Training employees on new skills is tough for small businesses. Most businesses have no shortage of ideas on how owners and managers can help their team improve performance and learn skills, but small businesses are usually not built with professional development in mind. The core business comes first, as it should; and there is unlikely to be someone on staff with the background needed to effectively write and deliver training materials. Ultimately it means that professional development gets put on the back burner and often never happens. According to CompTIA, half of US companies don’t have formal training strategies in place to address the skills gap*. The employees, customers and ultimately the business pay the price.
Increasingly, generative AI can help any small business develop professional development materials. Here’s how our small communications agency went from talking about putting together training materials to having a pretty solid first draft in 15 minutes— with the help of free AI tools.
As part of our ongoing employee development at Gova10 we knew that one topic we wanted to cover was improving outreach and pitching our clients’ stories to journalists. All of our employees know the basics but it’s always good to review and there were definitely best practices to share.
Knowing you want to train your team on something and actually taking your knowledge and developing it into a professional development program or session are two very different things. You need to:
- Collect the information from those with the knowledge.
- Consolidate the information and develop the key messages.
- Design an engaging presentation that conveys the key messages.
Each of these tasks can get assigned and reprioritized several times based on more urgent work and tasks waiting for attention. After all, we are communications people, not learning development professionals.
On a recent Wednesday, with the help of free AI tools, we built a solid first draft in about 15 minutes.
That doesn’t mean we had the finished product that quickly, but we had a deck that was about 70% of the way there.
We used the methods described for a training session on pitching stories to media, but these tools can be utilized to develop materials for any topic.
Fathom
We started 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 action items have wowed several of our customers after seeing us use the tool.
So when we started talking about the professional development initiative during a recent meeting of the Gova10 VPs– at first we discussed all the reasons why we would 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 want to cover in the training session. Then we each took turns speaking about the challenges and opportunities available to improve how our team pitches the media. We mostly agreed and added additional ideas, and we debated a few points and if they should be included in 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 wanted to convey.
Gamma
Now that we had a strong AI generated outline, we needed to put it in a format that we could present to our team. Gamma is an AI tool that generates presentations based either on a short prompt or a full outline. The more information you give it, like all Gen AI tools, the better it performs.
Gamma offered me some layout preferences and within seconds built me a deck. It did a great job of further organizing and refining my outline and varying the look and feel of each slide while still keeping a consistent look. However, the images Gamma provided didn't quite hit the mark, so I swapped them out with pictures related to the material, and filled in with pictures from a team photoshoot. This made the presentation feel familiar and fun instead of AI generated. The VPs then went through the deck and made edits to ensure it was clear and carried all the desired messaging.
ChatGPT
For the pitch training, the Fathom-generated bullet points were enough, but a few months ago I was in a slightly different situation. I needed to prepare a media training presentation for a client’s spokesperson. A few days before, I had given an informal media training session to a different spokesperson. I took the Fathom transcript from that training session and uploaded it to ChatGPT with a prompt asking it to organize and distill the ideas I had discussed. ChatGPT did its work in generating an outline and then I was able to feed that into Gamma for a polished-looking presentation.
AI can’t do it all…yet
Before we delivered the employee training we decided to include relevant “pitch-to-story” examples that we could review, showing how past pitches to journalists resulted in articles in 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 material in front of the team quickly and in an organized manner in minutes instead of hours—or maybe 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 are already seeing better results from our junior associates that went through the training. Any business can adopt this practice and make professional development more accessible for any topic that needs further employee development.
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