Training employees to train new skills is difficult for small businesses. Most businesses have no shortage of ideas about how owners and managers can help their teams improve their performance and learning skills, but small businesses that are often not considered professionally developed. Core business emerged first. And, it is impossible to give someone the background they need to effectively write and deliver training materials. Ultimately, this means professional development is placed on the back burner and usually never happens. According to Comptia, half of the U.S. companies do not have formal training strategies to properly address the skills gap*. Employees, customers and ultimately the business pays the price.
More and more AI is generated, which can help any small business develop professional materials. This is how our small communications agency goes from talking about how to put training materials together to getting a fairly solid first draft in 15 minutes – with free AI tools.
As part of our ongoing employee development at Gova10, we know that one of the topics we are going to cover is to improve outreach and push client stories to journalists. All of our staff know the basics, but the review is always good and there are certainly the best practices to share.
Knowing something about you want to train your team and actually leverage your knowledge and develop it into a professional development program or conference are two very different things. You need:
- Gather information from people who know.
- Merge information and develop key messages.
- Design an engaging presentation that conveys key messages.
Each of these tasks can be assigned and repositioned multiple times based on more urgent work and tasks waiting for attention. After all, we are communications, 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.
This doesn’t mean our finished product is fast, but our deck is about 70% there.
We used the methods described in training courses about pushing stories to the media, but we could use these tools to develop material for any topic.
fathom
A few months ago, we started using conference transcription tools after seeing our customers using it. In our experience, transcription accuracy is far beyond the accuracy of competitors we have tried, and native transcription products in Google Meet are higher than native transcription products’ head and shoulders. Fathom’s impressive AI-generated notes and action projects wowed several of our customers after seeing us using the tool.
So when we started talking about professional development plans at the latest conference for Gova10 VPS – first, we discussed all the reasons why it was difficult for us to prepare for the upcoming meeting in time – I quickly added my Fathom Notetaker to the conference. I explained to NoteTaker that our goal is to capture what we want to introduce in the training course. Then, each of us took turns talking about the challenges and opportunities of how we can improve the team to market the media. We mostly agreed and added other ideas, we debated a few points and whether it should be included in the training.
About 5 minutes after we hung up, Fathom sent a summary of a meeting, including key points about what we discussed. These bullet points almost perfectly capture what we want to convey.
Gamma
Now that we have produced a strong AI outline, we need to be in a format that can be presented to our team. Gamma is an AI tool that generates presentations based on short tips or full outlines. Like all Gen AI tools, the more information you provide, the better it will perform.
Gamma gave me some layout preferences and built a deck for me in seconds. It does a great job of organizing and perfecting my profile and changing the look of each slide while still maintaining a consistent look. However, the images provided by Gamma didn’t quite meet their goals, so I swapped them with the materials-related pictures and filled them with the pictures taken by the team. This makes the presentation feel familiar and interesting, rather than the resulting AI. The VPS then went through the deck and edited to make sure it was clear and with all the required messages.
chatgpt
For pitch training, the bullet points generated by fathom are enough, but a few months ago I was in a slightly different state. I need to prepare media training speeches for the client’s spokesperson. A few days ago, I held informal media training courses for other spokespersons. I took the FATHOM transcript from that training course and uploaded it to Chatgpt and prompted it to organize and refine the ideas I discussed. Chatgpt struggled to make the outline, and then I was able to feed it into the presentation where Gamma did polish.
AI can’t do all this…
Before we conduct employee training, we decided to include relevant “footsteps” examples that we can review to show how past coverage of journalists has attracted articles from our clients in the media. We also added an exercise, team members paired and developed a media publicity, and we then reviewed and criticized together.
These ideas are ours. The execution is ours, but AI certainly helps us to bring the material quickly, organized (or never) in a few minutes rather than hours. We have not been replaced by AI, but AI saves us time and removes the pressure to prepare content.
We have seen better results for junior staff who are trained. This practice can be adopted by any business and makes it easier to obtain professional development for any topic that requires further employee development.
