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The heat is on! Is your learning in full gear for summer? If you could use some inspiration, there are plenty of free webinars full of ideas, motivation, and more. Take a break from the sun and check them out. We hope these July events will inspire and motivate you.

Wednesday, July 1, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Unlock the Power of Millennials With Mobile Performance Support (Free for ATD members)

The Millennial wave is not coming—it’s already here. According to a recent Pew study, Millennials have surpassed Gen Xers as the largest generation in the U.S. workforce.

While this statistic might strike fear in the hearts of some employers, the forward-thinking ones know that this is a good thing. Why? Because Millennials have the necessary skills and disposition to thrive in today’s fast-paced market, where information changes quickly and often. In fact, when paired with the right performance-support strategies on mobile, Millennials will be more productive in less time than any previous generation. Learn how to unlock the power of the Millennial employee with mobile performance support. Attendees will learn:

Why mobile and Millennials are a match made in heaven.
How to onboard, train, and retain the Millennial workforce.
How to get started in 30 days.

Thursday, July 2, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Are You Prototyping Your Future eLearning? Or Are You Still Designing for the Past?

Experts say we are now in our third generation of eLearning. During the first, we were able to upload PDFs and PowerPoint files and let our learners study online. The second generation featured rapid authoring software, which allowed us to breeze through and add narration and interactive elements, along with some other really cool stuff. Now, for the third generation, we have an abundance of options ranging from blended, social, gamification, and cloud to TINCAN, among many others.

We need to prototype the future, fast.

What is the demand, new meaning, and value of “Prototyping your Future eLearning?”
When is prototyping cheaper, faster, and more efficient than the traditional content scripting and documentation, storyboarding, and production?
What are the elements and components of a Future eLearning Prototyping Approach?
How do you build a library of prototypes and models for easy and quick decision making?
How do you prototype quickly for creative standards, image selections, and interactive options?
How do you create an appealing low-cost prototype budget?
How do you aim to push your prototypes to project future-driven and innovative solutions that may seem to be ahead of the curve, yet add tremendous value when implemented?
What are the steps used in Future eLearning Prototyping Approach?

Models and demos will be presented during the webinar.

Tuesday, July 7, 2015, 10:00AM – 11:00AM PT: Le développement du leadership à travers le coaching par les pairs (Leadership development through peer coaching)

Peer coaching is a leadership development methodology established by Henry Mintzberg and Phil Lenir.

During this 60-minute webinar, the speaker will talk about this form of social learning for leadership development, its impact with case studies, and lessons learned during the development and deployment.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015, 9AM – 10AM PT: How to Avoid Becoming Obsolete (Free for ATD members)

Don't wait until you're laid off, burned out, or unhappy in your position before you evaluate how competitive your skills are in today's work environment. In an era where many companies have eliminated employee career development programs in favor of a DIY model, you need to take responsibility for your own career path. By conducting periodic inventories, both of yourself and of the job market, you can keep your career on course. This webcast will help you to:

Identify what you have to offer employers.
Clarify your preferred skills and work environment.
Evaluate your strengths and identify any gaps.
Develop an action plan.

Join Sue Kaiden, author of the June bonus TD at Work, “Keeping Your Career on Track,” as she walks you through tools designed to help you identify your best skills and favoured work environment, highlight any gaps, and develop a strategic plan for your career.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015, 10AM – 10:30AM PT: Are You Ready for the Future of Learning?

Discover the 5 keys that will help you get there.

From this session you will be able to:

Identify the most important emerging trends that will have a significant effect on the future of learning.
Be better prepared to address the rapidly changing needs of your employees.
Get ahead of the curve and begin to reshape and redefine your future learning initiatives, programs, and technologies.
Understand why CrossKnowledge was a recipient of multiple awards from Brandon Hall Group Excellence in Technology 2014 Awards Program.

Join Rachel Cooke, COO with Brandon Hall Group, and Steve Fiehl, CrossKnowledge’s Chief Innovation Officer, as they share relevant insights on where learning is going and what to do to be successful.

The webcast recording and slides will be provided to registrants.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Captivate Features, Tips and Tricks That You MUST Know!

It's easy to get started with Adobe Captivate, but there's a lot of power under the hood! Some features are not well known, but the more you know them, the better your instructional design will be. Using the layers of sophistication of these features means you will save a lot of time, deliver more engaging and personalized learning, and be able to tap into resources more easily. Joe Ganci, a Certified Adobe Captivate expert, and Dr. Pooja Jaisingh, an Adobe Evangelist, will take you through the Captivate features you need to make the most of this powerful tool.

These are the kinds of features that experts use all the time and novices tend not to know, allowing experts to do more in less time and get all the praise.

Here is some of what you'll be able to do:

Maintain your lessons now and in the future without a lot of extra work.
Use Captivate's built-in options for delivering your learning in more than one language.
Extend Captivate’s capabilities beyond the obvious.
Take advantage of little-known features to work faster and with fewer errors.

Thursday, July 9, 2015, 10AM – 11:00AM PT: 5 Myths About Measuring Training’s Impact and Why They’ll Get You Into Trouble

There are a number of ideologies and beliefs on how to best measure the impact of training. As a result, it can be difficult to distinguish myths from best practices. During this webinar, our prominent measurement experts will provide “practitioner-focused” solutions for the most common misconceptions about measuring business impact. The core issues to be addressed will include:

The facts about a “Level 1 Survey.”
The accuracy around Self-Report data.
The pitfall of customizing evaluation questions.
The need for statistical significance when measuring impact.
The decision to measure after the training program has been launched.

Learning Objectives:

1. Gain insight into the 5 most common myths and why the industry believes them.

2. Obtain practical tips and tricks on how to overcome each myth.

3. Discuss ways to build your evaluation plan so you don’t fall victim to these challenges.

Thursday, July 9, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Seeing Your Point: 3 Simple Steps to Visualizing Your Presentations (Free for ATD members)

OK, you’re convinced. You’ve read the research and seen it for yourself—presentations that effectively use visuals are more engaging and easier to understand than bullet point–laden ones. You’re ready to refresh your own slide decks to add more visuals. If only you knew how.

This session answers that question by demonstrating a simple, three-step process you can use to evaluate the big ideas in a presentation, generate a plan for representing those ideas visually, and find visuals in the vast sea of image and illustration sources. During this webcast, you will learn how to:

Identify the most powerful ideas to represent visually in a presentation.
Brainstorm ideas for illustrating an idea visually.
Search for visuals in appropriate (and legal) sources, both free and paid.

Friday, July 10, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: More Lies About Learning (Free for ATD members)

In More Lies About Learning, the captivating follow-up to Lies About Learning, workplace learning veteran Larry Israelite debunks today’s pervasive myths about learning in a style that will make you smile. This book shares the candid perspectives of 10 high-level executives from a wide range of industries and offers advice for how best to deal with new lies about organizational learning. Attendees will:

Explore all-new variations of the old lies about learning.
Delve into myths about learning research, learning management systems and strategies, and learning technology.
Discover solutions, suggestions, and tips to deliver meaningful development experiences for your organization.

Monday, July 13, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Using Research and Training to Deliver the Services Patients Really Want (Free for ATD members)

As the third largest not-for-profit health system in the United States, Providence Health & Services places great emphasis on service marketing and development. The organization devotes large amounts of time and effort to engage physicians and get the kind of input it needs to communicate with patients in a meaningful way while measuring how effective the services it markets really are. From using online research to determine what patients really want, to identifying operational barriers to cultural change, Providence uses a detailed approach to figure out how to make the organization more attractive to providers and patients alike. This webinar will explore the ways Providence uses research, training, and collaboration to develop effective marketing plans, service promotion, and messaging.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015, 10:00AM – 11AM PT: The Happiness Advantage at Work Part 2: Changing Social Scripts to Positive

What makes happiness at work so hard? The truth is that happy cultures are difficult to build and sustain. First, organizations must change the powerful social scripts that inadvertently undermine positive environments and behaviours. Second, business priorities must demonstrate a real commitment to happiness as a strategy for success.

In this second of a three-part webinar series on The Happiness Advantage at Work, Devin Hughes, Chief Inspiration Officer at International Thought Leader Network (partner with Harvard happiness researcher and internationally best-selling author Shawn Achor) talks to T-Mobile’s Jennifer Falkenberg, Director of Customer Service Learning & Development, on the challenges and critical steps involved in building a happiness advantage inside T-Mobile.

In the fast-moving mobile marketplace, T-Mobile is a positive outlier. Jennifer suggested that happiness might be exactly what her organization needed as an enabler to deliver on T-Mobile’s Un-carrier promise to employees and customers. Jennifer saw that starting inside out and infusing happiness into their DNA was “how” T-Mobile could deliver on the Company’s mission to revolutionize the wireless industry.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Introduction to Facilitating Groups: Best Practices in Group Facilitation

At some point, even experienced trainers, facilitators and managers find themselves standing before groups whose dynamics are all over the board. Everyone is expressing an opinion, ideas are flying at warp speed, emotions are high, disagreement is rampant, and some participants in your group are shutting down—while others are rebelling against the process. Wouldn’t it be great to have the tools that allow you to regain control and confidently lead your group to effective results?

In this session with Certified Master Facilitator, veteran trainer, and CEO Michael Wilkinson, you will learn practical facilitation techniques to elevate your group-handling skills to help you achieve amazing team results. Whether you facilitate training sessions, project meetings, strategy planning, or executive retreats, this webinar will give you an introduction to a proven comprehensive approach for leading any type of group. Learn cutting-edge tools designed to make your sessions even more engaging.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Next-Generation Learning Strategies for Government (Free for ATD members)

Managing and developing talent in the government has never been more important, or more challenging. In the wake of constant change and unexpected budget cuts, local, state, and federal agencies are under a tremendous amount of pressure to do more with less. With a high number of employees who need training in a wide variety of topics, agencies are looking for new ways to deliver training in a cost-effective, timely manner that meets their individual, institutional, and compliance needs.

Join Jason Marceau, vice president of strategic accounts at Meridian Knowledge Solutions, and learning industry thought leader Ed Cohen as they discuss and debate the challenges of meeting the extensive technology requirements of key government agencies.

Thursday, July 16, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Leveraging Iterative Development for Instructional Design

Successive approximation, rapid prototyping, agile methods… they all call for iterative development. With each iteration you take a product out to the learners and gather new input into your designs. Does this completely mess with everything we’ve learned about the ADDIE model? How do you know when to stop iterating? How do you convince your project sponsors to go along? Is this just an excuse for releasing shoddy work?

Learn from actual case studies and the LLAMA (lot like agile methods approach) methods how to create opportunities for iterations as you plan your instructional design projects. You will explore a number of different iteration approaches, what to do with the information gathered at each cycle, and pitfalls to avoid.

Everyone wants to deliver what they promised. This is a sure-fire way to stay on track with your customer and get them the product they expected… on time and on budget! If planning your projects is putting a kink in your day… this could be your solution.

Thursday, July 16, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Competencies, Challenges, and Trends in Instructional Design (Free for ATD members)

As the talent development field evolves and attracts a global pool of professionals with diverse skills and experiences, new questions arise: Have the competencies of instructional design (ID) changed? Should they change? How has ID evolved during the past few decades? Are instructional designers’ competencies keeping up with the pace of change?

Through a collaborative partnership between the Association for Talent Development (ATD), the International Association for Continuing Education and Training (IACET), and Rothwell & Associates (R&A), the R&A research team implemented a research study to investigate the proposed questions. The results from this study support three major findings, which participants will explore during this webcast:

The skills required in the ID area of expertise developed by ATD remain highly relevant in today’s evolving field.
Although technology is constantly changing, the challenges faced by instructional designers are less about technology and more about serving the multitude of varied learners, as well as maintaining momentum and a relationship with the subject matter expert.
ID has evolved during the past couple of decades, and there is an ongoing need to promote the value and understanding of the ID professional’s role in talent development.

Thursday, July 16, 2015, 12PM – 1PM PT: 10 Ways to Ruin Your e-Learning: A How-To Guide in Reverse

In many professional areas, it is usually a good strategy to look to common practices in the field as a guide—maybe not for the most cutting-edge ideas, but at least for reliable models to follow. Unfortunately, in e-Learning this can often be a recipe for disaster.

Join Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist with Allen Interactions, on a journey uncovering the 10 most common design practices that are sure to ruin your e-Learning.

Monday, July 20, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Managing Change (Free for ATD members)

What is really involved in how individuals and organization systems change? This webinar will outline key aspects of organizational change that need to be planned and managed effectively, as well as common misconceptions that get many into trouble. It will also include some exploration of recent changes in the organizational world that will affect how change is conceived and executed.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Micro-Video IS Training – Learn How to Make the Most of It

In this session, you’ll learn about some of the latest emerging neuroscience and behavioural science about how humans really learn. What the empirical data tells us is there are amazing connections between the reality of learning and video, especially micro-video. Some of what we think we know about human learning is simply mistaken.

The session will provide an overview of actual case studies and the findings proving how results change when learning practices are tied to the realities of human learning.

In this session, best practices tips and suggestions will be reviewed that show how you can leverage these amazing data-driven findings to improve the rates of employee learning in your organization, and by extension, drive ever-higher levels of performance and business results.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: TD: The Art and Science of Motivation and Behaviour Change (ATD member/subscriber content)

We ask a lot of our learners. Typically, we want them to block out all their daily distractions to focus on our learning materials. Then we want them to allocate all their effort to new skills and behaviours.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Inspiring Motivation in eLearning—Self-determination Theory in Practice

This webinar showcases one of the best-rated, most popular sessions, speakers, or topics from DevLearn 2014 Conference & Expo, now available to all through this special online presentation.

eLearning is often viewed as a brain dump of knowledge, with far too little examination of how to motivate learners. Engaging design elements and interactivity can inspire learners to complete modules, but they don’t necessarily inspire learners to keep learning and growing. There is a huge opportunity to incorporate motivational strategies from educational psychology in a practical way in eLearning.

Participants in this session will learn about self-determination theory (SDT), a motivational theory identifying the three basic human needs required for growth and achievement: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. You’ll discuss this theory and explore the proven business benefits of using SDT to motivate learners. You’ll examine practical examples of how to realize this theory through the design of thoughtful web-based training deliverables. You’ll leave this session with a new way of looking at strategies for eLearning that can have long-term positive results for retention, employee development, and employee performance.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Custom Learning Portals: The Right Content, Right When You Need It (Free for ATD members)

Training only works if the right people can access it. Where does your learning live? Do you struggle to deliver personalized learning to a diverse audience? Do you wish you had one place learners could go to discover their learning path?

David Linder will demonstrate how Sublime Media’s custom-built learning portals let you deliver personalized training and learning plans to your employees, customers, and partners. Custom learning portals are built to communicate your brand, highlight your curriculum, and achieve your training goals. Hosted on-site or in the cloud, the company’s learning portals integrate courses, document libraries, videos, classroom registration, and learning management systems so you can deliver any type of content to your targeted audience.

Thursday, July 23, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: 7 Ways to Increase Your Credibility and Visibility as a Consultant

All consultants are not created equal. And all consultants do not earn the same amount of money. And some consultants know more—and get paid less. Why?

For more than 40 years Bob Pike has been one of the most highly respected—and highly compensated consultants in the training and performance field.

In the session, Bob will pull back the curtain and reveal the strategies that he has used time and time again to boost his visibility, his credibility, and his income. And he'll share the strategies he has adapted from the beginning of his career in 1969 so they are still highly effective today.

Monday, July 27, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Creando una Cultura de Confianza: Uno de los Desafíos Para los Líderes de Hoy (Creating a Culture of Trust: One of the challenges facing today's leaders) (Free to ATD members)

Today, being a manager is a high-risk activity for career and personal health. In times of continuous and constant change, paradigms are continually being reviewed. Uncertainty is causing shock among teams, causing selfishness and destroying the commitment, thereby creating toxic behaviour that can be extremely contagious. To counteract this toxicity, leaders must build trust among their teams.

Real confidence only exists when people are able to accept and display their own vulnerabilities. Leaders need a strong foundation of self-knowledge to enact cohesion and positive attitudes. Effective leadership is rooted in authenticity, which is based on the credibility and thus increases confidence. During this webinar, you will learn how to strengthen your leadership in developing new resources based on emotional intelligence.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Delivering Learning across an Extended Enterprise: A Case Study

It is challenging enough to effectively deliver learning to an audience all located within the same building, but those challenges multiply when the learning audience is dispersed across the country and made up of a mix of employees and non-employees. Companies often find themselves employing multiple systems to meet their needs, creating inefficiencies and redundancies that can minimize learning’s overall impact.

Valvoline Instant Oil Change (VIOC) was in this very situation, using one system for company-owned stores and another for franchise stores; and neither solution was adequate. Given the high-turnover nature of their business, effective training is vital to develop bench strength quickly and consistently. The ability to deliver an effective experience that was consistent across the organization yet met the unique needs of the different audiences was paramount.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Sales Training Is Over: Is Your Team the Last to Get the Message? (Free to ATD members)

Sales organizations are spending ever-increasing amounts on training with ever-decreasing value. A recent study found training budgets increased 15 percent on average in 2013, with little correlation to ROI.

The solution? Make sure sellers have the methods—and tools—to maximize their success. Find out how to change your sales training in this webinar. You’ll learn:

Why sales training isn’t working.
How your sales team will improve through behavioural change.
How using your customer relationship management software and the Holden Adaptive Platform will continually train your team.