Wiregrass Construction Company

Eric Fulmer

Workforce Development Pathfinder

Time, cost, quality, and quantity…these are the typical ways people measure how productive we are at work. Then we have methods that help us identify the underlying causes of our problems like fishbone diagrams and the five whys. We track and collect metrics with surveys, dashboards, and scorecards. All kinds of measures, methods, and processes exist to help us learn more about where we’re at and where we’ve been. As we streamline our work into figures, tasks, and objectives it’s normal to feel satisfied with the sense of control we have over our work. However, we’re ultimately reliant on the collaboration and cooperation of other people. Robots can be streamlined, people can’t.

What’s always drawn me to Organizational Development (OD) is that it takes a future oriented approach to making people and organizational goals compatible. It’s focused on what’s next for other people, whether that’s welcoming someone to a new job, preparing them for another job, or helping others get better where they’re at. The recent low unemployment rates have created significant challenges for talent acquisition professionals throughout the country, but it’s also created opportunities for focusing on talent development. Talent development is no longer a nice-to-have benefit, it’s a must have, especially for larger organizations.  

OD takes a holistic view of how we’re utilizing what’s available to bring our people and organizational goals in line. One opportunity that has developed is the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Over the past year there have been significant improvements to AI recruiting platforms. As someone that personally subscribes to them, they have made sourcing candidates, managing the interview process, and creating dashboards more effective and cost efficient.

In talent development, AI has made video creation, photo editing, content writing, and training formatting less time consuming and much more affordable. Which in turn has made creating eLearning modules easier. Even using free AI tools like ChatGPT to create things like branching scenarios adds a lot of value to training and saves a significant amount of time.

The benefit from using these tools isn’t constrained to just their own specific use cases. If your OD strategy is future oriented, then you should also be assessing how tools like the ones mentioned above can have other use cases that help people outside of HR. Instead of sitting through an extensive Excel course, host a lunch and learn meeting about add-ons that let you convert plain text instructions into formulas. Writing Content Tools aren’t only useful for training purposes, they also provide people with baseline rough drafts for policies, performance criteria, job descriptions, memos, case studies, and much more. Which is a task universally completed across all functions. Sharing these insights through your talent development function helps serve the broader goals of Organizational Development.

“Talent development is no longer a nice-to-have benefit, it’s a must have.”

Tools that provide us with automation save us a lot of time, but they don’t replace the need for understanding how to complete tasks ourselves. Pilots still need to know how to fly a plane even if there’s an autopilot option. Finding the balance between how much someone needs to know and how much of a task you can automate is an important consideration. The trial-and-error process should be shared so it can inform your plans for talent development. OD should be evolving at the rate that technology and people evolve.