Month: April 2024

A 3-Point Checklist for Upskilling your Workforce

The demand for upskilling and reskilling has never been more critical. Within a decade, it’s expected technology will reshape more than one billion jobs worldwide, requiring as many individuals to retrain and reskill by 2030.1 In response, organizations around the world are driving towards solutions that will ensure the effective validating of new skills in a rapidly changing job market.
Why Skill Validation Matters

With standards still evolving, organizations are responsible for valuing and validating this reskill and/or upskill mastery for their workforce. However, many organizations lack concrete proof regarding learners’ ability to retain and apply the knowledge and skills needed to successfully navigate the changing landscape.

3-Point Checklist for Upskilling your Workforce
✔ Set clear, aligned learning objectives
✔ Give real-time, relevant feedback
✔ Ensure consistent, unbiased evaluations
3 Steps to Validate Skill Mastery
The success of your upskill program hinges not only on the quality of training but also on the tangible proof of its impact. Here, we present a 3-point checklist for substantiating genuine skill mastery and enhancing your credentialing program.
1. Establish Clear, Aligned Learning Objectives

Effective assessments begin with defined learning objectives. These objectives form the foundation for your any learning program (and are critical in quickly reskilling or upskilling your employees), facilitating deliberate practice, relevant feedback, and meaningful assessments.

First, create clear, customized objectives rooted in your course materials, including training documents, video transcripts, and assessment rubrics. These objectives:

  • Provide learners with unambiguous guidance, ensuring they understand where to focus during practice.
  • Create a uniform learning experience for all participants.
  • Prevent misalignment between course content and assessment criteria.
  • Maintain consistency by subjecting all learners to the same predefined objectives, ensuring fairness and transparency.First, create clear, customized objectives rooted in your course materials, including training documents, video transcripts, and assessment rubrics. These objectives:
2. Offer Real-Time, Relevant Feedback

The next step involves providing learners with timely, actionable feedback on practice assignments and assessments guided by your learning objectives. This process reinforces comprehension of course content, enabling learners to refine and master their skills through continuous practice. Moreover, it instills instructor confidence in learners’ assessment readiness while reducing the bad habit formation that can occur when learners gain confidence in a wrong approach without timely feedback to redirect.

Providing timely, aligned feedback:

  • Encourages learners to persist until they achieve excellence.
  • Boosts learner confidence by illuminating their strengths and areas for improvement.
  • Sustains learner engagement and motivation.
3. Ensure Consistent, Unbiased Evaluations

Lastly, establish a consistent and fair evaluation process based on your learning objectives to enhance the value and credibility of your upskill/reskill program. By evaluating each learner’s skills and comprehension against the program’s learning objectives, instructors can grade with confidence.

Basing your assessments on learning objectives:

  • Boosts the credibility of your evaluations, ensuring all learners are graded against the same criteria.
  • Helps validate learners’ mastery of the required skills.
Selecting the Ideal Skills Development & Assessment Tools

Traditional assessment methods, such as multiple-choice tests and quizzes, often fall short when meeting today’s credibility, scalability, and value demands. Organizations find it challenging to verify the real-world readiness of their learners, instructors grapple with manual grading, and learners aspire for genuine recognition and feedback that prepares them for real- world challenges. In addition, these assessments often fail to keep up with the evolving needs of reskilling an entire workforce to meet the challenges and demands of the future of work.

AI-powered solutions are swiftly emerging to bridge this gap, offering innovative tools to enhance assessment and credentialing processes for organizations.

Get Evidence of Skill Mastery with Traveling Coaches’ LegalMind+ Features

Traveling Coaches is delighted to unveil LegalMind+, a groundbreaking solution that employs a threefold assessment approach, offering tangible proof of skill mastery. This tool elevates reskilling programs using learner-created video submissions as concrete evidence of skill mastery, complete with AI-driven feedback and options for both individual practice and evaluator assessment, as needed.

LegalMind+’s distinctive approach ensures upskilling objectives are supported by video proof of
genuine skill mastery, combining efficiency with undeniable validation. The new features
include:

  • Automated Learning Objectives: LegalMind+ rapidly generates core learning objectives from provided course materials, saving instructors time and effort. It establishes precise assessment criteria for learners and instructors aligned with organizational goals.
  • Instant Feedback: An AI-driven tool that provides learners with real-time feedback on video assignments, ensuring depth of content understanding and presentation effectiveness. It reinforces learner comprehension of course material by aligning feedback with learning objectives.
  • Automated Smart Scoring: An automated grading system evaluates learners’ final video submissions against each learning objective to ensure consistent and unbiased evaluations. This approach showcases proof of mastery and frees instructors from the time-consuming manual grading process.

LegalMind+ combines the efficiency of automation with the depth of human expertise. Our solution ensures fast, consistent assessment processes while seamlessly integrating human proficiency at any stage, providing organizations the best of both worlds. Plus, our privacy-first the infrastructure and training approach ensures the confidentiality and security of all data,

reflecting our unwavering commitment to data protection.

With LegalMind+, you can finally have confidence in proving skill readiness, accelerating learner growth and enhancing an organization’s credibility and scalability. AI-powered solutions are swiftly emerging to bridge this gap, offering innovative tools to enhance assessment and credentialing processes for organizations.

Sources:

1 https://www.weforum.org/impact/reskilling-revolution/

Training Return-on-Investment

At Traveling Coaches, we recognize the importance of maximizing the value of training investments. Recently, one of our Learning Strategist had the honor of participating as a panelist in a Training Return-on-Investment webinar, where industry experts convened to explore strategies for effectively measuring and enhancing Training ROI. In this recap, we highlight key insights from the session.

Understanding Key Performance Indicators:
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) play a significant role in evaluating training programs. It’s a topic that many firms are discussing, but it’s also one that can make individuals uncomfortable if they’re not sure what they should be measuring, how they should measure, and why they should measure. KPIs are measurable values that signal whether success is likely. They can range depending on the firm’s business drivers but typically include metrics such as:

User Adoption: Are they using it? Are they using it properly or efficiently? Are they using it to the fullest capabilities?

Staff Ratios: Measures the ratio of a specific type of employee to fee earners. This data can be helpful to look at on an overall staff, support staff, or trainer-to-fee earner basis. Learning programs are often implemented to positively impact overall ratios.

Customer Satisfaction: Measures the general perception of the effectiveness of learning services. This can be done at an overall, program/service-specific, or event level. Many firms use an annual Satisfaction Survey to measure this metric.

Time to Competency: Measures the average time it takes until the expected competence level is reached by employees. The measurement can be done through assessments, interviews, and surveys.

Assessment/eLearning Pass Rate: Measures the scores on assessments or eLearning programs. This data can be helpful in identifying additional learning needs.

Alignment with Business Goals:

A central theme of the webinar was the imperative of aligning training programs with overarching business objectives. KPIs need to be customized to your business situation and should be developed to help you achieve your goals. It’s important to begin with the end goals in mind when designing training initiatives to identify what success looks like. By ensuring alignment with organizational strategies, firms can accurately measure the ROI of their training investments and drive tangible results. When we are intentional and plan what gets measured, we’re able to measure what matters to clarify success and to facilitate effective stakeholder communication and engagement.

Overcoming Challenges

Common challenges faced by law firms in measuring and demonstrating the ROI of IT training were discussed. Some firms struggle with knowing what and how to measure, while others fear failure. Echoing the sentiment of Peter Drucker: “What gets measured, gets managed.” By focusing on meaningful metrics and acknowledging the value of qualitative outcomes, firms can navigate these challenges and unlock the full potential of their training programs.

By understanding KPIs, aligning training with business goals, and overcoming measurement challenges, organizations can elevate the effectiveness of their training initiatives and drive sustainable growth.

Traveling Coaches is ready to help you empower your people and elevate your firm. Reach out to us today to maximize your Training ROI.

How To Talk to Lawyers about the Effective and Responsible use of AI

Before we get into the specifics of this article, let’s level-set on a few things about Generative Artificial
Intelligence (GenAI):

  • Is it Evil or is it Good? NEITHER. It’s probably best to stop ascribing morality to a technology. It’s in the use of things that it gets such a moniker.
  • Is it intelligent? NO. It is really machine learning based on what it has to learn from (there are some interesting tangential thoughts here – think GIGO …or Garbage In, Garbage Out).
  • Is it AMAZING? Oh yeah, most definitely YES! The technology is extraordinary and has the potential to do things in seconds that would take a really talented person hours.
  • Will it take over the world and be the end of all life as we know it? NO. While it clearly provides the conspiracy theorists with fodder for Skynet references (come on … we’ve all seen Terminator), this technology will be disruptive but not destructive (IMHO).

There are a lot of directions you can take when discussing GenAI for lawyers and the legal community. You can take the complete risk-averse mindset of “Not only NO, but heck NO!” Or you can take the daredevil mindset of “these are innovations that will change everything.” Of particular interest to lawyers, however, is a balanced view of both. There are interesting stories around its misuse, some cool stories around efficiency gains, and a whole lot of speculation about its impact on job roles and how it might change the look of the modern-day law firm. But how do we talk about the GenAI juggernaut with lawyers? Here are a few things to consider:

Know your audience

In fact, I would take this one step further. Don’t assume you know your audience. Ask them. A mistake many have made over the years is to take a new technology and try to “make it fit” into a lawyer’s way of working. Instead, we should start with the business issue(s) facing the lawyer and how this can help solve the business need(s). The best way to know the business issues facing lawyers …is to ask lawyers.

Something else to consider … what matters to you may not matter to a lawyer. Always approach the introduction of technology changes with lawyers based on the real (not perceived) business needs of the lawyer.

Know the Ethical Guiding Principles to which All Lawyers Are Bound

Ethical rules are not just platitudes or suggestions or “it would be nice if” types of things for lawyers. They are rules that lawyers are bound by and that they’ve sworn to. In fact, there are sanctions for not staying within the ethical guidelines established for lawyers. This is no small thing. Lawyers are held to a higher standard …and they should be. This is also not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a good thing. Ethical standards and rules help tremendously when faced with a decision tree moment. For example, they provide guidance and direction for when to and when not to use certain technologies (which is OH SO relevant to the GenAI discussion).

The American Bar Association (ABA)’s model rules are guides for this discussion. For reference, the ABA sets model rules that are, in most cases, adopted by each state for lawyers with their State Bar in that state. Using the ABA’s model rules provides us with a broad, yet widely adopted place to start. Two notable rules come to mind.

Duty of Competence (ABA Model Rule 1.1): Let's cover some salient points to this rule:
It requires you to maintain requisite knowledge and skill. This is the reason CLE is required. It also makes clear that things are constantly changing, and a lawyer has a responsibility to stay current …including technologically. It requires that you keep abreast of the changes in the law and its practice. The laws and rules around the use of GenAI are changing by the minute. In fact, some judges are adding rules for their court specifically around the use of GenAI. It requires you to understand the risks and benefits associated with relevant technology. See any connections here to the use of GenAI? You are required to be aware not only of the good things (the benefits), but also the not-so-good things (the risks).

Duty of Confidentiality (ABA Model Rule 1.6): This one should be clear, but sometimes gets lost in the practical application. Comment 16 to this rule states that “Reasonable precautions” must be taken to safeguard and preserve confidential information. Understanding the technology tools and how they handle, store, and secure access to confidential information is part of that reasonable precaution mandate. 

What about Data Privacy? It has been said that public GenAI solutions are the exact opposite of Data Privacy. Adding confidential information to a public GenAI solution makes that confidential information very public. Data Privacy laws are changing rapidly world-wide. All ethical use of GenAI solutions must align with a lawyer’s (and law firm personnel’s) responsibility to maintain data privacy and protection. It’s the law.

Take a Balanced Approach

Lawyers want a breakdown of the facts so they can make informed decisions. Lawyers also want practical and actionable steps to use a technology like GenAI. Put GenAI topics into ethical and effective use case scenarios. Find the uses of GenAI that add efficiencies and solve business problems without violating their ethical requirements. Align the discussions of the effective use of GenAI with the policies and procedures established by the law firm and the firm’s core values.

About the Author

Kenny Leckie

Senior Technology & Change Management Consultant

In his role as Senior Technology and Change Management Consultant, Kenny provides thought leadership and consulting to the legal community in areas of information security/cybersecurity awareness, change management, user adoption, adult learning, employee engagement, professional development, and business strategy. He also works with clients to develop and deploy customized programs with an emphasis on user adoption and increased return on investment. Kenny is a Prosci
Certified Change Practitioner, a Certified Technical Trainer and has earned the trust of firms across the US, Canada, The UK, Europe and Australia.

Kenny has more than thirty years of combined experience as a law firm Chief Information Officer, Manager of Support & Training, and now consultant providing him a unique point of view and understanding of the challenges of introducing change in law firms. He combines his years of experience with a strategic approach to help clients implement programs that allows focus on the business while minimizing risk to confidential, protected, and sensitive information. Kenny is an author and speaker and a winner of ILTA’s 2018 Innovative Consultant of the Year.