Four GenAI upskilling trends that leaders cannot ignore in 2025

With change comes uncertainty, and there is a lot of pressure for leaders to help their workforce prepare for and understand the organization’s point of view on the GenAI evolution. While employees can certainly leverage a wide variety of AI training programs, leaders will also need to refresh their soft skills such as effective communication, decision-making, manager coaching, and change management.

Remember, employees need clear guidance and encouragement to be part of the change — including the psychological safety to try new things and fail safely.

It is not just students who will benefit from AI tutors or learning assistants: employees that are upskilling and reskilling will, too.

For leaders, this means your investment in digital training modalities for your employees will generate an even greater return on investment. Your employees can gain enhanced learning depth through digital training, allowing business leaders to quickly develop a workforce that has the critical skillsets to contribute to business growth.

Simply put, the faster and better your workforce can learn new concepts and skills through the power of GenAI, the faster they will be able to help your business innovate and improve the bottom line.

One of the best ways to keep up with the pace of technology is to invest in organization-wide upskilling initiatives that build an engaged culture of learning.

However, it can be tough to know how and where to invest to maximize your organization’s immediate innovation needs. With the interest in GenAI, in particular, AWS is seeing more organizations deploy short-term, highly focused training initiatives on a specific topic, area, or team. The key is to organize a collaborative, cohort-style training that includes dedicated ideation, hands-on learning, and soft skills education. These sessions have a few key benefits:

1. Employees come away with actionable use cases that maximize the newly developed skills, giving them priority focus areas that may not have been possible without collaborative, hands-on learning.
2. With priority initiatives identified, leaders can make quick decisions about redeploying newly skilled talent into new roles or investing in additional reskilling.
3. The short-term and focused nature of the training gives the organization quicker results, which reinforces the business benefit of skills development. This leads to greater leadership buy-in for workforce skills initiatives. Given how quickly GenAI is evolving, speed matters more than ever in the world of technology and business.

Productivity is an important factor to evaluate, but it is much more than that, and it is a long game. By ensuring your team has the right skills to complete a project or initiative, you will not have to recruit new talent, outsource the work, or worse, shelve the project altogether. Measuring the business impact of ongoing training comes down to what can be accomplished that was not possible without the skills development. This takes into account your teams’ engagement, retention, efficiency, collaboration, and confidence to take risks.