#584 How to Create Your AI Learning Plan

**Sarah Ellis** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Sarah, and in this Squiggly Shortcut, I'm going to talk about how you can use our Learning Navigator tool to think about AI. So in our workshops and our work at the moment, the one learning goal that everyone has got is AI. But often when you dig a bit deeper, people are struggling to articulate exactly what they want to learn when it comes to AI. And that's understandable because it is such a big and overwhelming topic, often we can be a bit unsure about where to start. So I was having a play with this Learning Navigator that we have created previously when we were thinking about learning in the flow of work to see if it could help me with, am I learning the right things in the right order when it comes to AI? Really thinking about how this relates to my job today, and also things that I might want to do in the future too. So the Learning Navigator has two dimensions which I'll just describe in case you're listening, rather than watching. So we're thinking about what matters now. So right here, right now, like this week at work, and then what might happen next, or if I'm thinking three months, six months out. Probably don't want to go too far, because it can be hard to imagine with AI at the moment. And then what feels essential in your job, the job you do today, and what feels more nice to do? If you can find a bit of time, you might want to be more playing or experimenting in that area.
And so when I went through this, just to give you a few examples, that it kind of really helped me, when I was thinking about what matters now and what feels really essential in my role, I'd got a few different areas. One, we've been experimenting with granola, but actually what matters now is not just using granola for transcripts, but how we can use granola for some of the admin tasks, some of the manual tasks that exist in our company. So I was trying to be really specific about what do I need to learn? Can I set up templates, frameworks, can they get populated? What does that look like? How do I connect that with the systems that we have, say, in Microsoft? So how do those two things talk to each other? So that was one for me. The second one was last year I had a learning goal around prompts, like getting better at prompts, and we used some of those and things like the Squiggly Skill Sprint that we did.
Prompts for learning, prompts for thinking about your career. I now want to think more about my own learning design.
So when I'm designing learning programs for leaders or everyone in a company, how am I adding in AI prompts so that we have for any skill, awareness, action, and an AI prompt, and then showing people what's possible? Because I think just having examples and case studies, and sharing specific stories is really helpful. So that's second on my list. Third, which came up this week in our team meeting, is creating or at least being part of creating some guidelines for our team about how we use AI. So we haven't really done that yet. Everyone's been more in experimenting mode, but you can start to see how this is going to be helpful. Then number four, which is a new one for me, is using Google Notebook LM, which is going to be helpful hopefully for our PhD. So it's particularly designed for, I think research and bringing sources and references together.
So I'm starting the PhD now, so it feels like relevant now, and having a way to bring all that information together feels really essential for me. So that was my priority learning list when it comes to AI. So even to be honest, if I had just done that, I found that helpful, it helped me to find some focus. Then on the rest of my list, my nows, but nice to do. So this is more have a play, have experiment. Profilers and quizzes. I was experimenting with this last week, couldn't get it to work, couldn't get the thing that I wanted to create to actually feel useful, but that was fine. It still felt like I was learning. I was just sort of failing, learning and failing along the way.
We're using things like Canva AI a bit more. Again, it's not essential for me, but I quite like having a play.
And sort of agent add-ins, how can agents play a part in my week? Still not sure about that. Kind of feels nice to do and something I want to do now. There's lots of chat about agents. I think it's good to have a point of view, but it doesn't feel as essential as some of those other areas. When I look further ahead into kind of what next, so maybe the next three, six months, what feels essential? Well, we are starting to build some things for some of the learning partners that we work with using AI and tech and tools. So data and privacy, being really clear about what that looks like with what we're building, and also the environmental impact, because I know that those are questions that will get asked, and I want to make sure we're clear about what we're doing and why. So they're on my list. Then my nice to do for next is I still have this idea that visual AI should be able to help people to bring to life their Squiggly Careers so far. Again, we've looked at this a few times, never quite been able to make it work in a way that's felt useful. But I've also never forgot it. So it's still on my Learning Navigator. But maybe it's something I'll come back to in the next three or six months. So if AI is your learning goal or just feels like something you want to learn more about, which is pretty universal right now, hopefully this helps you to drill down into the specifics of, well, what actions am I going to take? When am I going to take these actions? And the more that you can connect this learning, I think, to your day job, the easier it is because then you'll just be just adding learning in, you're learning as you go, rather than feeling like you have to find extra time to learn.