Say you had a conversation with one of your business leaders last year where you agreed that they needed to work on their communication skills. To support them, you got them a communication coach, enrolled them in a series of elearning courses and gave them access to an AI tutor agent to help them develop their skills through roleplay and realistic training scenarios.
You’ve done everything right: you identified a skills gap and you provided the learner with the content and resources needed to help them upskill. But once they’ve finished their courses or completed the coaching sessions, how can you be sure the learner is a better communicator as a result?
Whether it’s levelling up an existing skill or introducing a brand-new skill to someone’s toolkit, how can learning and talent teams monitor emerging skills… and more importantly, how can they do it efficiently without a huge manual tracking effort?
Uncertainty is inevitable for businesses – but that doesn’t mean it’s ever easy. Business models change, technologies emerge and customer tastes and expectations evolve, leaving learning and talent teams on the back foot trying to anticipate and prepare for every eventuality.
Traditional workplace planning tends to rely on backward-looking data, anecdotal evidence or, too often, gut feeling. It’s slow, manual and rarely comprehensive or accurate. But the ability to predict emerging skills throughout your business, whether that’s skills people are already developing or the ones they will need in the near future, suddenly opens up the ability to futureproof your workforce.
It doesn’t even need to be a massive organisational overhaul. With the right technology in place, the ability to predict and detect emerging skills can be done quietly, in the background and with virtually no manual input.
We’re not going to pretend that it’s easy to spot emerging skills within a business. Unless you have someone dedicated to monitoring the activities of every single employee and noting down the skills they’re using, which is intrusive, creepy and entirely impossible, it’s just not something anyone has been doing with any real success. Well, until now.
AI-powered software is ideal for doing just this, with absolutely no need for unsettling human surveillance.
AI is great at analysing huge amounts of data, including patterns and trends, from multiple data sources. Instead of requiring notoriously flawed self-assessments or biased manager observations, AI bases its skills tracking on real data from real day-to-day work. No artificially inflated figures, no favouritism from managers – just a way to show what’s really happening across the business.
Continuous skills assessments give us a much clearer picture of the skills in our business than traditional one-off quizzes. As skills emerge, or improve, we’ll be the first to know about it, rather than constantly playing catch-up with what’s going on with our people.
Tracking skills over time also helps us understand the impact of our learning initiatives. For example, if we spend two months upskilling employees in active listening, we can keep an eye on whether or not those skills are actually showing up in the course of business.
The more evidence we can gather that learning is leading to real behaviour change, the easier it will be to prove the value that the L&D department brings to the table.
Until now, L&D has gathered data on the learning taking place (such as workshop attendance, course completions or quiz scores), and the senior leadership team has gathered data on business performance (such as sales, customer loyalty or productivity). While L&D may try to claim these business outcomes as a result of learning efforts, we’ve never really had a way to prove the cause-and-effect relationship.
By proactively tracking emerging skills, you can join the dots between the learning and the business impact by showing what happened in the middle – in other words, the learning intervention, followed by an uptick in skills, followed by improved business outcomes.
Here’s an example:
Your salespeople have had a dip in sales numbers in recent months. There have been some complaints about the salespeople’s responsiveness and understanding of customer’s problems.
The learning team spots that communication skills are lacking in the sales team, and they set the sales team up with a communication coach, as well as providing activities and just-in-time resources to help boost communication skills.
With your AI skills intelligence tool, you can watch in real time as communication levels improve throughout the sales team.
Over the next six months, the sales team reports its strongest sales figures in the last five years.
Without continuous skills tracking, it would be almost impossible to attribute the sales figures to the learning intervention. With the help of AI skills intelligence, the L&D team can show the timelines and the real-time improvement in skills, resulting in better performance.
With skills intelligence, you can create a dynamic map of emerging and current skills and capabilities, potential skill gaps and what skills may be needed in the future to keep up with the market and external business changes – more proactive, less reactive.
Our upcoming AI skills intelligence solution puts the ability to track emerging skills directly into your hands. By integrating AI-driven insights with a user-friendly platform, our platform enables L&D and talent teams to:
The result? You’re not just reacting to change – you’re leading it. AI skills intelligence helps you shift from firefighting to foresight, turning workforce data into strategic decisions that futureproof your organisation, and continue to do so time and time again.
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