Training employees on latest skills is hard for small businesses. Most businesses haven’t any shortage of ideas on how owners and managers will help their team improve performance and learn skills, but small businesses are often not built with skilled development in mind. The core business comes first, because it should; and there may be unlikely to be someone on staff with the background needed to effectively write and deliver training materials. Ultimately it signifies that skilled development gets placed on the back burner and infrequently never happens. In line with CompTIA, half of US firms don’t have formal training strategies in place to handle the talents gap*. The staff, customers and ultimately the business pay the worth.
Increasingly, generative AI will help any small business develop skilled development materials. Here’s how our small communications agency went from talking about putting together training materials to having a reasonably solid first draft in quarter-hour— with the assistance of free AI tools.
As a part of our ongoing worker development at Gova10 we knew that one topic we desired to cover was improving outreach and pitching our clients’ stories to journalists. All of our employees know the fundamentals nevertheless it’s at all times good to review and there have been definitely best practices to share.
Knowing you should train your team on something and really taking your knowledge and developing it into knowledgeable development program or session are two very various things. You must:
- Collect the data from those with the knowledge.
- Consolidate the data and develop the important thing messages.
- Design an attractive presentation that conveys the important thing messages.
Each of those tasks can get assigned and reprioritized several times based on more urgent work and tasks waiting for attention. In spite of everything, we’re communications people, not learning development professionals.
On a recent Wednesday, with the assistance of free AI tools, we built a solid first draft in about quarter-hour.
That doesn’t mean we had the finished product that quickly, but we had a deck that was about 70% of the best way there.
We used the methods described for a training session on pitching stories to media, but these tools could be utilized to develop materials for any topic.
Fathom
We began using meeting transcription tool Fathom several months ago after seeing it in use by a client of ours. The accuracy of the transcription far surpassed the accuracy of competitors we had tried, and was head and shoulders above the native transcription offering in Google Meet, in our experience. Fathom’s impressive AI generated notes and motion items have wowed several of our customers after seeing us use the tool.
So after we began talking in regards to the skilled development initiative during a recent meeting of the Gova10 VPs– at first we discussed all of the the reason why we’d struggle to have it prepared in time for an upcoming meeting—I quickly added my Fathom notetaker to the Meet call. I explained to the notetaker that our goal was to capture the content that we would like to cover within the training session. Then we each took turns speaking in regards to the challenges and opportunities available to enhance how our team pitches the media. We mostly agreed and added additional ideas, and we debated a number of points and in the event that they ought to be included within the training.
About 5 minutes after we hung up, Fathom sent a summary of the meeting including bullet points on what we had discussed. These bullet points captured almost perfectly the content we desired to convey.
Gamma
Now that we had a robust AI generated outline, we would have liked to place it in a format that we could present to our team. Gamma is an AI tool that generates presentations based either on a brief prompt or a full outline. The more information you give it, like all Gen AI tools, the higher it performs.
Gamma offered me some layout preferences and inside seconds built me a deck. It did a terrific job of further organizing and refining my outline and ranging the feel and look of every slide while still keeping a consistent look. Nevertheless, the photographs Gamma provided didn’t quite hit the mark, so I swapped them out with pictures related to the fabric, and filled in with pictures from a team photoshoot. This made the presentation feel familiar and fun as a substitute of AI generated. The VPs then went through the deck and made edits to make sure it was clear and carried all the specified messaging.
ChatGPT
For the pitch training, the Fathom-generated bullet points were enough, but a number of months ago I used to be in a rather different situation. I needed to organize a media training presentation for a client’s spokesperson. Just a few days before, I had given an off-the-cuff media training session to a distinct spokesperson. I took the Fathom transcript from that training session and uploaded it to ChatGPT with a prompt asking it to arrange and distill the ideas I had discussed. ChatGPT did its work in generating an overview after which I used to be in a position to feed that into Gamma for a polished-looking presentation.
AI can’t do all of it…yet
Before we delivered the worker training we decided to incorporate relevant “pitch-to-story” examples that we could review, showing how past pitches to journalists resulted in articles within the media featuring our clients. We also added an exercise where team members paired off and developed a media pitch, which we then reviewed and critiqued together.
The ideas were ours. The execution was ours, but AI definitely helped us get the fabric in front of the team quickly and in an organized manner in minutes as a substitute of hours—or perhaps never. We’re not being replaced with AI just yet, but AI saved us time and took away the stress of preparing the content.
We’re already seeing higher results from our junior associates that went through the training. Any business can adopt this practice and make skilled development more accessible for any topic that needs further worker development.
