Upskilling Your Association’s Staff to Keep Up with Technology
“You may have heard the common phrase lately: ‘AI will not replace your job. A person who is using AI will.’
This sentiment certainly rings true regarding the AI and the job security situation in the early months of 2024. AI has taken the market by storm in just a couple of years. Artificial intelligence has evolved from pre-programmed bots to smart models that learn and adapt.
Whether your enterprise is nonprofit or for-profit, as it stands today, all staff must learn how to keep up with AI to remain relevant in the marketplace.
Not only is it crucial for individual job security, but it is also vital for the longevity of your association and its mission.
How Do You Upskill Your Staff to Keep Up With AI?
Here’s five ways to help your staff stay on top of the ongoing explosion of new tools:
1. Conduct a Skills Gap Analysis
Your first step is to understand the capabilities of your staff so you can identify when upskilling is needed. Assess your staff’s readiness and abilities using questionnaires and surveys to determine the knowledge gap.
The primary aspects your assessments should focus on are:
- Data literacy: The ability to understand and interpret data is crucial for utilizing AI effectively. If needed, teach your staff the necessary skills in data analysis and visualization.
- Digital fluency: It’s not acceptable in today’s business world to not have digital fluency. Everything is becoming computerized, and your staff should handle computer data with ease.
- Problem-solving and critical thinking: AI will automate routine tasks that humans do as muscle memory. As such, human expertise will shift toward complex problem-solving skills.
- Ethical considerations: Once you learn AI, misusing it becomes as easy as it gets. Your staff needs to be equipped with moral and ethical considerations through training on responsible AI use.
2. Use Internal Experts
AI knowledge is as easily accessible as Googling food recipes. You may already have AI experts or at least staff members with a passion for technology within your association.
Leverage the abilities of such staff members, and encourage them to become champions and team leaders within the training sessions. By sharing their resources and providing peer support, you build capacity and foster a sense of ownership and engagement within your team.
3. Encourage Experimentation
Experimentation will serve as the research hub within your association. Create a safe space for your staff to experiment with new AI-based technologies.
Allocate enough resources for such projects, and encourage your staff to test new tools. Celebrate the success of these experiments whenever possible to encourage more out of your staff.
4. Compensate Your Staff
Establish milestones within your training program with financial rewards. Your staff needs to feel that they’re not working overtime solely for the company’s benefit but also for theirs as well.
Milestone incentives create a “win-win” situation, providing achievable and fruitful goals for you, the owner, the company, and your staff.
5. Accept and Embrace Continuous Learning
Technology evolves faster than most of us can comprehend. What’s new today can be obsolete within a few months. AI-based knowledge isn’t a one-time course that you can attend and forget about, it needs continuous learning to keep up with the latest advances.
As such, you should constantly provide flexible learning options, like online courses, micro-learning modules, and mentorship programs to keep your staff updated.
Keeping up with AI is no longer an option, it’s necessary. To equip your staff with the needed knowledge to catch up with AI, you need to foster an information-rich, rewarding, and interesting training program.
Start by identifying the digital levels within your staff, get help from the already experienced ones, provide milestones and incentives, and keep the knowledge process going.