For many of us, September is a good time to refocus. Many have refreshed themselves with some vacation time; others are looking forward to a return to routine and some quiet time for professional development. Why not harness the latest learning with a free webinar? September has plenty of events to choose from. We hope they will inspire and motivate you.

Tuesday, September 1, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Conference Sneak Peek – How to Engage and Motivate Your Other Most Important Asset

Client Education is not a new concept to most IT companies. Other organizations often don't implement it in their day-to-day business though. It is therefore a rather new approach, based on adult education principles, marketing and sales techniques, as well as world-class customer service.

Client Education combines all of those into one solution that needs to be aligned with overall business goals and objectives in order to see changes to the bottom line.

Learning Outcomes:

• Learn how to engage your clients through education.

• Discuss how engaging clients through education differs from your internal L&D programs.

• Use adult education principles to build a basic client education model.

• Discuss ideas and concepts related to client education that will help change your bottom line.

Tuesday, September 1, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: The Five Most Important Recruitment Metrics for Business Success

Organizations rely on metrics in order to drive growth and productivity. In recruitment, metrics are just as powerful to ensure alignment with business goals and greater operating efficiency. Metrics allow organizations to examine what’s working in their talent acquisition efforts and lay the groundwork for what needs to change in the future. Unfortunately, metrics can often be misleading and frustrating for talent acquisition departments. Organizations find it challenging to track metrics and even more challenging to translate these metrics into business results. As talent analytics becomes increasingly important to any talent acquisition function, organizations must think differently about the metrics they track. In this presentation, Brandon Hall Group will present new data on the most critical recruitment metrics and offer key recommendations for translating these metrics into business objectives.

Tuesday, September 1, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: A Manager's Guide to Employee Development (Free for ATD members)

Recent Gallup research on the State of the American Manager shows "that people who get the opportunity to continually develop are twice as likely as those on the other end of the scale to say they will spend their career with their company." The study states that leaders "must take steps to create an environment where people have ongoing opportunities for personal improvement through formal coaching, group classes, mentoring or some other form of learning."

As managers, we are expected to hold career and professional development discussions with our employees, although many of us feel ill-equipped for these conversations. Are you unsure how or where to begin with your employees’ development? Perhaps you want to brush up on how to create more meaningful development plans? This webcast, intended for managers and human resource and talent development professionals, will:

• Review the employee development process.

• Identify steps to having a positive career and development discussion with your employees.

• Identify the characteristics of an actionable individual development plan.

• Explain how to lead successful development conversations, including addressing several common challenges typically encountered.

Wednesday, September 2, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: The Coaching Enterprise: How to Build and Sustain It!

This webcast will provide a step-by-step strategy for building a powerful coaching culture at your organization. The webcast will teach specific pitfalls to avoid along the way, as well as input on how to get managers not only trained, but also enthusiastically participating in your new coaching culture.

There are three basic premises needed to build a coaching enterprise. The three principles may surprise people, but all three are needed to ensure that coaching becomes indoctrinated into the mainstream of leadership, and also into employee development.

The webinar will cover:

• The methodology that gets trainers to love coaching.

• A support model to get managers to participate in and embrace coaching.

• Enabling managers to gain real-world success in coaching.

• How a director of coaching can increase the value of a training organization's delivery of services.

Wednesday, September 2, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Leadership and Development: Tools for High Performance (Free for ATD members)

Most leaders and organizations today seek to drive higher performance. However, very few of them take into consideration that employees have higher expectations for their leaders, which go beyond the single focus of making a profit: incorporating conscious culture, meaningful purpose, empowerment, and opportunity to make a positive contribution to customers and society.

In this interactive session, the following will be addressed:

• Top talent development considerations for organizations today.

• The skills and development needed for higher organizational performance and leadership.

• Defining employees’ higher expectations of their leaders and organizations.

• Effective organizational development that integrates technical, business, emotional intelligence, and other critical skills, considering current trends and frameworks that have motivated people to perform better.

• Examples of the development tools organizations have successfully incorporated into their cultures, as well as sample ways to integrate these practices across the professional lifecycle.

Thursday, September 3, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: 10 Tips for Better eLearning Design

Has your eLearning design gotten dull and same-old, same-old? Looking for some design ideas and inspiration? Cammy Bean, Kineo's VP of Learning Design, shares some ideas and examples to get your design juices flowing.

In this session, you'll learn to:

• Liven up your eLearning designs with strategies for making your content more human.

• Design interactions that rely less on clicking and more on thinking.

• Identify ways to extend the learning experience outside of the course and into the real world.

Thursday, September 3, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Utilizing Learning Data for Proactive Compliance Reporting (Free for ATD members)

As the world becomes more interconnected through globalization, businesses of all sizes are beginning to feel the repercussions from increasing compliance standards. Proving that compliance training has taken place is now a time-consuming task. With the growth and complexity of data in learning management systems, managers have to spend more time in spreadsheets and not enough time where it matters most. Fortunately, new reporting and analytics solutions are coming to the forefront to automate and simplify the compliance-reporting process.

Join Stewart Rogers, reporting and analytics expert, to learn about:

• Compliance risks caused by the lack of insight into your data.

• The relationship between learning and training data and compliance.

• General learning management system reporting problems.

• Solving these problems with a powerful reporting and analytics solution.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: How to Write a Million Dollar Proposal for Training in 3 Hours

You get a phone call. A client wants a proposal by close of business today—just three hours from now. You are competing for a dream assignment with two other groups. Can you create a compelling proposal? In this session Bob will share the exact proposal process he has used multiple times.

Included will be:

• Why Bob uses the word "proposal" only once in the document— and the power phrase that is used the rest of the time.

• The three stages that must be part of the proposal process.

• Why the document says: "Some of the identified..." rather than having a complete list.

• Why the word "cost" is never used—and what goes in its place.

• The critical items that go immediately before and after the pricing information.

• Why and where the word "authorized" must be used.

• How to create a timeline and a narrative of work—and why they are critical.

And much, much more.

This is a four-part webinar series. 

Tuesday, September 8, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: The Magic Behind Interactive Webinars

Have you ever watched a web-based conference session and wondered, “How’d they do that?” When slides or polls appear or videos pop up and play automatically, it’s not magic! There’s a person behind every action who must click, type, or drag to make things happen. If you’re always the participant and never the presenter, join this session to take a peek at how it’s done.

In this session, we’ll explore aspects of the Adobe Connect software from a presenter’s point of view so you can see what you’ve been missing.  

You will learn how to:

• Customize settings and features to accommodate planned interactions.

• Document delivery plan in a shared location.

• Communicate with team members using secret and private messaging.

• Manage participant questions and technical issues.

• Deliver consistent sessions using templates.

• Discover what presenters do that participants don’t see.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015, 12PM – 1PM PT: Becoming an Agile Instructional Designer

You see potential in good design. You can change behaviour, drive results, decrease errors, and improve learner engagement. But, even the best designs are jeopardized if the process lacks the ability to support them. A great learning design driven by a flawed process can create havoc, such as:

• Missed milestones.

• Unnecessary burden on SMEs and reviewers.

• Scope creep.

• Unengaged learners.

In this webinar, Richard Sites will introduce Successive Approximation Model (SAM). Discover the power of using an iterative, agile-like process for the creation of quality instructional design and development of learner-centric experiences, and why the agile advantages that SAM offers can mitigate common learning development pain points.

Learn how this agile process can help instructional designers:

• Manage client expectations and content development.

• Bring focus to designing performance-focused interactions.

• Minimize the risk of delay and endless revisions.

Wednesday, September 9, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: The 4 Steps to Building the Bridge from Learning to Performance

Organizations are recognizing more than ever the critical need for laser focus on optimizing performance.

In order to achieve breakthrough performance and transform the workforce, successful learning organizations such as Baker Hughes have bridged the gap between learning and performance by taking steps such as:

• Assessing and understanding the learning needs of the organization.

• Designing implementation and change management plans.

• Organizing and centralizing content.

• Expanding the framework for the future by building new connections and strengthening existing ones.

Join in as Jennifer Rogers, Global Content Development Manager at Baker Hughes, takes us on her organization’s extraordinary journey, discussing the development of an enterprise content strategy with scalable assets. Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer for Brandon Hall Group, will also join us to offer his perspective on how other organizations are building their bridges. 

Thursday, September 10, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: 2015 HCM Awards Announcements

Now entering its 21st year, the Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards Program is the most prestigious awards program in the industry. Often times called the “Academy Awards” by Learning, Talent and Business Executives, the program was one of the first of its kind in the learning industry, which was pioneered in 1994.

The awards recognize the best organizations that have successfully deployed programs, strategies, modalities, processes, systems, and tools that have achieved measurable results.

Who will be a winner of the 2015 HCM Excellence Awards? Register and join in to find out!  

Thursday, September 10, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Conference Sneak Peek – Management's Real ROL: Capitalizing E/M Learning Investments

Management often views training efforts as a line expense for a specific period. Apart from specific tangible elements, any type of training activity is rarely considered an investment. E/m-learning initiatives fall into this category, since they require tangible financial requirements, such as technology and supporting infrastructure, viewed as capital expenditures. We'll address specific literacy tools used to build a comprehensive financial structure to support your e/m-learning projects and to gain senior management buy-in.

Learning Outcomes:

• Apply financial tools to build an effective case for e/m-learning.

• Utilize the financial skills to communicate e/m-learning effectiveness.

• Implement an e/m-learning budgetary/forecasting process.

• Apply capital expenditure investment tools to measure financial benefits.

Thursday, September 10, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Set a Productive Learning Environment: Stop Running the Vacuum!

Making learners feel comfortable and welcome from the moment of contact is critical to setting a productive learning environment. No trainer would disagree with this, right? Then WHY are so many of us failing to connect with learners before our sessions, or unprepared when learners are entering our classroom—be it physical or virtual?

When you’re still prepping the room and handling logistics as your learners enter your classroom, it's like inviting guests to a dinner party and answering the door while you're vacuuming the rug or touching up the paint on the wall. Rude, right? Well, so is not paying attention to the learners from the moment they sign up to attend.

Join this fast-moving, hands-on session and learn to:

• Prepare yourself and your learners BEFORE the learning experience so you can hit the ground running.

• Ensure your “stage” is set for your learners’ arrival and that it communicates the tone you want for your session.

• Engage learners from the start for maximum interaction throughout.

Come away with practical and useful checklists, tools, templates and ideas to help you and your learners CONNECT and have a productive session from the get-go! 

Thursday, September 10, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Turning Sales Managers into Great Coaches (Free for ATD members)

High-performing sales managers have a profound impact on a company's bottom-line sales results. But too often training initiatives focus on salespeople and not a company’s front-line sales management team.

Join in for an interactive webinar as Norman Behar and Ray Makela of the Sales Readiness Group share best practices and strategies for creating effective sales management development programs.

Attendees will learn to:

• Develop a coaching culture and mindset.

• Analyze and discuss performance.

• Overcome sales coaching challenges.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Creating an Organization Built to Last – Based on the Bestseller “The Alliance”

Does your company's ongoing growth depend on your ability to recruit and manage the kind of entrepreneurial talent that got it to where it is today?

The Alliance Framework solves challenges pervasive in today’s workplace, such as lack of trust in management and lack of open communication about the future. By adopting the framework, companies have enabled managers to build more trusting, committed relationships with employees, gaining a competitive edge in tough hiring environments, keeping employees engaged and productive, and minimizing disruptive employee departures.

The Alliance is a two-way relationship that lets the company and the employee work together toward common goals, even when some of their interests differ. The paradox is that recognizing an employee’s independence is what allows a company to rebuild the loyalty and trust that’s been missing from today’s employment relationship. More importantly, by offering their employees the opportunity to transform their careers, companies can attract and retain the entrepreneurial talent they need to drive Silicon Valley–style innovation.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: More Than a Game: Leadership Experiences That Drive Self-Awareness

Ever find yourself asking how to grow your company to the next level? How to radically change the culture of your organization? How to lead in a way that leverages diversity? It starts with self-awareness. Gone are the days when 20 potential leaders were whisked into a classroom or off-site for a week of intense leadership training. Today’s world of work requires intentional, repeatable, and small bytes of learning.

In this one-hour webinars, the presenters share some of the best leadership development tools, tips and tricks we’ve found. You’ll be immersed in activities to see how the learning exercises affect your attitude as a participant:

• Create a safe place to discuss self-assessment and see real learning occur.

• Build resiliency among learners.

• Practice coaching in a safe environment.

• Illustrate the power of a shared vision.

Thursday, September 17, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: iEngage! Your Personal Engagement Roadmap

Engagement is often seen as a top-down process driven by organizational management. Employees often expect the company to do things to engage employees and hope our managers lead in a way that creates a culture of engagement. While it’s true that employee engagement starts at the top, engagement is truly dependent on individual accountability.

• Do you know what engages you?

• Do you know why you are or aren’t engaged in your current position?

• Are your positive emotions driving your engagement, or is it being inhibited by your negative emotions?

• Do you know what intrinsically motivates you?

Learn the secrets to becoming a more engaged, motivated, and productive employee in this captivating and self-reflective session of self-discovery.

Thursday, September 17, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Raising the Learning Bar: Skills as the New Currency of Business Impact

Skills are the new currency with the potential to make a tremendous impact on your business. Managing your talent is more than basic onboarding and compliance training; it’s about providing the knowledge necessary to develop future leaders.

One quarter of companies simply hire people who possess the necessary skills, rather than leverage learning opportunities to develop their existing workforce. And, top organizations must now deliver learning in multiple ways, since receiving information is becoming as important as the knowledge itself.

Join David Wentworth, Principal Learning Analyst with Brandon Hall Group, as he examines the challenges organizations face in developing their workforce to close the skills gap. They will also examine learning strategies and the technologies that power them.

Thursday, September 17, 2015, 12PM – 1PM PT: Conference Sneak Peek – F3 – Using Mindfulness to Develop Personal Resiliency

Resiliency is the ability to maintain our mental, physical, and emotional energy during adverse conditions, such as organizational change or other stresses. Resiliency is what allows us to continue to make good decisions, stay focused, and have access to our personal resources to see us through.

The problem is, though, that our brain is naturally hardwired to be on the lookout for threats, and to take protective action. On one hand that’s good—this is what has kept us alive since the beginning of time. On the other hand, it hinders our ability to be resilient.

The good news is that recent findings in the field of neuroscience have proven that we have the ability to re-wire our brain, to allow us to become more resilient by consciously changing our brains or—as it’s known in the world of neuroscience—by practicing mindfulness.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand how our brains are hardwired to protect again perceived threats—such as change.

• Utilize the concept of mindfulness to reprogram your brain to allow for increased resiliency.

• Understand personal strengths and areas of opportunity for optimizing resilience.

Monday, September 21, 2015, 9AM – 10AM PT: How to Get Started in Talent Development (Free for ATD members)

Are you thinking about a career in talent development? How do you know if this field is a good fit? How do you decide? Whom should you speak with? If these are your questions, then attend this webcast to learn more about the field and how people from all walks of life have become successful talent development practitioners.

You’ll learn:

• About some of the talent development careers available.

• How to match your skills with what employers are looking for.

• How to conduct informational interviews that will provide valuable insight for making your decision.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Learn@Work Month – The Big 5 and Talent Development

Seen as either an innate gift or as a capacity that can be nurtured and developed through efforts and persistence, talent significantly depends (among other factors) on personality characteristics. The "Big 5" model maps the personality differences across five broad categories: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness. This session examines the Big Five personality traits and talent development.

Learning Objectives:

• Examine how personality traits impact talent development and creativity.

• Analyze the three most important factors that predict on-the-job performance.

• Use concrete and specific scientific findings on personality traits to foster talent development.

• Discover the significance of the Big 5 personality traits to leadership and decision making.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: The Now What, Know How, and So What of Leadership Development

The Brandon Hall Group 2015 State of Leadership Development Study identified “building a culture of performance” as the top driver of leadership development. And performance culture depends on leaders being in the right place at the right time with just the right amount of know-how. Alarmingly, only 31 percent of organizations have that leadership mix. The other 69 percent are more than twice as likely to report lower levels of revenue and customer loyalty.

The study, along with findings from DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast, found that the criticality of high-performance leadership is the difference between sustained business success and poor organizational performance or worse, organizational collapse. In this session, the presenters will:

• Explore the “now what” concerning leadership development: drivers, challenges, and transformations.

• Share the framework-based “know how”/leading practices of high-performance leadership development implementation.

• Present the business value or “so what” of implementing new leading practices to leadership development.

• Offer examples of how global organizations are approaching leadership development and seeing results.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015, 12PM – 1PM PT: Is CPLP Certification Right for You? (Free for ATD members)

Join ATD Certification Institute staff Jennifer Naughton and Diane Daly for an overview of the Certified Professional in Learning and Performance (CPLP) program.

This webcast is intended for individuals trying to decide if the CPLP program aligns with their career goals and who want to learn more about the nuts and bolts of the CPLP certification program. The presenters will cover information about the CPLP program’s policies and the requirements—eligibility, the CPLP Knowledge Exam, the Work Product assessment, and recertification. The presenters will allow time for questions. 

Wednesday, September 23, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Integrating Social Media into the Virtual Classroom

Is your organization beginning to rely on learning resources outside of classroom training events? In today's hyper-networked virtual workplace, it is only natural to begin "thinking outside the classroom,"—virtual or otherwise!

Social media provides rich resources for informal learning outside of the classroom as well as supplemental learning within the classroom. Both timely and collaborative, social media outlets provide you with the power to make sure learning occurs during your events and continues afterwards.

Social media can also be used to build community and continue the learning conversation started in the classroom, or it can be used as a stand-alone "just in time" set of resources—or anything in between!

This session will provide guidelines for:

• Incorporating social media tools and networks into a virtual learning experience to accomplish formal and informal learning.

• Establishing social networks as a critical part of your blend.

• Integrating social media into virtual classroom design during live lessons and in-between live lessons.

Wednesday, September 23, 2015, 12PM – 1PM PT: Stand Out: Networking (Free for ATD members)

Few activities are as nerve-wracking as networking. Some professionals eschew it altogether because they think it means stilted conversations with strangers or exploiting others for personal gain. It's time to reclaim networking. The real goal is to turn brief encounters into mutually beneficial and lasting relationships.

Drawing on her new e-book Stand Out Networking, Harvard Business Review contributor and Duke Fuqua School of Business professor Dorie Clark will share concrete strategies on how to turn small talk into meaningful exchanges, unlock the power of social media as a networking tool, make the most of conferences, and more. This webcast will help you turn networking from a chore into a joyful and enriching activity. 

Thursday, September 24, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Alternative Approaches to Interactive Instructional Design

This webinar begins by teaching you an esoteric skill that you could use to impress your family members and friends. The presenters will then walk you through alternative approaches for teaching the same skill in face-to-face, self-instructional, webinar, and e-learning contexts. You discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of each of these approaches and figure out when to use which approach. You also discover the universal principles that add instructional value to all of these alternatives.

Friday, September 25, 2015: Appreciation in the Workplace: What It Does (and Doesn’t Do) for Your Organization (Free for ATD members)

While employee recognition programs can be effective in acknowledging achievements and performance, they are not successful in helping individuals feel appreciated at work. Senior leaders can learn the foundational issues necessary for employees to feel truly valued and create a more positive work environment, which has been shown to have numerous benefits for the organization's functioning. Be prepared to challenge your thinking about employee recognition and communicating appreciation in the workplace. You will also receive practical action steps to help make a culture of appreciation a reality in your organization.

By participating in this webcast, you will be able to:

• Delineate the differences between traditional employee recognition and authentic appreciation.

• Identify the four core components for employees to truly feel valued.

• Avoid two major misconceptions leaders often have about appreciation in the workplace.

• Establish (and measure) the positive impact that can occur when authentic appreciation is consistently communicated among team members.

Tuesday, September 29, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Analytics for the C-Suite and Every Day

Analytics is all about the journey from data to insight. A single point of data may not mean much, but when you can correlate multiple data points, you begin find meaning. Today’s organizations are looking to move beyond analytics as a representation of what happened in the past, and are using their data for predictive and prescriptive analytics—using causal analysis to understand what likely future events will occur, and what you can do about it. But truly taking advantage of analytics to run your business as an executive, or make better data-driven decisions every day, requires more than analytics tools and capability. It requires an organizational shift to a culture that understands the value of data, and knows how to ask the right questions. In the modern HR world, the key to differentiated performance is knowing which information will have the greatest impact.

Join Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Analyst as he discusses:

Why integration matters when moving from reporting to truly predictive and prescriptive analytics.

What you need to know about the science behind the analytics you use every day, from hiring assessments to prescriptive learning plans.

How to focus on asking the right questions from your data. 

Tuesday, September 29, 2015, 10AM – 11AM PT: Creating Hyper Stories for Instant Learning

Learners and leaders complain, “We can’t afford the time, no budget and training must be done ASAP.” This is getting worse because “connected” workers want to learn short, simple and direct-to-the-point lessons.

The easy approach—which often still fails—is to simply chunk the content. But how does one chunk the content and still make it engaging and teach the lesson?

Hyper Stories for Instant Learning is an approach that helps designers and leaders find the high-value and high-use content and match them with work-related stories that are full of emotional experiences. As a result, learners pay attention. They learn and apply the ideas quickly.

Applications:

• Apply steps in dissecting big content and find the most useful content.

• Identify, write, and formulate hyper stories to match the value of the content.

• Apply the Hyper Story lessons for compliance, technical, people skills and other types of learning.

• Learn and apply from live demos and examples and obtain templates.

Wednesday, September 30, 2015, 11AM – 12PM PT: Creating a Culture of Accountability in Healthcare (Free for ATD members)

True and sustainable accountability cannot be imposed on others through regulations, protocols, or management edicts. Real accountability comes from within each person and reflects individual values and purpose. It's a choice.

Creating a culture where this kind of accountability is the norm doesn’t happen by chance. It requires intentional effort to develop the skill of accountability in each of your employees. They need to be able to:

• Take ownership of their responsibilities.

• Show initiative to produce key results.

• Tackle high-stakes situations by using all of their 28 relational strengths.

In this webinar, Michael Patterson will explain how healthcare organizations can elevate their performance by creating a proactive culture of accountability using a proven behaviour-change method that integrates people, performance, and process. In the end, you’ll see what it takes to get people to want to be accountable and create sweeping changes in your culture.