Training Talent for the AI Era: HR’s 4-Step Plan for Reskilling

Enterprise leaders have poured more than $200 billion into AI investments since 2020, but employee adoption remains slow due to fear of replacement and a lack of AI reskilling for current employees.

‍

Today, only 1% of companies say that they’ve reached the level of “AI maturity,” and 80% of professionals are failing at reskilling and say that they’re only a beginner or intermediate with AI tools. 

A recent executive survey found that 57% of executives “state that fewer than one-quarter of their employees are skilled in proactively applying AI-based solutions to relevant work challenges.” Respondents cited AI skills gaps as the biggest roadblock to success. 

Why are companies struggling to improve AI adoption among employees? Resistance stems from traditional workplace culture, fear of being replaced, and lackluster AI skills.

 Despite employee resistance and conservative workplace culture, there is a path forward. The path begins with a clear definition of upskilling—improving employees’ skills to meet the demands of new workplace technologies like AI. Human Resources (HR) is the key to making upskilling a company-wide priority. 

How HR Can Drive Reskilling and Create an AI-Friendly Workplace Culture

HR can overcome objections, build and be essential to creating an AI-first company culture, and get employees on board with AI transformation across the organization.

This department can drive organizational and cultural changes through hiring, onboarding, training, and motivating employees across all departments. When HR embraces AI as a powerful tool for change, they can generate excitement across the business and help employees see the tool as a force multiplier, rather than a threat.

This does more than just increase employee satisfaction and change workplace culture—it impacts a company’s overall strategic priorities. By prioritizing AI upskilling and reskilling, HR can improve a company’s:

• Revenue Growth
• Profit per Employee
• Innovation Metrics
• Customer Satisfaction
• Market Share

 HR, despite its incredible potential for change, has not embraced its power to shape the future of the workplace. A new approach—and strategy—is needed to bring HR to the forefront of the AI revolution.

 Follow our step-by-step guide to assess your HR department’s AI maturity, help employees develop critical AI skills, and create an AI-friendly workplace.

Step 1: Assessing Your HR Department’s AI Maturity Level

The MIT Center for Information Systems Research praised companies that emphasize AI upskilling, determining that “Companies with advanced artificial intelligence capabilities—those most effectively using AI to improve operations and customer experience, and to support and develop their ecosystems—outperform their industry peers financially.”

HR is the key to boosting an organization’s AI capabilities. However, before the department can benefit from new AI technology, leaders have to evaluate HR’s current AI maturity level. This requires leaders to assess three key competency areas:

• Technical Skills
• Operational use
• Strategic vision

To assess the HR team’s technical skills, leaders must evaluate their employees’ familiarity with AI tools. Start with basic questionnaires before moving on to real-world assessments.

Next, HR leaders must determine whether AI is currently integrated into existing workflows. Is your organization already using AI tools in HR? If so, how well are they integrated, and are there manual processes where they can immediately impact them?

Finally, what is your organization’s strategic vision for AI? How can HR use AI to align their departmental strategy with the company’s larger business goals?

Skills Gap Analysis is Key for Reskilling Employees

Once you’ve identified the AI maturity level, it’s time to conduct a skills gap analysis. This helps HR leaders map their current team’s skill set against future needs. 

If leaders identify crucial skills gaps that may be hard to fill by reskilling existing talent or resources, it may be time to hire additional employees with the right AI skills or partner with a 3^rd party learning resource (detailed in Step 3) to bring existing employees up-to-speed.

How NCS Group Used an AI Maturity Assessment to Jumpstart HR Transformation

 Charlotte Chiew, VP of People and Culture at the NCS Group, recently sat with HR Executive to discuss her department's AI transformation. According to Chiew, upskilling and reskilling HR teams was essential for transforming the company into an AI-mature enterprise.

The HR department helped transform the company’s culture and get employees to view AI tools as exciting new opportunities by focusing on reskilling and changing the narrative around AI.

“As AI reshapes the future of work, HR leaders need to prioritize workforce resilience through both upskilling and reskilling. We must also think about the soft skills employees need because that is how they can provide value in the age of AI,” says Chiew.

NCS Group launched its AI transformation with HR. But today, all 13,000 of the business’s employees have access to NCS’ AI Foundational Course.

Chiew encourages her peers to follow a similar path: “As AI reshapes the future of work, HR leaders need to prioritize workforce resilience through both upskilling and reskilling. We must also think about the soft skills employees need because that is how they can provide value in the age of AI.”

Step 2: Building a Strategic Skills Development Framework

Once leaders have assessed the HR department’s AI maturity level, creating a comprehensive skills development framework is time. This should focus on the knowledge employees need to reskill and integrate AI into their workflows (and maximize efficiency gains).

 Go after “low hanging fruit” to demonstrate quick ROI and justify a larger budget for future projects.

Organizations that have adopted AI in recruiting are already achieving incredible results, which you can see in the above image. HR leaders can help their organizations get similar results by integrating the following AI tools into recruiting: 

• AI Sourcing Tools (SeekOut, HireEZ, etc.)
• AI Recruiting Tools (Betterleap, Dice, Wellfound, etc.)
• AI Screening Tools (Humanly, HireVue, Skima, etc.)
• AI Interview Tools (Jobma, Metaview, Interviewer.ai, etc.)

‍

How IBM Uses AI for Personalized Learning Programs

 IBM is a leader in AI-driven education. The tech giant’s HR department uses IBM Watson, the AI assistant, to conduct skills gap analyses and create personalized employee learning programs.

It analyzes open job descriptions and current roles to identify skills gaps and create a strategic skills development framework for each employee. Once complete, IBM Watson provides each employee with a personalized curriculum and specific 3rd party courses to help them upskill and close the skills gap. 

When employees complete their Learning and Development (L&D) program, IBM Watson sends the results (and student performance insights) to HR. These insights are used during annual reviews and promotion cycles.

While the pilot program started with HR, IBM Watson now helps its 250,000+ employees further their careers and upskill for the AI era. 

Implementation Timeline

 Creating a clear implementation timeline with milestones that align HR’s role with the company’s overall AI upskilling and workforce transformation strategy is important.

 Month 1: Determine the organization’s AI maturity level, conduct a skills gap analysis, and create a training curriculum for upskilling and reskilling.

 Month 2: Launch pilot training programs within small areas of the HR department, gather employee feedback, and conduct AI skills assessment to measure learning progress.

 Month 3: Roll out a full-scale training program to the full HR department, track KPIs, and gather metrics to report to senior leadership.

Step 3: How to Build an Effective AI Learning & Development Program

 Once leaders have identified their AI maturity level and developed a strategic skills development framework for HR, it’s time to build the L&D program.

The Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) and Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA) are two leaders in the world of HR-specific continuing education. 

AIHR’s Artificial Intelligence for HR certificate teaches HR professionals how to “streamline workflows, advance decision-making, improve the quality of your work, and make more time for strategic projects that impact business success.” HRPA’s HR Skill UP: Leveraging AI in the Workplace certificate takes a similar approach, while also teaching students how to scale HR pilot programs to other departments.

In-house HR leaders can use the same approach to upskill their own department and become an AI-first organization. 

‍

Build the L&D Curriculum Using S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Establish S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based) goals that align the L&D program’s HR curriculum with the company’s larger strategic goals. Determine exactly how AI upskilling and reskilling will help the department increase efficiency, boost revenue, and improve innovation. 

Next, create personalized learning paths based on an employee’s role in the department and technical background. 

Finally, a structured progression should be included, starting with foundation knowledge and technical skills before diving into position-specific use cases. Use cases for HR employees should focus on AI-enabled ATS, recruiting and interview tools, employee onboarding and training programs, and everyday workflows. 

Consider using a multi-modal approach to curriculum by including a variety of media formats, such as live webinars and classroom training, self-paced modules, quizzes, and real-world projects.

HR leaders should also use a phased rollout to launch pilot programs and collect feedback before finalizing the curriculum and offering classes to the full department. Gather performance metrics by tracking pre- and post-training data, using classroom surveys, and measuring impact through manager reviews. 

Create Unified Messaging and Prioritize Internal Communication

 To encourage employee participation, HR leaders need to frame this continuing education as a growth opportunity for upskilling and reskilling for the AI era. Employees are more likely to participate and use insights in the real world when they view participation as being in their own self-interest.

One of the most effective messaging strategies is positioning AI as a foundational skill.

In the early 2000s, digital literacy and the ability to navigate the open internet wasn’t universally accepted. Professionals prioritizing these skills could thrive over the next two decades and continue to move up the ranks. 

The same thing is happening today. Professionals who embrace and reskill on AI tools will be more essential than those who fail to upskill.

How Sephora Upskilled Employees with a Multi-Modal L&D Program

 Sephora is a multinational beauty retailer with over 2,600 stores in 38 countries. The company has long been an early adopter of AI, using AI to build personalized customer experiences in 2016—well before its competitors took notice.

The retailer recently built the My Sephora Learning platform, which uses AI and machine learning to develop an L&D curriculum that’s received overwhelmingly positive employee feedback. 

Employees can sign up for personalized learning programs driven by AI. These modules help them learn about beauty products, makeup techniques, and skin science. 

Sephora has also embraced the multi-modal approach to learning. Their curriculum includes self-paced modules, live webinars, tests and quizzes, and real-world scenarios. 

“You have to produce something educational, more personal, and focused on the employee experience,” says Elisa Giulia Maria Albertini, Learning Senior Specialist at Sephora Italy. “You are trying to engage your people. You know who you’re talking to, your population, and what you want them to take from these videos. 

‍

Step 4: Measure Success and Prove ROI

The final step in an AI workforce transformation strategy is to measure and analyze success. This allows HR leaders to easily communicate the ROI to senior leadership and justify funding for future initiatives.

 HR’s departmental success is measured in a variety of ways, but the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) are: 

• Time-to-Hire
• Employee Retention
• Employee Satisfaction
• Employee Annual Reviews

When HR integrates AI into their workflows and employee training programs, the impact is incredibly far-reaching. Successful implementation can impact several company-wide KPIs as well, including: 

• Productivity
• Profit per Employee
• AI Adoption
• Employee Engagement 
• Innovation Metrics

Productivity improvements and innovation metrics show that AI is helping employees accomplish more in the same amount of time. Improvements on both metrics typically accompany increased profit per employee, the most critical metric.

In addition, increased AI adoption and employee engagement rates demonstrate that the HR workforce transformation strategy is working. The messaging resonates with employees, walking away with concrete ideas on using AI to improve their output and streamline workflows.

‍

Vodafone’s AI-First HR Strategy Impacts the Entire Company

Vodafone, the global mobile phone and fintech giant, launched an AI-first strategy to transform the company’s HR department. The company’s HR leadership realized that their employees lacked the digital and technical skills necessary for success in the emerging AI era, and employee engagement suffered as a result. 

They focused on building an L&D program that emphasized upskilling and reskilling employees to combat this skills gap. The curriculum was designed “to ensure people feel empowered to own their development in easy-to-find tools and to drive their growth,” said Marc Starfield, Group Head of HR Systems and Programs.

Ultimately, the program had a far greater impact than the HR department. The initiative increased the number of new hires, boosted diversity, and reduced time-to-hire. It also improved the company’s overall employee engagement and AI adoption rates across the board. 

“This for me speaks to ensuring that any HR intervention, or all HR interventions, should directly contribute to new organizational outcomes," said Starfield. 

Conclusion: HR's roll in Launching a Successful Enterprise Workforce Transformation Strategy

Businesses worldwide struggle to get employees on board with new AI initiatives and produce real-world results from their huge investments. However, even though most companies are struggling to increase AI usage among frontline employees, HR departments may be the key to success.

When companies prioritize HR as part of their workforce transformation strategy, they can improve AI adoption rates, transform the company culture into an AI-first enterprise, and boost profit per employee metrics.

 By following the steps in this guide, HR departments can quickly:

• Assess their AI maturity level and potential use cases
• Develop a skills development framework 
• Build effective AI learning programs
• Demonstrate ROI to receive future funding 

‍

‍