What if you could use AI to create a personalized training plan tailored to each employee's unique needs?
In this episode of Leveraging AI, Isar Meitis talks with Hank Barker about how tools like ChatGPT have immense potential to transform learning and development programs in organizations.
Topics we discussed:
Our guest Hank Barker is a LinkedIn creator focused on using AI for assistance and personalized learning plans. Connect with Hank on LinkedIn to continue the conversation.
About Leveraging AI
If you’ve enjoyed or benefited from some of the insights of this episode, leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, and let us know what you learned, found helpful, or liked most about this show!
What if you could use AI to create a personalized training plan tailored to each employee's unique needs?
In this episode of Leveraging AI, Isar Meitis talks with Hank Barker about how tools like ChatGPT have immense potential to transform learning and development programs in organizations.
Topics we discussed:
Our guest Hank Barker is a LinkedIn creator focused on using AI for assistance and personalized learning plans. Connect with Hank on LinkedIn to continue the conversation.
About Leveraging AI
If you’ve enjoyed or benefited from some of the insights of this episode, leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, and let us know what you learned, found helpful, or liked most about this show!
Hello and welcome to Leveraging AI, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business and advance your career. This is Issar. Mayte is your host. And I have a different, unique and exciting episode for you today. Most of the time we just talk about business and processes in business and so on, but a very big part of running a successful business is being able to train yourself and your employees on new things that are happening. And that becomes an even bigger necessity in the world of AI, where things are moving and changing all the time. But one of the problems that we face as learners, or as people are trying to teach other people. So people in L and D positions is that People learn in different ways, right? Different people have different ways that they like to learn, different knowledge gaps that they have. And the current way of learning and training usually aims for the average student, which means you're actually not providing optimal training for more or less anyone. That being said, AI is an amazing tool to solve that problem and provide a personalized custom training to every single person in your organization, whether that would be college, high school, elementary school, or in your business. And our guest today Hank Barker is an expert exactly on that, on how to use ChatGPT and other AI tools in order to, first of all, understand your personalized knowledge gaps, but then build a customized plan on how to have ChatGPT train you and help you close the gaps that you currently have. I find this extremely exciting and think that's the future. of training, like putting people in a classroom again, whether that's in a business environment or in a school environment and teaching everybody the same thing is not making any sense to me anymore. I must admit, it didn't make sense to me for a very long time now, but now we have an opportunity to actually solve that problem. So I'm very excited to be talking about this. Hank, welcome to
Hank Barker:Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm just glad to be here. And like you said, it's, there's people learn in so many different ways. So you have to be able to accommodate that. And now with tools like ChatGPT, you just have that capability and it's really exciting to see. And like you said, I think this is going to be the future of,
Isar Meitis:how we learn. I think it's amazing to me that you talk to people, schools and universities. And the first thing they do is they ban this thing. Like you're not allowed to use ChatGPT. It's no. And it's blocked from the, like the network and you can't get access to it. And I'm like, you're idiots. this is literally the biggest opportunity we had to change the way we've been teaching for, I don't know, 150 years now, people sit in classroom with a teacher in front of a board. Like, how can that be? Like everything else in the world has changed. And even even in a business environment, if you think about it, how do businesses provide training, it's usually they would bring some kind of an external instructor that sits in a classroom in front of X number of employees and teaches them for X number of hours the same content, which again does not make any sense. So what's the alternative? I'll let you, take it from here and walk us through, your process.
Hank Barker:Yeah, so the alternative is like it's personalized learning plans and it's we're at a time now where, like I said, we can use these tools to instead of taking this cookie cutter approach where everybody is, getting the same exact like plan, you can now create these personalized plans for each individual because everyone has their own, necessities for some for someone they might want. Learn way better with hands on approaches and some learn more from like a theoretical approach. So with that being said, you can take a tool like a ChatGPT and with just a first good initial prompt, you can craft a strong personalized learning plan that's going to be perfect for them and what they need to learn.
Isar Meitis:Okay, so let's do it. Sounds, I'm really excited on a very personal level to learn this, as an instructor, myself, who teaches courses on AI and, supports organizations in training their employees and so on, on AI. So I'm really curious about this. Let's dive right in.
Hank Barker:All right, perfect. Let me share my screen
Isar Meitis:real quick for you. So those of you who are listening and cannot see the screen, A, this will be available on YouTube as well. So if you want to watch it over there, but also we're going to share exactly what's on the screen that just helps us follow the process in a more precise way.
Hank Barker:All right. Can you see my screen? I can't. All right, perfect. So we're going to start off with the initial prompt, something pretty simple, nothing crazy. So you're going to start off by establishing the role of the bot. So the role is going to be that you are an expert at crafting highly personalized learning plans for individuals in the workspace. You assist in every step from creating the benchmark test, analyzing results, and finally creating and help carrying out the personalized plan. And I also offered it to say, here's some more information about you. You ask clarifying questions when needed to ensure great results. You are patient and understanding implementing any needs into the plan, and you always deliver high quality results and don't skip any necessary information. So let's enter that in and it's going to give us, it's going to basically say, Hey, great. This is, I'm going to need some more information from you. So the persona that I'm going to go with today is, a woman named Stacey. Now Stacey is like a running thing on LinkedIn with me and a couple other creators. We started her off with, me and a man named, Josh Wheeler and some, I forgot who the other guy was. Oh, Archer. And what we did was we took Stacey, and we were using, using Stacey for New Year's goals. So we wanted to basically establish her as like a running character. So I thought, why not have Stacey learn something new today? Okay. so basically right off the bat, it says, that sounds great. As an expert in crafting highly personalized learning plans, I'm here to help you through every step of the process. So it's asked for efforts, right? For some initial details. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to provide it with who Stacey is and what we're looking for. Awesome. So I can say my new employee is Stacey, who is struggling and learning how to conduct sales calls. She has some prior experience, but can't grasp and implement the concepts. Ideally, I would want this to be about, her to become confident in her abilities. And I would want this to be within the next month because people want to learn quick. They don't want it to take a long time. So next is going to give us some sort of, it's going to say, Hey, to do this, we're going to need to do an assessment. We're going to do, how to develop the learning plan. And from here, it's going to give, it's basically going to go through the steps of okay, if you were to be creating a plan for her, what do you need to be covering? So it goes into a little bit into the detail of each step, okay, potentially doing role playing, real time, giving some feedback, progressing the, watching the progress. And from here, what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be asking it for a, an evaluation. And so I'm going to say, Hey, I need an assessment of where she is struggling. And so I need a test for that.
Isar Meitis:And I will add one thing as you're typing your prompt for the test. First of all, it gave us a lot of great outline that we didn't go over, but it really gave us a good outline here. Yeah. assessment and then learning and development plan. And then within each and every one of them, there's sub bullet points with a lot of useful information and then practice and application and then reevaluation and, support and encouragement and then adjustments as she progresses. So it's a great outline that we have just out of the get go. And again, with more details underneath that. But the other thing that I want to say specifically on your particular example, that. You can even take, and today ChatGPT is very good. it has a very large context we know, and it's very good at analyzing large quantities of data. So you can even say, okay, here are the transcripts of her last 10 sales calls. Oh, for sure. And here is the benchmark that other people that are good salespeople have. Here are their calls. And here is the script that we asked them to actually use during sales calls. And this is how I want you to evaluate the calls. So now, without even Having Stacy in the loop, you can already have ChatGPT have a very good reference to what is needed, what is a good sales call, and how her calls look like. So you can use these kind of things, especially in this very particular example. you have information that you can start with without actually having the person involved yet.
Hank Barker:Oh, for sure. there's so many different avenues you can go down and like you said, this is just, it's a great, it's just starting off. perfect from here. You can take it in so many different avenues. You could give it a lot more information to really dive deep in certain, certain applications, certain things that she struggles with. But the next step that I'm going to take is I'm going to have it create the test that I should be giving her. and it should, it's just for the sake of this, it should be around 20 questions and cover all important topics to do with sales calls. So then from here, it's going to create a, just a, an all encompassing 20 question test that we can use to then have her answer these questions. And then from there, ChatGPT is going to analyze these questions for where she could improve. And then from there we can take it to the final step of, creating this learning plan for her.
Isar Meitis:That's brilliant.
Hank Barker:So I have already, I've done this, I've done this so many different times and it always gives very similar questions I've noticed. I don't know if this is something you've ever, if you've done anything similar, but every time I've done it, I get a very similar, like understanding customer needs, opening the call. It gives me very similar, Questions to ask Stacy,
Isar Meitis:which makes sense, right? it's, you asked it a very specific topic. what are the important things on doing a sales call? So I give you two questions on each and every one of those things. Yeah. And I think the beauty of this, if you scroll back up a little bit, the beauty of this, so the questions it gave us is about opening the call, product knowledge, communication skills, handling objections and, building rapport, closing the sale and then follow up. So it gave us. All the different aspects of exactly. I think the beauty of this is if you know what somebody's struggling with, you can build a test that is a layer deeper than that, right? You can say, okay, I know she's struggling with closing and dealing with objections. Write me a test to understand exactly what she's dealing with when dealing with objections and closing a deal. And then you'll get, instead of 20 questions, two on each general step of a sales call, it will dive a lot deeper and we'll give you 10 questions on the two topics that you want to focus on. So if you have prior understanding of what this particular individual is with, you can do that, or you can actually do A second step here, which maybe you were planning to do. So if I'm stealing your thunder, I apologize, but you can do a second step where it says, okay, based on the questions, based on the answers to these questions, ask follow up questions to dive deeper into whatever topics you think we need to dive into.
Hank Barker:For sure. yeah, you're hitting it right on the head. It's there's, you can keep going layers and layers deeper to just continue adding more to it. Now, this is a very surface level example. So you can, like you said, there's so many layers of this just really like you said, delve deeper. It's such a cool opportunity here. So from this, we got the questions that we want to ask. So from here, like I said, I've had very similar questions every time. And I wanted to make sure that it was going to give some similar questions so I can proceed with the next step. So now I can, I have already done this before I've went and I've had, chat to BT actually go and answer these questions in a different chat, as if it was somebody that wasn't confident in sales calls. So I have some examples of, answers to that we've been given. And I said, from here, I'm saying, okay, here are your Stacy's answers. on which she's not very confident with her answers. Please analyze them for where she needs to improve. And then from there, ChatGPT is going to take what you put and is able to find, where is Stacey struggling the most and where would a detailed plan help her the most.
Isar Meitis:And I want to add one thing to what you said, and I do this when I teach my courses, we talk a lot about this, that you can use ChatGPT to Help you fine tune ChatGPT, right? So before you give it to students, if you want to see if your process actually works, you can run a separate chat, having ChatGPT play the role of multiple types of students, let them take the tests, bring it back here. And then you can improve your own process over time without. having the first batch of students be your guinea pigs. You can have them be the 10th batch that's actually going through the process. And now you have a much better fine tuned process. And this is true for almost anything you want to do. let's say you want to do a customer service assessment and you want to ask your customers multiple things, you can write the assessment and then let ChatGPT answer it as different personas and then see what you get and say maybe I want to ask these questions instead of those questions and you can fine tune processes just by Playing ChatGPT against itself, if you want to get a better first step when you actually go live with the thing you want to go live with. So it's a great example that you just gave on how to do that, letting it answer the questions to see if you're asking the
Hank Barker:right questions. Yeah, for sure. That, that you, like you said, that was perfect. Everything you just said was awesome. And you take, I've, I all the time will utilize ChatGPT to create, different personas and just, have ChatGPT work against ChatGPT. It's so awesome. So it gives us a very initial, action plan. and here it says what she's struggling with. She has a struggle with basic understanding, grasping the ideal customer profile. And basically just as outlined, here's where she's not the best at with sales calls. So from here, I would just say now give me a detailed plan, the detailed plan for Stacey.
Isar Meitis:So just to explain what we see on the screen is that it gave us the evaluation of what it thinks. about, how she did on the test. And then it's suggested an outline of an action plan. And what, Hank is asking for now is okay. I like the outline. Give me the actual plan.
Hank Barker:Exactly. Cause yeah, you can take this very low. Face value like here's okay. Here's a suggested action plan for this example. We really want to delve deep We want to make sure she has you know, getting everything she needs to know from this. So perfect right off the bat We're getting week one being a foundation and a product like product knowledge We're starting off strong and like I said, I wanted this within a month. So ChatGPT is recognizing that and saying hey Here's a four way to four weeks to a month plan with the week one focusing on foundation and product knowledge. The objectives are to enhance understanding of product features and unique selling points and develop a clear understanding of the ideal customer profile. It offers the activities as a daily product training sessions in our customer profiling workshop and even gives assignments like creating a detailed product fact sheet and developing a customer profile for a hypothetical but realistic client. Then week two we have sales call structure and techniques. Which you're working on improving sales call processes and developing a skills and handling objections. Again, it gives activities and assignments, and we're going to week three, which is communication, report building and, an active listening, which is the goal. The objective is to enhance communication skills, focusing on active listening and report building. And then finally, of week four, which is resilience, follow up strategies, and self improvement. We're going to develop strategies, learn effective follow up strategies, and foster a mindset of continuous self improvement.
Isar Meitis:So I want to pause you for a second. First of all, I think it's freaking brilliant. but I want to add another layer to what you're saying, especially again, in this particular example, but it's true in any consumer, customer facing roles, which is ChatGPT now has voice. It can actually speak and you can speak to it. So in this particular scenario, you can say, and especially if you fed it your best practices, and if you fed it examples of good calls, and if you fed it the actual calls where this individual was struggling, you can ask it after it goes to that phase in the training to literally hold a call with a fake client to experience the things you were just talking about. So you can ask it to say, okay, now I want you to play the role of a client. That will be the profile that we just talked about and literally have the call. And then at the end of the call, get a feedback from ChatGPT on how you did on the things you just did in the things. And it's really endless, like the amount of things you can do with it. It's just up to your imagination and the implementation is really easy. And in the first two batches, it's not going to be great. It's just going to be good. But as you keep on improving it and you can improve this process, you can give them great feedback with actual quote unquote, real time experience without talking to real
Hank Barker:customers. yeah. Well said, like you said mentioned it's up to the imagination. And I totally agree with that. If you can think it more than likely you can do it with ChatGPT. So I really liked that, that, that example of using it for speech. I didn't even think of that. It was a great recommendation there. Something definitely that, so if you were looking into doing it with sales calls, for example, creating a personalized learning plan, it could help for the product training sessions or the customer profiling workshop. And get help with so many different opportunities. So the last little bit here that it also brought up was it also offered, saying, Hey, here's some, you can get ongoing support and feedback, make sure you're, utilizing like a mentor of some sorts. And then, also said here, make sure you do an evaluation and a month assessment to evaluate progress against initial best benchmarks and a feedback session to basically discuss where Stacy's at and where you could continuously start to, improve upon this initial, plan.
Isar Meitis:First of all, I think this is amazing. I want to touch on one more higher level business aspect of this thing, right? So one aspect is what you touched upon is how to involve other people in the organization, in the training process. So it's not just, Oh, now I have ChatGPT. I don't need to train this individual. That's obviously not the case. It's an assistant. The beauty of this is that you can have the results of each and every one of those steps shared with Stacey's manager or the head of training in her department or the L& D department for the whole company. And therefore they can assist in the process as they see, giving her encouragement when she's making progress or giving her additional assistance where she needs and supplementing what ChatGPT is doing. So that's aspect number one. Aspect number two, which takes it into. What I think the future is going to be, if you think about a platform that is like a learning and development platform for the organization, and there's tools like that today, but most of them are really expensive and hence small businesses usually don't have these. Building something like this that connects to just a database or a CRM, like an internal CRM that will monitor the progress of every single individual and will continuously suggest new things that they should be training on while giving them the actual tools to train, and this costs, again, 20 bucks a month, like in the big scheme of things, you can get very granular on what you're training people while giving them a personalized learning experience while providing feedback to them and the people that needs to monitor their progress and stuff like that. I, again, I'm not an L and D guy. I assume it exists. I assume it's really expensive and I assume it does not provide the actual training itself. It just provides you the frameworks and so on. And you need instructors to do that. And this could an absolute game changer to any company in any size, in any topic, because it will be able to help you take people at their own pace. And all you have to make sure is that they're actually doing it right. Okay. Now you have a four week plan. I want you to follow the plan and we'll talk whatever the case may be.
Hank Barker:Yeah, no, I totally agree. It's, it seems like it is the future that's, that we're heading towards, like you had mentioned, especially like within organizations that don't really have the money to be spending thousands of dollars or whatever they need to on training, this is a very cheap option to, get that plan in place and start having them work towards being more efficient in whatever they need to be efficient in.
Isar Meitis:And I'll add one more thing, I don't know how much you got to play with GPTs or the audience has played with GPTs, but GPTs are basically a mini packed version of ChatGPT that specializes in something very specific. And you can add a lot of background information into GPTs for them to use as reference for different things. So you, if you have existing training plans or best practices or even books, I want my employees to follow this. Process that is defining this book when they do whatever they do, it doesn't matter whether it's managing skills or writing code or organizing stuff in folders or like whatever the thing you want to train them on, if you have reference material, you can build your in house GPT, there will be a trainer on that particular topic while adding reference information and telling it to only use this reference information. So it's not, Oh, yeah. I don't know if ChatGPT knows about my little, very small niche area, but if you give it that information, it will still be able to do all the things we've just done with Hank, teach you on that subject based on the book, the PDF, the recordings of a presentation by the CEO, like whatever the case is, recordings of existing sales calls. customer service tickets solved properly, like whatever it is that you have as reference material, you can use and build a training plan according to that. And then you don't have to write all these prompts because they become a part of that GPT. We'll just follow the process like the process we just did. So I think even within the existing tools, without any futuristic thing, without integrating it with anything else, this could be absolutely incredible as a very solid starting point to small and business, small and medium businesses.
Hank Barker:For sure. And like you said with the GPTs, that's, that is the next step after doing within a chat, being able to upload your own resources into it and, getting, getting these great results, it's, it is the future, like you said, it's being able to take any of those resources that you have, like you said, like maybe potentially transcripts that are trained, these are your high quality transcripts that you want Stacey to learn, for example, having those at her disposal, being able to, Have ChatGPT analyze it for what the best practices are and what worked well. And then being able to take that and apply that into Stacy's training is just, it's next level.
Isar Meitis:Amazing. Absolutely brilliant. anything else to add to this, like other tips or tricks that people should be able to be aware of or use when they try these things?
Hank Barker:I would say just take it slow and it may take some time to get the exact plan that you want for sure. I've had some of the iterations when I've tried this where it spit out like Eight week plans, for example, from there, it would just, you just say, Hey, I only wanted four weeks and it's, it takes, it's working with it, like it's another human basically. And that's something that I've learned is working with it, work with it. Like you were just talking back and forth with somebody and also just, make sure that's. You don't try to dump too much into it at a time because sometimes it can, then the quality can decrease as well.
Isar Meitis:I agree a hundred percent. one of the best practices that I teach in my courses and that he's also written in the best practices from open AI themselves is when you have a lot of. detailed steps, break it into the steps, don't give it all the instructions at once. Do it step by step. The other benefit, by the way, of doing that is that you can correct it. As you said, if it gave you something that is not great, right? If you ask me for the full thing, you have the full thing, but if you break it step by step, then if it did something wrong in step two, you're like, okay, let's pause for a minute. I want to. It's not exactly what I meant. I want to do this. And then only then you continue to step three when you have the correct version of what you wanted to achieve. So absolutely great. if people want to connect with you, follow you, learn from you, work with you, what's the
Hank Barker:best way to do that? The best way is right through LinkedIn. I know I got links through there. Everything is perfect. Just head over to my LinkedIn. If you're looking to learn more, talk to me.
Isar Meitis:And the link to Hank's LinkedIn is going to be in the show notes. So you can open your phone right now and just click on the link and you'll find him. Hank, this was absolutely fantastic. I really enjoyed this. I learned a lot. It gave me a lot of ideas to think about. and I really appreciate you taking the
Hank Barker:time and sharing with us. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I really enjoyed it. It was a great experience. Awesome.