough, breakthrough the career/skills divide employees that are not climbing ladders anymore will not adopt your programs.

What does this mean? It means you must connect your skills programs with your career programs. It means you must connect your skill programs with your academy programs, and it means you must partner with HR and with the Enablement teams.

This is the point that Josh Bersin makes in a recent article I’ve entitled as:

What’s next for corporate learning and careers

Paraphrasing Josh, “To be successful L&D must become a partner in the goal to connect”:

Career (employees not climbing ladders anymore)

With…

Skills (personalized for every employee based on role and career goals)

And with…

Academy (content aligned with every employee’s skill priorities and the GTM priorities for the company).

AI is the connecting glue. AI connects career with skills and with academy, and it does it literally in minutes. Yes, everybody AI connects the dots, and it breaks through the career, skills, academy divides. This is the real power of AI for L&D (and HR and Enablement).

So, yes, the future of L&D is AI, Lead or Lose!

The NextGen L&D platform

Here’s what this looks like in the form of a NextGen platform for L&D. AI (ChatGPT) becomes the career, skills, and academy engine. What sits between the AI and the UI are coded prompts for career, skills and for academy. Coded prompts feed data from the AI onto Kanban style boards, one for career, skills and for academy. The super visual nature of boards enables employees to easily view career choices and build career pathways. Boards are ideal for presenting and ordering skills making it easy for employees to drag and drop to prioritize skills and link through to academies that are perfectly aligned with the skills prioritized.? ?

Career

The career board is divided into two elements, a career playground, and a career pathway. Think of it like this, career playgrounds are populated with every role in your company enabling employees to look at role choices that are of interest to them and then drag and drop these roles to piece together their best career pathways.

AI builds career playgrounds for every company in minutes. Based on knowing your company, your company type AI can generate a playground of all your roles. As Bruce Forsythe presenter of the popular BBC TV Show “The Generation Game” would say “Just like that”. ?The real magic here comes from the powerful prompts that we’ve coded that sit between the AI and our boards that feed roles data, for example in this case, onto career board.

But there’s more, not only does the AI generate playgrounds, but it also acts as a co-pilot guiding employees to the roles that have the biggest impact on success for the company. Colors tell the story because dark purple roles at the top of each role category, for example “Technical Roles” are the roles that have the biggest impact on success for the company. Given impact is an important interest factor for employees, then these roles will capture the most attention. This as it turns out is a win-win for employees and the company!

So, playground is generated by AI based on every role in your company. Playground enables every employee to take charge of their career choices and via simple drag and drop they can generate their own personalized career pathways, and they can do this in moments…Wow!

Watch these videos:

https://youtu.be/IXeDqmv4KiE

https://youtu.be/6cVRk5mGblU

But there’s more, we are just getting started here.

Not only does AI build the playground of roles and enable employees to piece together their best careers but it also generates the essential skills that drive success in each role.

Yes, AI generates career playgrounds with roles and essential skills for each role and categorizes them in terms of functions and orders them based on impact…you are kidding, nope!

Skills

So, let’s talk skills. The AI builds your skills engine based on the roles it generates for playground. The AI learns about the skills that drive success in a role; the essential skills and transferable skills that are so important for all roles such as communications, empathy, creative thinking, leadership etc. and the technical and specific skills that are important for each individual role. ?

So, L&D Professionals the AI builds and maintains your skills engine! No more meetings and spreadsheets. No more herding cats.

But there’s more, this is like the post that never stops giving…

The AI generates for employees personalized skill boards populated with the essential skills associated with each role on their career pathway. The AI orders the skills by category of skills and using colors visualizes the skills with high vs. low importance making it easy for employees to prioritize skills that have the highest impact on success in role.

Watch this video: https://youtu.be/rbEa_LrqyAo

Academy

Yes of course, there’s more, this is the world of AI, because employees can click on an academy icon located on each skill and… wait for it, the AI will automatically generate an academy board for each skill. Yes, AI generates a personalized academy of resources including courses, TedTalks, insightful articles and masterclasses perfectly aligned with employee’s prioritized skills. That’s amazing! Employees can even move resources into a library to create their own personalized LMS. ?

Watch this video: https://youtu.be/q9GyzV5qDB8

Ok, what can the AI not do?

Well, the AI can’t connect employees working remotely with managers who can make smart suggestions about career moves and skills to prioritize for development, can it? Of course it can, surely you know by now that the AI can do it all!

Managers as the Lynchpin

In the world of remote work, the manager acts as the Lynchpin between team members, teams, and the company. Managers need a smarter toolkit to enable remote workers to feel like the company cares about their careers. AI delivers the goods by giving managers a view of team member career and skill boards such that managers can act as mentors and coaches making smart suggestions to employees about career move choices and skills to prioritize for development. If AI is here to revolutionize, the manager is here to rationalize and help employees to prioritize and make great choices.?

Watch this video: https://youtu.be/1hBNSAUt_b0

Read the article about Managers at Microsoft: In Hybrid Work, Managers Keep Teams Connected (microsoft.com)

Listen to this Podcast: Why “Connector” Managers Build Better Talent (hbr.org)

Read about "Constant Learning Cycles" at Pagaya: How To Foster A Culture Of Innovation And Learning - The Leadership Learns Podcast | Podcast on Spotify

What’s in it for you?

Employees, remote workers, that see good opportunities to learn, and grow are 3.6x more likely to report being happy at the company and 2.9x more likely to stay with the company and here is the big one, managers who connect their team members with the best resources and mentors are 3.0x more likely to develop top performers.

Now then, I said there was a kicker at the end. Well, here it is.

The Kicker

The kicker, it’s FREE, yes FREE!

L&D Professionals you can get started with all this absolutely for FREE. No license fee, no contract, no agreement. All employees can sign up and start using the playground absolutely for free.

Subscribe and use playground today at https://www.reaching4.ai/

The future of L&D is here. Lead or Lose, Jump Ain!

illustrations in this post generated by DALL.E3

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