BDO UK puts human skills alongside AI in its first firmwide Learning Week
Most corporate learning calendars follow a familiar pattern. There is a compliance module early in the year, a leadership offsite for the few who make the cut and a scramble in the final quarter to spend whatever budget remains. The arrival of generative AI has added another layer, usually a mandatory prompt course delivered as if fluency were a certificate rather than a habit. What tends to get lost is the slower and less glamorous work of helping people stay curious once the course is over.
BDO LLP, the UK and Ireland member firm of BDO with 19 offices, 8,500 people and revenues of £1.1bn, has tried a different shape. Rather than treating AI capability as a standalone push, the firm put it in the same room as the skills that help people work with one another. The result was a week that its people leaders describe as part of an approach to continuous learning and development, not an event to be ticked off.
What the week involved
More than 1,100 people participated in person, with sessions at the London office plus 16 regional workshops. Bitesize digital content on the firm's internal social platform was watched over 18,000 times, which suggests the shorter formats reached people who could not, or would not, block out an afternoon. Sessions on storytelling, managing change, building connections and wellbeing sat alongside AI, digital and innovation focused learning. People across BDO UK and Ireland were encouraged to try something new, share experiences with colleagues and make personal development pledges, with the aim of carrying what they learnt into everyday working life.
Alison McCormick, Director of Learning and Development, described the intent. "Learning Week gave people the space to step away from the day-to-day, be curious and try something different, whether that be exploring AI, developing a different professional skill, thinking about their wellbeing or connecting with colleagues they wouldn't normally work with," she said. She added that "learning isn't a one-off task. It's continuous."
Why human skills sit beside AI
The national backdrop gives the pairing some weight. The UK Government's AI Skills Boost programme has set a target to upskill 10 million UK workers in AI by 2030, and professional services firms are under obvious pressure to show that their people can use the tools their clients are adopting. It would have been easy for BDO to run an AI week and call it done.
Louise Sayers, Head of People, Culture & Purpose, explained why the firm did not. "The world in which our people and clients operate is changing quickly. We can't know today every skill that will matter tomorrow," she said. "That makes the ability to stay curious, keep learning and adapt increasingly important." She was equally clear that "technology is part of that, but so too are the distinctly human skills that help people connect, collaborate and solve problems." The argument is a practical one. A tool changes every few months, while the ability to tell a clear story about a change, manage people through it and build relationships across teams is what turns a new tool into new work.
What this means for L&D
For learning and development leaders, the interesting design choice is the pledge. A week of sessions creates attention, but a personal commitment made in front of colleagues gives the learning somewhere to go on the following Monday. The same tension shapes how we think about our AI Training programs, where tool fluency only holds when people also have the confidence and the conversations to apply it inside their own teams.
The harder question is what happens in the months after. Participation and view counts show that people turned up, not that their work changed. Leaders running similar programmes should decide in advance how they will follow up on pledges, which teams will be asked what they tried and how human and technical skills will be developed together rather than in separate budgets. If AI capability is going to be built as a habit, the structures that sustain the habit matter more than the week that launches it.
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