AIHR’s 2023 Wrapped: Continuously Striving for Excellence
It’s that time of year again! 2023 has been a rewarding journey for us here at AIHR. I’d like to share some highlights with you on what we’re most proud of and our outlook for 2024. This year, we’ve made significant progress across a few different areas, including helping HR professionals succeed in their careers, helping HR teams succeed, and becoming the best employer we can be.
Let’s take a look!
Helping HR professionals succeed in their careers
I’m proud to say that in 2023, we’ve taken things to the next level when it comes to helping HR professionals succeed in their careers. We achieved this by supporting the HR domain globally through quality free content and continuously empowering our members to excel in their careers, prepare for their dream jobs, and maximize their impact.
Elevating the HR domain globally
Our 2023 content in numbers:
- 7.2 million HR professionals visited our blog
- 88,094 new LinkedIn followers
- 19,300 new YouTube subscribers.
This year, we published more than 200 news articles on a wide range of HR topics. All are freely available to anyone, and over 50 of these also contain free templates you can download and use immediately in your daily work. We also continued to grow our HR glossary library, where you can find 100+ entries arranged in alphabetical order for easy reference.
Take a look at our 2023 blog Hall of Fame:
- 11 HR Trends for 2024: Elevating Work: 11 HR trends you need to know to prepare for 2024.
- RACI Template & Ultimate 2023 Guide to the RACI Matrix [+Free Download]: Discover everything you need to know to streamline critical HR projects with the RACI matrix.
- How To Perform an HR SWOT Analysis: Find out how to perform a SWOT analysis to create effective HR strategies.
Our blog is not the only place where you can brush up on your HR knowledge. We’ve spent 2023 building out our extensive video collection on various HR topics so that we can offer you a comprehensive HR library in diverse formats. This year, we’ve published:
- 19 Learning Bites: Where you can find everything you need to know on Learning and Development, Compensation and Benefits, People Analytics, and more!
- 14 HR Dialogues: The podcast series where our Chief HR Scientist, Dr. Dieter Veldsman, speaks with People Practitioners on how they navigate our challenging world of work.
- 7 HR Deep Dives: Where AIHR’s Co-founder Erik van Vulpen delves into prominent HR topics, such as HR Management, Organizational Development, Change Management, and more!
- 20 YouTube shorts: Bite-sized videos to get you up-to-date on a number of HR topics in under a minute.
Here are our top three videos of 2023:
- HR and ChatGPT: is this the future of HR? [2023]: Explore how you can use AI to enhance your HR services, not replace them.
- 11 HR Trends for 2024: Elevating Work: The HR trends that will change the world of work in 2024.
- What is Talent Management? Definition, Process, and Strategy [2023]: Learn about talent management strategies and how to build one in five simple steps.
Want to be the first one to see our new videos? Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the notification button!
Empowering members
Our freely available content is only made possible through the success of the paid AIHR memberships on our platform. As such, our members are always our top priority. We want to maximize the value we deliver through our platform and gated content.
It also meant regularly releasing new courses and programs. This year, we’ve introduced our Talent Management and Succession Planning Certificate Program — our first certification that focuses on helping HR professionals gain the skills to take a strategic approach to talent management. With this new addition and our existing 11 programs, we’re proud to have full coverage of all HR disciplines with in-depth, hands-on, and practical training.
Additionally, 2023 was the first year we introduced a new course format — the minicourses. These courses allowed us to quickly adapt and respond to the needs of HR professionals who want to develop in-demand skills such as prompt engineering in generative AI. If you’re looking for this, check out our ChatGPT for HR minicourse. Or if you want to get up to speed on major trends affecting the organization and HR in 2024, our HR Trends & Strategies minicourse might just be what you need.
Beyond new content, we’ve also been continuously revamping our existing courses to ensure that everything is up-to-date and in line with our vision of HR. Our Digital HR Certificate Program and People Analytics Certificate Program are just two examples of our best-performing content that we’ve made even better in 2023.
Helping HR teams succeed
One of my firm beliefs is that HR teams are only successful if their skills remain relevant. This means upskilling, upskilling, and upskilling. So, how did we help HR teams succeed in 2023?
Let’s take a look.
HR Competency Model 3.0
HR is one of the fastest-growing fields out there, which means that there is a constant need for new skills and competencies for individuals and teams to succeed. In other words, you either upskill or risk becoming irrelevant. This puts extra strain on companies who need a structured approach to develop their HR teams.
To help HR teams get started on their upskilling journey, we’ve updated our T-Shaped HR Competency Model. This model stipulates what it takes to be a modern and relevant HR Professional who drives business value across the full HR spectrum. It provides a tangible framework for performance management, skill gap analysis, and upskilling, providing a template for what the ideal (HR) organization will look like. With these updates and increased level of detail, I dare to claim it’s the most granular and future-proof competency model available within HR.
This framework divides HR competencies into two categories: Core Competencies and Specialist Competencies. Each competency has several dimensions within three proficiency levels, with example behaviors and activities for the dimensions. This detailed approach to competency mapping allows you to easily assess your team’s current strengths and weaknesses.
2024 Sneak Peek 👀
Next year, we’ll be mapping the proficiency levels from the competency model onto the 54 HR roles of the Career Map so that you can see exactly the competency levels each role requires.
Working with HR teams
In 2023, we noticed more and more interest from teams and entire HR organizations who wanted to upskill and help their people future-proof their HR careers. The problem was that they couldn’t find what they were looking for to address their upskilling needs through traditional vendors. So, they turned to AIHR for help in filling urgent skills gaps and offering ongoing HR-specific development opportunities.
Want to see what an HR Academy can look like in practice? Take a look at how Ahold Delhaize built their academy together with AIHR. But if a full academy is not what you’re looking for right now, you might be interested in how HumanX offers ongoing development opportunities for their team of HR consultants.
Integrating ChatGPT in HR
It wouldn’t feel like a proper 2023 wrap-up if I didn’t mention ChatGPT. When it was launched, it felt like everyone (and their grandmother) was talking about ChatGPT and its potential to change the world. The latter part is still up in the air, but I think we can all agree that ChatGPT has proven to be quite useful in the many practical aspects of HR.
Think of writing job descriptions, creating a new employee onboarding program, or drafting an employee handbook. ChatGPT might not (yet) be life-changing, but you can still get a lot out of it if you master the skill of effective prompt engineering.
With various advanced technologies and AI becoming easily accessible for any company, talented people are going to increasingly become essential as the single most important differentiator between great and mediocre companies. It is also the most durable competitive advantage any organization can have. This makes HR even more important to any business’s success because the only way you will be able to recruit and retain the absolute best talent is to make your company a great place to work.
The rising popularity of ChatGPT also offers companies a new and unique opportunity to differentiate themselves from their competitors. For instance, by creating high-quality content that is verified and fact-checked. This is what you can expect from us.
I won’t say that we don’t make use of AI in our work because it is still a tremendously useful tool that can help us speed up our ideation process. But AI is not the thing that defines the quality of our content — it’s the talent of our team and the diligence that they put into preparing high-quality and trustworthy content.
And on that note, I would like to reflect on some of our team highlights in 2023.
AIHR’s 2023 highlights
In 2023, we have accomplished all of this thanks to our exceptional team of 80 individuals. Undeniably, 2023 has been our greatest year so far, not only because of everything we’ve done but also because of how much our people have grown in such a short amount of time.
I have to admit, it’s no coincidence that we’ve been able to build such an amazing team comprised of talented and dedicated people who consistently strive for excellence in all that they do.
We’ve also made significant progress in becoming the best employer we can be. This is one of the two principles that I believe are most important in building a company (spoiler alert: my other principle is creating the absolute best product for our members and clients).
In 2024, as part of our ongoing mission to ensure our people are happy, satisfied, and engaged, we worked on a couple of significant projects. These projects aimed to provide more opportunities for structured career growth, offer a better rewards package and ensure we have a single source of truth for our HR data.
Let me walk you through these projects.
Highlight 1: LEARN framework
Our LEARN framework was created to ensure that everyone has a growth path that they can follow based on their skill sets, experience, and personal and professional goals. The framework provides a clear visualization of each employee’s path — a path that doesn’t necessarily need to be a managerial track.
Through the LEARN framework, we want to offer our people different options and opportunities, many of which might not be commonly available for individual contributors. If you want to read more about our vision of HR career paths, check out this article.
Highlight 2: Salary benchmark
A large part of being a great place to work is ensuring fair and equal pay. That was why we decided to build a new salary benchmarking process in 2023 to compare our rewards package with the market median.
This might be a rather ambitious project for a startup and scaleup, but it was a necessary step to take towards a better and more equitable compensation strategy. Going forward, this salary benchmark will be a default part of our budgeting process.
Highlight 3: Our first HRIS
As your organization grows, it’s important to implement a proper system to collect and store employee data becomes increasingly important. Of course, every startup begins somewhere — most likely in a spreadsheet with a million different tabs, formulas, and charts.
I, myself, love spreadsheets. But, speaking from personal experience in building AIHR, I’ve come to realize that spreadsheets can sometimes be unintuitive and unsafe for storing sensitive employee data.
An HRIS is a much better choice for this. I know we’ve talked quite a bit about the importance and value of an HRIS, but I do have to say that implementing a proper HRIS is a time-consuming and effort-intensive process that we didn’t have the chance to commence with until this year. I’m happy to say that, thanks to our dedicated People team, we now have a brand new HRIS where our employees can easily request time off, access their contracts and salary information, and even indicate their shirt sizes for our fantastic AIHR hoodies!
Looking forward: 2024
HR for HR
I said it last year, and I’ll say it again this year: HR for HR is more important than ever. HR’s workload continues to greatly depend on the needs of the business. Given the evolving expectations of employees, work disruptions, and uncertain economic circumstances, HR professionals risk stretching themselves thin while supporting both employees and the organization.
Expanding your team is one possible solution. While hiring more people can address your organization’s needs if you have the budget for it, it’s not your only option and might not be the best solution. Automation can streamline administrative and repetitive HR tasks, freeing up time for more strategic projects that can make a significant impact.
The question is: how? We discuss in detail nine ways you can do this in our HR for HR article. But, I want to highlight one of the most important elements: investing in your own development. This will ensure that you are efficient, impactful, and fully capable of confidently navigating any uncertainties you might face in the future.
If you’re leading an HR team and looking to invest in upskilling your people, you might not want to rely on horizontal (mile-wide-inch-deep) learning platforms like LinkedIn Learning or Coursera. Instead, you need to provide them with HR-specific development opportunities to help your HR people grow and drive more business value.
The good news is that HR Leaders are starting to take HR for HR seriously. This trend will only increase in 2024 as more and more realize the value of having a healthy and thriving HR team.
High and low-frequency learning
I’m proud to say that we have the world’s most comprehensive curriculum of in-depth, practical, and hands-on HR training programs. But, realistically, I know that this only solves part of the puzzle.
To really help HR professionals apply new skills and deliver maximum impact in their day-to-day jobs, we need more than just courses. That’s why we introduced our HR resource library to provide members with practical and ready-to-use guides, templates, cheat sheets, and ebooks — from the 9-box grid template to the HR metrics calculation template. In 2023 alone, we’ve published 99 new resources.
In 2024 we will be creating more of these types of ongoing support to help our members excel in their day-to-day jobs through what we call ‘high frequency’ types of interactions and features.
HR trends for 2024
2024 is also the year to elevate work. You can see this in the HR trends that we discuss in this article. Here’s a sneak peek:
- Resolving the productivity paradox: HR needs to take a more holistic view of productivity to remove bottlenecks, formulate strategies to improve performance, and reward behaviors that drive productivity.
- AI-powered workforce evolution: HR needs to go beyond generative AI policy creation and take a critical role in building technology self-efficacy among employees.
- Shifting work-life balance to work-life fit: HR can facilitate a better relationship with work by redefining the employee value proposition and accommodating what different people want from work.
Final words
It’s been a great year for us at AIHR. As we continue to increase our impact in the world by working with our amazing clients, I’m confident that 2024 will be even better. It has been a long wrap-up of our 2023 journey, so I guess the only thing left for me to say is to have a great time this holiday season, and I look forward to seeing you again in 2024. Cheers!
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