ChatGPT for Learning and Development Management

Benefits of GenAI

I've been using ChatGPT consistently for about 5 months now. I experience about 20-30% extra value output each day for my management responsibilities. That means I get an extra week's work done each month - well worth the €25 investment!

With this level of extra productivity, I presumed everyone else was doing the same as me and using ChatGPT for as much work as possible. But it wasn't until I attended a conference recently that I realised how little people are using ChatGPT. Maybe people are uncomfortable with it. Maybe they see it as cheating by automating their tasks. Or maybe they are using it but don't want to say.

For anyone that is using it, the use cases are straightforward. Most use cases equate to pasting content into ChatGPT and asking it for feedback or insights. That's not to say this isn't valuable, but it only touches on the extra value it can bring to a manager. Let's walk through how I use it to manage learning and development in my organisation.

ChatGPT is not a new Google - it is a copilot

Many people have warned against using ChatGPT as a google replacement. Worse still, some people have relied on ChatGPT to their detriment. ChatGPT's answers should not be blindly trusted. Anything it produces should be verified, particularly if it is crucial information.

But anyway, quick knowledge is not the primary benefit of ChatGPT. Its value is in its ability to interact with my ideas. A loose idea can quickly get teased into a robust proposal with ChatGPT. It can be used as a coach, content creator or document expert which allows me to interact with it for a particular task.

ChatGPT prompts

Prompts are the input we type into ChatGPT. Each prompt will get you a response, but the more detailed and specific your prompt, the more relevant the output will be.

Brainstorming initiatives and solutions

Quick brainstorming is one of the most common ways I use ChatGPT. I can prepare for a meeting in 15 minutes instead of an hour. If a colleague asks me to help them with a problem, I'm able to interact with ChatGPT and propose a more robust solution that better solves their problem.

Stakeholder request example:

ChatGPT prompt:

"I want you to act as a learning and development manager in a software company. You've just received the following request from a stakeholder and you want to propose back a solution that is more robust and better aligns with their needs. Here is the request: I have one team that is poor at debugging and resolving their tickets quickly. Give them a workshop to fix this problem."

Screenshot:

As you can see, ChatGPT responds with suggestions on diagnostics, training programs, hands-on workshops and regular feedback. Not only does this better align to the stakeholder's needs, but I can propose something like this to my stakeholder at a much lower cost of my time than previously. The answer may not be 100% or even 50% what I want, but it gives me enough to start putting ideas together. Combined with my own expertise, I can write out a pretty good proposal for my stakeholder.

Create workshops

With ChatGPT, I can put together a decent workshop in 1 hour instead of 3. The workshop still needs to be tested on a group of people, but I no longer need to spend the time researching in-depth into multiple topics to find the correct one that meets by team's needs. I will still spend the time to research the chosen topic, particularly if I'm the one giving the workshop. But now I'm hyper-efficient. A quick prompt on the problem statement and what I'm trying to accomplish and ChatGPT spits out the outline of a good workshop. I can interact with the response, suggesting games or activity formats that suits my team.

One big advantage I'm getting from this is that I can create multiple workshops to offer a team, rather than offering a single workshop to everyone. Instead of booking a team into an hour's workshop and presenting them with the predefined topic, I can offer them a menu of options to choose from. This helps them get the most out of the hour together and choose something that best supports their needs. In the future, I hope to get to a stage where I can ask each team what individual problems they have and develop a workshop tailored to their specific needs.

Each workshop has some key ingredients that make it effective. I use ChatGPT to help me craft better versions of these ingredients quickly.

Ice-breakers

Ice-breakers are a common way of getting people to talk and interact with each other straight away. Here I've asked ChatGPT for a list of ice-breakers to begin my workshop:

Interactive Activities

Effective workshops are interactive and get people talking. Discussions, games and pair-based activities are all things ChatGPT can help with.

Engage with document content

One of the newer features of ChatGPT is its ability to absorb documents you provide. For example, I can upload this whitepaper for "Learning through play: A Review of the evidence".

Then I can ask ChatGPT to give me information about the document back to me.

Formulate better ideas

Learning and development is a highly creative discipline. It is fuelled by ideas that can help people. Anyone who is used to coming up with ideas everyday understands how messy they are in the beginning. It takes discussion, drawing and writing to transform a loose idea into a robust solution. ChatGPT can help us short-cut the messy phase and get into proposal mode faster.

Here is an example of a specific idea that was messy to begin with. ChatGPT was able to give me a starting point to structure the loose thoughts.

Custom GPTs

We can now create our own tailored chat bots used Custom GPTs. These are custom versions of ChatGPT that respond in a particular way which you have defined.

Learning + Development Coach GPT

Here is a coach I created that is specialised in learning and development, organisational development and innovation. I generally spend 30 - 60 minutes per week engaging with this bot to help me identify challenges and goals for myself. It is designed to act as a coach and ask me powerful questions rather than give me answers to everything. This helps me challenge assumptions and organise my thoughts.

Learning + Development Mentor GPT

I found myself typing the same information into ChatGPT again and again. The number of people in my organisation, my role, the domains we are part of. So I created a Custom GPT with all this information in it. Now I just have to start a new chat with my Learning and Development Copilot and it knows all the specifics related to my job.

Here is the instructions I give the GPT:

The GPT, as 'Learning and Dev Copilot,' is specialized in providing support for various learning and development initiatives across an organization. It offers expert guidance on remote-based courses, workshops, and projects, tailored to the needs of a diverse workforce. The GPT will provide innovative ideas for engaging and effective training, feedback on existing plans, and suggestions for improvement. It will take into account the challenges and opportunities of remote learning environments and diverse learning styles. The GPT will avoid making assumptions about the specific nature of the organization or its employees, instead asking for details when needed to provide accurate and relevant advice. It will maintain a friendly and professional demeanor, aiming to be a supportive partner in the learning and development process.

Domain expert

A big challenge for teams in my organisation is to learn domain knowledge quickly and easily. Usually this involves trawling through messy documentation and confluence pages to find the correct information. I've started to create domain expert GPTs for each team's area. I hope this will help the teams find the necessary knowledge they need quickly and easily.

So far, domain experts has included telecoms ecosystem, kafka and high performance java.

Conclusion

ChatGPT is incredibly powerful for management tasks. The increased level of productivity and quality you receive is a no brainer. Add in the extra features of the premium version and you get a powerful virtual assistant who knows nearly everything about anything.