Can AI Tech Help Surge Skilling Become Easier and Cheaper?
In today’s constantly evolving workplace, performance gaps can’t always be solved with more training or more knowledge. Sometimes, it’s focus and behavioural shift that’s needed—fast. That’s where surge skilling comes in: short, intense bursts of targeted learning designed to address a specific need, right when it matters most.
But while the benefits of these campaigns are clear, they’ve often been too complex, costly, and time-consuming to execute well. Could AI finally be the missing ingredient that makes surge skilling easier to design, coordinate and deliver—at scale?
Let’s start with an example that might sound familiar.
Simone
Simone is a 46-year old Customer Service Manager with a medium sized financial institution in Brisbane. She’s frustrated today. She got her department KPIs a month ago, and this week’s progress report shows her team’s CSR empathy measures not improving, nor are the client vulnerability detection metrics—they’re both pretty much flat.
Simone feels stuck – she’s talked to her team about the importance of empathy and vulnerability, and they certainly have seemed receptive. Everyone’s taken the training, they’ve scored high, and she’s reviewed the knowledge banks at hand for everyone—there’s plenty of support there...
So, what does Simone do now? If knowledge isn’t the problem, what is? She decides to interview a few senior and junior members of her group. No one knows what to say to her – everyone is trying, there’s just too much to keep in mind.
I’m willing to bet many L&D professionals have experienced this kind of dilemma, and a fair few of them would advise, “Simone simply needs to get her group’s attention and focus – maybe some type of performance campaign focussing on showing empathy for sensitivity toward vulnerability?”
Performance Campaigns = Surge Skilling
I’ve always been fan of performance campaigns – an intense set of micro-learning and awareness interventions designed for employees to close a specific performance gap – usually run over a tight schedule. These campaigns are highly targeted and designed to be more highly engaging that traditional learning courses.
There is data to suggest performance campaigns do work, but it has always been difficult for L&D to compete for the time to design, coordinate, and get cross-functional buy-in, and of course, chasing the requisite budget is never easy.
For example, microlearning can produce up to 4 times higher engagement rates and 50% better knowledge retention than traditional e-learning tools (MobieTrain), with techniques like spaced repetition, shorter learning bursts, and the use of clever psychological techniques.
Recently, there seems to be a resurgence for the benefits of performance campaigns, and it’s called “surge skilling.” As the name suggests, it is similar to performance campaigns in that it utilises intense, highly targeted interventions over a short period of time, to achieve a performance or skill change.
Recently I listened to a wonderful episode from Michelle Ockers’ Learning Uncut podcast series (this should be on your regular rotation, if it’s not already) with McKinsey’s Lisa Christensen, who talked eloquently with Michelle about a surge skilling program she directed which focussed on how employees receive feedback – this campaign was part of a larger skills initiative targeting better feedback skills, called “Receive to Grow.”
This McKinsey initiative had some very interesting outcomes, some unexpected (in learning how to receive feedback, you have to learn how to ask for feedback!), but if you’re interested in performance campaigns, or surge skilling, listen to this important episode.
On another, related, channel, The Learning Forum’s CLO Lift initiative wrote in its article “The Skills Accelerator” about a new rapid learning paradigm, a “re-framing of L&D’s potential,” seeking to match the pace of learning to the pact of business change, a new world in which speed of learning and adaptability is everything. This is also worth a careful read.
I’m hoping that this renewed focus on campaign-style learning initiatives will promote its usefulness within organisations. But let’s return to the problems this style of learning has always faced: complex design, complex coordination, cross-functional buy-in and budget.
Can AI Tech Help?
I’m feeling more buoyant these days because I think evolving technologies, especially AI, may just help us out here. Here’s what I think might help L&D teams create and run surge skilling initiatives:
Effective (and quicker) engagement design – the use of rapidly improving AI content generation will assist Learning Experience Designers in creating and curating engaging materials, with opportunities to personalise messaging for different functional areas of the business. Real-time feedback and adjustment on what’s working/what’s not will also enable surge initiatives to be iterated quickly.
Easier cross-functional coordination and communications – this variety in messaging for different areas can be supplemented by message design variation from each functional area involved – helping to ensure ownership and engagement of each business function supporting the surge initiative.
Automated opportunity identification and tracking of results – AI-supported analytics can help L&D teams identify opportunities for surge skilling, to support anecdotal observations, as well as track detailed results for employees in each cross-functional area.
Lower budget – once surge program structural support parameters are set up, determining how and where technology can supplement, the cost of each surge program will decrease significantly.
I’d love to hear your thoughts:
Will we (and Simone) see easier and more effective surge skilling programs in our futures?