‘AI, Skills And Cost Efficiency Will Be The Biggest L&D Trends In Future’

Exclusive interview with Annee Bayeux, Chief Learning Strategist, Degreed

In an exclusive interview with HR.com, Anne talks about how new technologies will impact L&D, how can organizations future-proof their employees, her current top L&D priorities, and more.

Excerpts from the interview:

Annee: Innovations are coming all of the time to the learning sector, and the main reason for this is to keep pace with changing skill needs and build more impactful, personal learning experiences. 

Technologies like AI can tailor learning to individuals and their career goals by using skills data (collected through learning, HR systems, resumes, performance discussions, and more) to inform what content, opportunities and skills are recommended. 

Generative AI will help L&D teams create content and curate pathways, which will be a double-edged sword as it could also increase the glut of irrelevant and inaccurate content out there. To avoid this, human oversight is needed on all AI outputs, especially ones that will impact someone’s career. 
 
AI advances will be complemented by other technologies like mixed reality, the Metaverse, augmented reality (AR) and VR to make learning more immersive and in-the-moment. It’s not a far cry to expect engineers to wear AR headsets while working onsite to learn new techniques and health and safety processes on the job. Likewise, technologies like digital twins can help individuals understand the components of an EV engine or an architectural design. Whatever your use of technology, ensure it aligns with your overall business goals. Otherwise, you risk it becoming a vanity project and not having a tangible business impact, and that will be to the detriment of your long-term learning strategy.  

Annee: Skills technology will be the biggest change for L&D teams soon, alongside AI. More organizations are moving towards skills-based, or as Josh Bersin puts it, dynamic models. Learning is one of the major drivers of this transformation because it builds skills. They must work with their colleagues in HR and talent acquisition, plus department leaders, to have a driving role and voice in the skills-based shift.  

Annee: Continuous learning is key, not just for the workforce at large but also L&D teams. You cannot expect to be at the forefront of change if you lack the right knowledge and skills. There are a host of learning technologies on the market today. It’s hard to discern between them. You can make an educated decision only when you know the difference between one vendor’s solution and another’s, especially when many are saying the same thing and everyone is racing to implement AI in some manner.  

Annee: Building a culture of continuous learning is the easiest way to future-proof your workforce against anything that may come your way. 

If everyone is regularly upskilling and has the habits and tools to do this easily, the next time a big disruption hits your market, they’ll be able to quickly upskill. Within days of ChatGPT launching there was a plethora of online resources available to help you build skills in prompt engineering and more. Of course, practical application also matters to develop that real-world experience and depth of skill needed to perform in a role. 
 
At Degreed, we embarked on a company-wide initiative to build our AI skills. We had a personal budget to allocate to AI-related resources, and we supplemented this with practical experiences. Some individuals were invited to teach their peers during our company all-hands meeting, others shared their stretch assignments and experiments with generative AI or other models. Crucially, we made it clear that everyone was on a learning journey and trying things out - and we shared lessons learned so that people knew it was fine to try and fail at a project.  

Annee: Like any company, we are challenged to keep pace with all the changes happening over and over again in the market, society, and economy. To deliver the best product for our customers and users, we need to not only stay ahead of developments like AI and take the best that such developments can offer, but also remain true to our mission and values. 

We also need to use technology responsibly for the good of employees. That requires some deep skills, in areas like AI ethics, learning and skills governance, and stakeholder communication. 
 
We are on a constant journey to improve our learning and help equip our people with the skills they need to succeed in the future. Recently, one improvement we made to the Degreed personal learning budget/stipend was to connect it with the new Degreed Content Marketplace platform. This has thousands of curated paid-for experiences that people can now explore and pay for, using their prepaid payment card. It’s made it a lot easier for our employees to find new courses, content, and boot camps to complete, but also keeps us aligned with the skills the business needs.  

Annee: L&D is at an inflection point. We have AI changing the game on one side and the skills-based future on the other. Meanwhile, L&D is in the middle, figuring out its role in enabling both the trends, while also juggling everyday learning needs and, most likely, a stretched budget. 

L&D professionals today are superheroes. They are achieving so many things across the business, enabling people to prepare for the future of work, while optimizing their learning strategies and technologies to give the greatest ROI. This is a long way of saying that three trends are strong in the L&D space right now and will continue to be, well into 2024: skills, AI, and cost efficiency.