Navigating Change: How to Upskill (Webinar Recap)

Today, Damiana and I had the pleasure of presenting a session on upskilling as a way to navigate change brought on by the introduction of generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) into medical communication to the Southwest Chapter of the American Medical Writers Association. I thought I’d add a brief recap to our blog for our readers.

After a little bit of background about change management and the context of the 4th Industrial Revolution that is bringing gen AI into our work lives (history minor right here!), we discussed upskilling in the AI era–what it is, how to do it, and the resources we have to upskill as medical communications professionals.

Some key takeaways:

• Change in the workplace/industry/your livelihood is an exterior pressure. That is, it is a change that is visited upon you, not a change you have initiated yourself. The cool thing about exterior pressures is that the receiver decides if the pressure has negative or positive meaning. So, you can choose whether to see changes to our industry as opportunity or threat. (It’s probably somewhere in the middle.)
• Gen AI threatens, at this point, folks who work in areas that involve tasks gen AI can do faster and cheaper, such as proofreading, basic copy editing, and drafting plain language materials. That work is below the water line. At the water line or just a little above are professionals whose work may involve some of those tasks, because those ranks will be condensed and slimmed. The further you get above the water line, the more successful you will be.
• AI is a tool for augmenting human intelligence, not replacing it. Gen AI hallucinates, which is a bad trait for a tool in an industry that requires accuracy and attention to detail. It also lacks a grasp of the soft skills we need in most projects, such as nuance and a grip on ethics. Gen AI’s ethical approach can have more of the Thanos vibe than most organizations are comfortable with. As a result, organizations need professional humans with domain expertise and communication skills to ensure documents are correct and appropriate for the intended audience (nuance).
• The way to get some distance between yourself and the water line? Upskilling. That is, refining your skills, adding new skills, cultivating your knowledge into domain expertise.
• Whether working as a freelancer or employee, upskilling will involve agency. Simply put, don’t wait around for someone to make it happen for you, you need to make it happen for you. Once you have committed to the process, start by assessing your skill set, abilities, and resources. (We have a decision matrix for that!).

We finished with a discussion of how to proceed to upskill after deciding your path forward and pointed to resources that provide medical communications professionals with educational resources, networking opportunities, and other tools for upskilling. And we did it in under an hour! And yes, we were editing it down until the very last minute (so much history gone!). So much to say, so little time to share.

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