Employee Education – Critical for Leading in the Change in 4th Industrial Revolution

Employee Education – Critical for Leading in the Change in 4th Industrial Revolution

At our last conference on May 8th, one of the critical success factors raised on leading change in the 4th Industrial Revolution was the need to educate ourselves as well as employees.

What needs to Change and happen in organizations right now, is creating awareness and educating employees on the organization’s strategy for  AI, BOTs, Digitization and Automation etc. and what this will mean for them and the organization.

One of the reasons we as human beings easily push back on change is the fear of the unknown. As much talk as there currently is around Artificial Intelligence (AI), there is also little to no knowledge for many employees on what this means for them and their future in the organization.

In an L&D survey of about 4,515 people working across a range of industries, in the UK, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain and the UAE, only 2% claimed to have heard of AI. While in a  2019 Gartner CIO survey of more than 3,000 CIO respondents in 89 countries, it was gathered that the number of enterprises implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) grew 270% in the past four years and tripled in the past year.

While CIOs and leaders may be making strides in implementing AI within their organizations, the awareness and need may not be trickling across the organization, therefore leaving employees either unaware or making sense of it based on propaganda and sensational headlines.


5 Key Messages for Employee Education in the Era of AI

In this piece on the Perceptions of artificial intelligence – and L&D’s priorities by the Training Journal, they raise ten key messages for HR/L&D professionals on AI. Here are five of the the key messages directly from Training Journal:

  1. Employees need to feel safe and understand more about AI so that they can maintain higher motivation and morale
  2. Employees at all levels of the organisation also need to feel confident in engaging with this new technology.
  3. The workforce’s appetite for learning about, and engaging with, AI appears high.
  4. Investing in new technology and infrastructure requires a bolstering of technical know-how and upskilling in ‘hard’ areas of aptitude.
  5. Success in AI’s implementation will depend on the management of employee expectations and confidence in the value of transition.

Full list of the ten key messages can be found here.