The Quantified Communications Blog

Once upon a time, artificial intelligence was just a vague, futuristic possibility. But today, it’s a real player in business, and it’s already transforming the way we work. For example, The World Economic Forum reports that AI handled about 29 percent of the tasks across twelve industries last year and LinkedIn predicts that 62 percent of search and data processing tasks will be managed by machines in the next three years.

Are your organizations newest managers struggling to in their new roles? You’re not alone. Management coach Victor Lipman recently wrote in Forbes that the transition to a first-time management role may be the most difficult in business ,  and it’s certainly tougher than the move to the C-Suite. That’s because, he says, new managers are frequently sent into the ring with little training or preparation, uncertain what the new role requires.

If you’ve been following our blog, you’ve seen us talk about how, with today’s tight job market and even tighter margins, AI-driven leadership development programs are the solution businesses need to identify, nurture, and retain top talent. While traditional coaching is too expensive and too subjective, and while traditional leadership development programs are too generic and suffer from the forgetting curve, AI-driven programs offer a “goldilocks solution” providing personalized training and quantifiable, lasting results without breaking the bank. In other words, it’s just right.

Though they were once considered “nice to haves,” we now know soft skills are critical predictors of workplace performance. Though they were once considered entirely subjective, we now know they can be quantified. And though soft skills were once considered traits you were either born with or not, we now know they can be taught and improved. 

How does your organization approach leadership development? Through workshops, mentorships, and online courses? Through trial by fire? Some combination of the above?

Whether or not soft skills are important in the workplace is no longer up for debate. We’ve written in depth about the topic, and we’re not the only ones. LinkedIn’s 2019 Global Talent Trends report identified soft skills as the biggest trend transforming the talent landscape, with 80 percent of respondents saying employees’ soft skills are critical to a company’s success and 92 percent saying they matter as much or more than hard skills.

On any given day in your workplace, are employees heads-down, working quietly and independently on their own, individual tasks? Or are they working in teams, sharing ideas, strategies, and workloads?

Education technology companies raised nearly 1.5 billion in 2018, according to EdSurge, eclipsing 2017 investments and demonstrating that the booming edtech industry has no intention of slowing down anytime soon.

But with the proliferation of choices in this ever-growing field, how can higher education institutions determine which—if any—of the innovations promising to improve student outcomes is right for them?

There’s no question that in today’s business landscape—where it’s more difficult than ever to recruit and retain top talent—learning and development opportunities should no longer be limited to corner-office executives. 

In any large institution or organization, programmatic change is often met with resistance. And this is especially true in the tradition-oriented higher education world—and especially when the proposed change is adoption of a new technology platform. This may come from fear of how new systems will impact everything from day-to-day work to policies and procedures to jobs, themselves. Resistance may also be rooted in inertia—after all, learning a new system or process adds more items to already-packed to-do lists. So if the status quo is working, more or less, why take the time to do something different?