Dive Brief:
- Although nearly two-thirds of employers have invested in AI in the last year, about half of tech professionals are seeking independent training because they feel their employers don’t adequately prepare them for AI adoption, a new study from Randstad Digital found. The technology services provider surveyed more than 27,000 digital workers and 1,225 employers late last year.
- Companies are investing in AI platforms more than they invest in workforce training to implement the technology, and employers are feeling an impact on productivity and the bottom line, the report found. In North America, nearly one in four technology professionals reported leaving a job because an employer failed to train them.
- Continuous training that is updated in real time is better suited for this era of enterprise AI adoption, Michael Morris, global head of platform and talent at Randstad Digital, said in a statement about the report. "If you increase the velocity of your tools without increasing the capacity of your engineers to govern and optimize them, you get technical debt at scale,” he said.
Dive Insight:
Training isn’t keeping pace with the speed at which AI evolves, leaving many organizations struggling to find ROI for AI projects in which they heavily invest. Instead of freeing up time for more meaningful work, many employees are spending their time managing agents, Randstad Digital found.
Organizations that wish to pin down an AI ROI need to adopt training models that are adaptive, role-specific and integrated into daily workflows, the report said. Roles are also shifting away from purely technical skills to decision-making and model management.
Culture is emerging as a critical element for enterprise AI, as adoption is increasingly becoming more important in the overall success of a pilot, Microsoft found in a study this week.
Companies that don’t invest in training run the risk of losing motivated talent who strive for resilience as markets and economies shift, according to the Randstad Digital report. Survey takers who identified as working in IT services are especially attuned to the gap between tech and training, with 27% reporting they feel like they’re falling behind on training.
Part of an organization’s culture is around learning, the report found. Successful AI adopter employers treated training as a priority among an employee’s core tasks.
“In the skills economy, organizations will be valued not by how many people they employ, but by how quickly they can build, deploy and renew critical capabilities at scale,” the report said.
CIOs should consider if their tech teams have the capacity to build custom training modules, or if they should outsource, Morris said.
Traditionally, IT departments audited skills on a yearly or quarterly basis, but the pace of AI transformation calls for learning in real-time, according to the report. Learning should be built into performance reviews, career planning and daily work as organizations find their footing with AI.
"Upskilling can no longer be treated as an HR program or professional development perk,” Morris said. “It's business-critical infrastructure, part of your technology stack, not separate from it.”
