The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Employee Training

According to the late Zig Ziglar, "The only thing worse than training employees and losing them is to not train them and keep them."

There is so much wisdom to what he said.

Here's the thing: employee training helps you measure up to industry standards, increase efficiency, and upgrade your personnel's skills and work performance. It helps you prepare them for higher duties — all of which can lead to business growth.

However, just like in most things in life, employee training needs to be done the right way.

The often-methodical and homogenized nature of employee training sessions disrupts your employees' learning pathways.

This makes your training ineffective,widening your workplace skills gap and preventing them from fully attaining your desired training outcomes

If that describes your company's state right now, then it's time you level up your personnel's learning rates with an innovative solution: artificial intelligence.

See eight ways AI plays a tremendous role in your employee training:

1. Enhances staff training

AI enhances your employee training sessions with unique and innovative learning methods. It can even offer feedback on your workers' areas for improvement.

For instance, leverage the AI's machine learning capabilities with speech-to-text. This lets you comment on your staff's presentation in terms of their speaking speed, number of word fillers said, mentioned keywords, and others.

You can even use augmented reality for practical ways to develop your staff's soft skills and give immediate feedback on their presentation.

Additionally, program bots to pick up on lessons opened up by employees, tag them contextually, and disseminate them to others who previously hinted their interest in the subject.

2. Improves learning efficiencies

AI-powered tutors can streamline and increase the efficiency of your staff training and learning processes. 

As digital tutors, AI can imitate the interaction between a veteran professional and a beginner. 

With its Natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, AI can engage in conversations that sound humanlike and suitable to your staff, relaying pieces of knowledge effectively.

The result is that you shorten your employees' learning curves and the duration it takes for them to become experts in your required technical skills, boosting their work performance and helping you reach your business goals sooner.

3. Personalizes employees' learning track

Every year since 2014, Donald Taylor, Chair of the Learning and Performance Institute, has asked leadership and development (L&D) professionals through the Leadership and Development Global Sentiments Survey what they think the L&D growth area and trend will be next year.

For 2019, one of the respondents' top answers was personalization. 

This shows how L&D professionals think a "one-size-fits-all" approach isn't going to be as effective anymore in learning as before. After all, each person learns best using their preferred learning styles and methods.

Thankfully, AI helps in delivering personalized learning and training sessions. 

For instance, AI empowers the educational sector with individualized student behavior profiles, training materials, and teaching methods based on pupils' capacities and experiences.

AI can do the same for the L&D category and your employee training.

It can better comprehend learning behaviors and forecast needs through its machine learning abilities through content positioning and recommendation based on those past behaviors.

That way, employees will receive different training approaches based on their job responsibilities, previous learning styles and experiences, educational background, etc.

AI also makes your training sessions more flexible. For instance, it can transcribe video tutorials into narratives for some employees, offer learning videos for others, gamify the lessons, give audio-guided presentations, train in person, and more.

AI can even customize training quizzes and assessment measures. Able to evaluate individual capacities and learning progress, AI can tailor the next course content according to the test results.

Doing so shortens your employees' learning curve and ensures they effectively absorb the knowledge you're relaying, so they can correctly use it to improve their work performance.

4. Boosts completion rate

Completion rates in online training classes are often low. On Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), data shows that fewer than 4% of all their learners finished the entirety of courses in 2017 to 2018.

Maximize trained AI and machine learning to give relevant training content in your employees' desired learning formats (such as audio, text, video, etc).

That way, they can more easily retain their interest in the session, digest the lessons, and finish the whole course productively.

5. Scales your training content building

Researching, developing, and finding extensive training content consumes much time and effort, especially for dynamic organizations.

That is why they often end up getting training materials externally to save more time. These resources, though, are not always perfectly suited to your company's needs.

With a properly trained AI system, you can instantly design content or obtain the right resources both internally and online, resulting in interactive, applicable training lessons.

For instance, if your employee needs to study how a conveyor belt works, the AI scours the Internet for research papers and other reliable materials. It then displays snippets from the sources for quicker learning.

What's more, AI can dig for and extract relevant details and transform them into readable formats appropriate for studying. 

With this automated process, the AI does most of the grunt work of course development, so your instructors can devote more time and attention to course design and delivery.

6. Increases training accessibility

Developing training courses in ways convenient for your disabled employees takes numerous hours, which is why most content is better designed for the able-bodied staff.

AI can provide accessible learning courses and experiences. Through advanced web or app accessibility features, AI adapts to the employees' impairment and enables their functioning senses in learning.

Like YouTube, use AI to create and display captions instantly, automate text translation to several foreign languages, and others.

Another example is Microsoft's Seeing AI app, which acts as the third pair of visually disabled people's eyes. It describes the scenes, currencies, other persons and their emotions, documents, short texts, colors, and more, wherever their smartphone camera is faced.

Through AI, you help your disabled staff catch up with the other employees to develop and upgrade the skills needed for their jobs.

7. Provides more objective feedback

AI removes any personal biases involved in various aspects of your employee training processes. 

For instance, managers can create course assessments with only easy questions or subject fields they prefer the most.

They can also grade and evaluate learners based solely or majorly on their background, personalities, or other limiting factors.

Because of this subjective approach, your training and the learning process become ineffective in enhancing your staff's skills, performance, and, eventually, reaching your company goals.

AI, however, uses concrete data to create courses and assess learning accurately and objectively.

AI collects data, such as your staff's individual learning styles and behaviors, previous knowledge background, and others, and analyzes them pragmatically.

It uses these data and insights to recommend the best-suited course content, design, and assessments, leading to more sensible, efficient learning paths.

Keep in mind, though, that you should also be impartial when programming your AI and machine learning models and inputting variables and datasets.

8. Offers data measuring your training effectiveness

Among AI's chief roles in employee training are the constant monitoring of learning progress, estimating the staff's comprehension of the topic, and tailoring courses to their needs.

From the data that the AI system uncovers, you gain critical insights, such as how your employees learn and when they can best retain what was taught to them.

AI also guides you in ways to ramp up learning productivity. For example, if you notice more employees having poorer assessment results, course completion rates, etc., AI can collect significant data supporting the reasons behind these conditions.

You can acquire data factors such as the average duration for module fulfillment, preferred learning formats, and more. Knowing these helps you fill in the gaps and avoid repeating the same issues later on.

Strengthen your employee training with AI.

AI has incredible potential to upgrade your employee training, leading to their productivity, retention, growth in your company, and more.

Employ a more staff-centric, data-backed path to your employees' learning with AI-powered tools. Soon, you'll reap its benefits and see the difference AI makes in their performance.