"Queen Victoria Agave" by Ken Bosma is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

It’s a busy time of year for businesses and individuals. Tax season can sometimes produce headaches—but it sure feels good to get it done and look forward to summer. How much can you get done before your well-deserved vacation? If you’re looking for some productivity hints, this month’s crop of free webinars could be a good source. We hope they inspire and motivate you!

Tuesday, May 3, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: 5 Leading Practices in Marketing Training Programs

As fast as things change in business, there is one part of the organization that lives and dies by being ahead of the curve, and that is marketing. From the newest mobile platforms to delivering personalized user experiences, it is essential that marketing professionals have the skills and tools they need to bring their companies’ stories to life. Are your people prepared for the latest search engine, email, and content marketing challenges? A big part of the preparation process is training, but not all organizations are prepared to adequately train today’s modern marketing professionals.

Join David Wentworth, Principal Learning Analyst for Brandon Hall Group as he explores how marketing leaders can design learning experiences that will engage and empower marketing professionals to get the best business results. This session will also include case studies highlighting companies that have taught their employees about omni-channel marketing, technology, and the latest trends.

Key takeaways include:

The needs of the modern marketing learner.
Real-world examples of effective training for marketers.
Modern instructional design.
Blended learning approaches.

Tuesday, May 3, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Building a Modern Learning Culture With Adobe Captivate Prime (Free for ATD members)

The most difficult challenge facing corporate e-learning professionals today is the complex process of migrating an organization away from its traditions toward a culture of upskilling, rapid onboarding, and lifelong learning. With the growing threats of market disruption, virtually every organization faces competition that is growing and adapting thanks to rapid innovation. But research clearly demonstrates that businesses that do not match this pace of innovation will be rapidly overcome by more agile competitors. The best response to this climate of innovation-driven disruption is innovation within your organization. And innovation is only possible through enhancing the skill, communication, and learning culture of your organization.

Join Allen Partridge for this online webcast and demonstration of the power of Adobe Captivate Prime to facilitate a learning culture in your organization. You’ll learn how to:

Facilitate a learning culture in your organization.
Create a climate of innovation.
Adopt a culture of upskilling, rapid onboarding, and lifelong learning.

Tuesday, May 3, 2016, 11AM – 12PM PT: Rev Up Your Ramp Up: Making Employee Onboarding More Efficient

Everyone is looking to develop employee onboarding that gets new recruits up and running faster than the competition, whether it’s closing their first deal, conducting their first client meeting, or managing their first high-profile project. But how?

In this webinar, we’ll discuss not only how to refine your training program’s content to make it more engaging, but also examine what software promotes best-in-class training programs, so learning and development leaders can better deliver business-critical information to employees more efficiently.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:

Transition employees from the classroom to the field faster.
Implement a knowledge library that employees can refer back to for key content.
Identify the metrics that effectively measure employee performance, before and after their ramp-up period.

Also being offered by Training Magazine Network Wednesday, May 4, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT

Wednesday, May 4, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Getting the Most out of Mobile in Performance Support

At first blush, the mobile platform seems like an ideal performance support delivery approach. First, there is an audience in need of training reinforcement as they return to the workplace after instructor-led and eLearning formal training. Second, nearly everyone has a mobile device in his or her possession—even on the job—these days, whether it is a personal device or supplied by the enterprise. The good news is that it truly is an ideal performance support opportunity. Learners need useful content on the job and at the time of need. The bad news is that there are myriad ways to do it wrong or ineffectively.

In this session, you will explore the many disciplines needed to undertake a mobile learning performance support initiative. You will examine the many facets of effective mobile performance support and how you can leverage it to be a part of a powerful training curriculum. You will explore a useful checklist of the many important considerations involved in an effort of this type. You will leave this session with greater confidence that you can implement engaging and useful mobile performance support in your organization.

Wednesday, May 4, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Implementing a Learning Ecosystem: What You Need to Know (Free for ATD members)

HR leaders are hot on the innovation trail, searching for novel methods and tools to make learning and development (L&D) faster and reach farther while cutting costs. And what they are finding is that traditional methodologies and one-size-fits-most tools are no longer comprehensive enough to build the capabilities that organizations and, more important, workers need to succeed.

If you’re serious about empowering today's workers and creating a culture of continuous learning, you need a comprehensive learning ecosystem and executives who think, lead, and work differently. Join this webcast to learn:

What a modern learning ecosystem is and why it’s more than just multiple modalities of the same content.
The key shifts driving the need to reinvent corporate learning.
How your enterprise L&D toolkit can evolve to better meet the needs and expectations of today’s workforce.
What innovative learning leaders are doing differently to transform their operations.

Thursday, May 5, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Assessing for Culture and Personality Fit (Free for ATD members)

Bad hiring decisions are costly, resulting in higher recruiting, training and benefit expenses, and lost productivity. Often, new hires have the right skills, but they do not fit the corporate culture or they lack the personality traits required to succeed.

Join this webcast to learn how to identify the values, soft skills, and personality attributes that are needed to succeed in a given position or organization. You will learn how to:

Build job and culture profiles.
Select and implement a way to assess fit.
Facilitate person-to-job and person-to-culture analysis.

Who will benefit from this webcast? Anyone involved in the hiring process: hiring managers, senior leaders, talent development professionals, trainers, recruiters, and human resources managers.

Tuesday, May 10, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: The Five Question Leader: Work Less Hard, Have More Impact

Managers and leaders find themselves stuck in three vicious circles. They’re frustrated by teams who have become over-dependent on them. They’re overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to do. And they’re disconnected from their own Great Work—the work that has impact, the work that has meaning.

Sound familiar?

Breaking out of those vicious circles is simpler than you might think. Mastering five essential questions can help managers and leaders increase the focus, courage, and resilience they need to have more impact in the work they do.

In this practical, interactive and engaging webinar, participants will:

Discover the three vicious circles that keep managers—and their teams—stuck.
Understand how breaking out of these circles can help them work less hard and have more impact.
Learn the five core questions they need so they (and those they lead) can focus on the work that matters.
Find the Best Coaching Question in the World (and it has just three words).

Tuesday, May 10, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Onboarding: From Adequate to Outstanding (Free for ATD members)

In this webcast, Sara Hopkins, Paradigm Learning’s senior director of custom learning solutions, will discuss why engaging, in-person, game-based onboarding solutions empower new employees and help jump-start their new roles. She will be joined by Jessica Harrison and Michelle Ratcliffe of Protiviti, one of Fortune magazine’s Top 100 Places to Work, and an organization that has created a comprehensive onboarding program with an in-person, game-based solution at its core.

You will also learn about:

Making new hires feel oriented versus making them feel empowered and welcomed.
Balancing online and in-person components of the onboarding spectrum.
Cascading a consistent message across a global audience.
Jump-starting organizational culture through a re-imagined onboarding platform.

Be sure to join in for this dynamic webcast!

Wednesday, May 11, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Five Levels of Leadership: A Game Plan for Leadership Development

The 5 Levels of Leadership webinar will provide a complete framework for developing influence for yourself and others inside your organization. This program covers the upsides and downsides of leadership, as well as the key beliefs and behaviours that a leader must practise in order to advance to the next level.

During this webinar you'll learn:

How you can achieve greater influence in your current position.
To understand the motivating factors necessary to develop a results-producing team.
Strategies you can implement to multiply your influence with others at all stages of your leadership.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016, 11AM – 12PM PT: Colouring Outside the Lines of Your Learning Strategy (Free for ATD members)

In this webcast the facilitators will discuss ideas and offer suggestions on how to colour outside the lines of your typical learning strategies. These concepts include using video-based assessments to measure what our learners actually do during the performance appraisal process, the application of gaming to take the complacency out of compliance training, and allowing your learners to take control using learning journeys! You’ll learn to:

Demonstrate how to use video-based assessments for performance appraisals.
Apply gaming techniques to yearly certification processes.
Use learning journeys to increase learner engagement.

Thursday, May 12, 2016, 8AM – 9AM PT: Top 7 Secrets to Create Responsive eLearning without Programming Using Adobe Captivate 9

According to a new forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC), the U.S. mobile worker population will grow at a steady rate over the next five years, increasing from 96.2 million in 2015 to 105.4 million mobile workers in 2020. By the end of the forecast period, IDC expects mobile workers will account for nearly three quarters (72.3 percent) of the total U.S. workforce.

As an eLearning author, can you afford to ignore this large chunk of learners or offer them a less than optimal learning experience? We assume, no!

But then is there a way for you to create device-agnostic eLearning, without writing some geeky lines of code? Oh yes, it’s called Adobe Captivate 9.

Join Dr. Pooja Jaisingh, Sr. eLearning Evangelist, and Captivate Guru, at Adobe to learn how to create responsive eLearning without writing a single line of code! Author content that automatically rearranges itself based on your learners’ consumption device, thereby increasing engagement and effectiveness.

Get the inside scoop on Pooja’s Top 7 secrets to create responsive eLearning without programming using Captivate 9, without breaking a sweat.

Thursday, May 12, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: How to Engage Your Leadership on Engagement!

Deloitte’s Global Human Resources Trends indicates that employee engagement (and culture) is the number one challenge facing business leaders. But they sadly claim, that organizations are only “somewhat ready” for this challenge.

Many leaders and CEOs STILL haven’t embraced engagement as a strategic business initiative. If your organization is one of them, this could be a costly oversight. Why? After five years of surviving countless organizational layoffs, job eliminations, mergers, reductions in training and development investments, and few promotions and pay increases, your employees are again in the driver's seat.

Join in May 12, 2016 to learn how to get the attention of the C-Suite.

In this high-energy and captivating webinar, global engagement thought leader and author Bob Kelleher will give you practical and specific ideas to help “engage” your leadership team.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: We Found the Weapons of Mass Instruction: Why the Next Big Thing in Learning Is Micro

We know what you’re thinking: Do I have time to read this? You’re a busy person, after all. What’s another webinar going to add to your life? Will it help you do your job better? Seem smarter? Will it be worth the time it’ll take to watch Alex Khurgin, director of learning at Grovo, present on this topic called “microlearning”?

The answer is yes. Microlearning is the most effective way to train people at work. The more accurate answer is that if you don’t learn about microlearning now, you’ll have that much further to catch up later. Because in a noisy and busy world, short bursts of training are the only pieces of content employees—and busy, good-looking L&D professionals—have time for. And that means microlearning is here to stay. It’s the biggest revolution in workplace training today. Alex will show you why.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

Why microlearning originated out of the failures of traditional training.
How microlearning transforms not just what you know, but what you do.
Ways you can create microlearning at your own organization.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Making the Right HCM Technology Choice

Today’s Human Capital Management (HCM) technology landscape is fast-changing, more flexible and more affordable than ever before. However, there are a wealth of choices in providers, implementation methods, and process approaches to choose from. Making the right choice today to serve your company for years to come is a challenging process.

With a wealth of experience in helping clients select HCM technology, a deep knowledge of vendors and decades of implementation experience, Brandon Hall Group has developed new thinking about the critical points in the selection process. Learn how business and use cases are shifting in importance, and how demonstrations by vendors can be leveraged to help you make the right choice.

Join Max Meadow, VP Strategic Engagements and Principal HCM Delivery Analyst, for this webinar to learn more about how you can help your company make the right choice in HCM technology.

Key takeaways:

The importance of defining and getting buy-in on the business value of the technology.
The shift in selection process driven by platform, infrastructure, and software delivery options.
The importance of preparing stakeholders for their responsibilities throughout the implementation process.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Corporate Culture: Don’t Just Survey It – Teach It!

Training Matters … but what about culture? Corporate culture drives results and longevity; “good” cultures create engaged employees, higher retention, and more flexible organizations. This sounds great, yet too often the next step in this line of thinking is an all-hands survey, one that ends up recommending things like monthly birthday parties and brighter conference room paint.

There’s nothing wrong with parties or paint, but culture-by-survey misses much of the point. In this multimedia webinar, Ed Muzio presents a clear, empirical look at what it is about culture that can be trained—what high-performing culture actually looks like when it’s working in an organization’s favour, and how that differs from the typical standards of management and operations in many of today’s workplaces. Based on research spanning more than five decades, it’s a complete, systematic, and pragmatic way of thinking about what culture really is, how to talk about it, and how to teach it.

Join in for a unique and informative look at the topic of corporate culture. You’ll learn, you’ll reflect, you may even laugh a little. And there won’t be a survey in sight.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: State of Workforce Management

Research has shown a shift towards the democratization of data (becoming more available and transparent to all levels of an organization) and the continuing evolution of the workforce into a more mobile, flexible, project-oriented group. How will this affect core HR practices, and the way in which we measure our workforce?

To answer that, we must look at the research surrounding workforce management, which will be presented by Cliff Stevenson, Principal Analyst of Workforce Management at the Brandon Hall Group. Their most recent research shows exactly how the workforce has changed, and how those changes are affecting the way people interact with their organizations.

He will be joined by Morne Swart, Vice President of Global Product Strategy and Transformational Leader at SumTotal Systems, A Skillsoft Company, who in nearly two decades of working in workforce management has first-hand knowledge of how customers are adjusting, how the nature of work is changing, and what employees and customers should do. Based on that knowledge, he will share real-world examples from successful organizations that have begun to tackle these issues.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016, 11AM – 12PM PT: The Manager Makeover Series: From Managing the Mundane to Inspiring Change (Free for ATD members)

The classic role of a manager is to direct processes, projects, and people. Yet behind all that is the part of their role that is the real game changer for your business. The art of engaging and inspiring people is what separates everyday managers from true leaders. Join in for part two of our Manager Makeover Series with author and transformation expert Gary Magenta. Go behind the scenes with a new manager as Gary helps him move from managing the mundane to inspiring change. We’ll answer these questions:

What prevents managers from inspiring change?
Why do managers need to see themselves as CEOs (chief engagement officers) and how does that affect your bottom line?
What three things matter most to transform your managers to inspire change?

Thursday, May 19, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Sales Enablement Through Technology-Enhanced Training (Free for ATD members)

According to numerous studies, more than 75 percent of C-level executives in marketing and sales ranked sales and product training as one of the most important functions of sales enablement. Through the use of digital, learning, and mobile technologies, sales and product training can substantially contribute to empowering sales teams and improve sales productivity.

This webcast will share the best practices of technology-enhanced training for sales enablement. At the end of the webcast, you will able to:

Determine the most appropriate technology to enhance your sales and product training.
Integrate your existing sales training initiatives with state-of-the-art technology.
Identify how leading organizations are using technology for sales training and achieving positive business results.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Scientific Findings that will Obliterate Our Training Tomorrow ... Unless We Change

Training and learning professionals are in a bubble—cocooned in their own world of realities. Slowly, their profession starts eroding. They become irrelevant and misplaced. Their realities are shattered.

There are fundamental research and scientific findings in psychology, neuro-biology, media and arts and information technologies that challenge the essence of the learning and training profession as they stand today. The impacts are now apparent.

In this webinar, you will understand how key research findings are challenging and redefining the current norms of the learning and training profession. You will see the practical impacts and gain insights into opportunities for growth.

Topics covered:

What are the learning and training assumptions that are old, archaic, and irrelevant in today’s business environment?
How do new sciences in robotics, virtual realities, Nano technologies, artificial intelligence, and interface design change the “learning and training” playbook?
What do sciences and early adopters reveal about the “broken realities” and what must we do to be relevant?
What opportunities are available for learning specialists and leaders?

Wednesday, May 25, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Research Spotlight: The Performance Management Revolution

Performance management continues to get lots of attention. Organizations are discussing, debating, even arguing about its practices and value—or lack thereof—in the workplace. At a minimum, the status quo just isn’t working and organizations are trying on new practices. Last year Accenture, Deloitte, and GE announced their disposal of the annual performance appraisal discussion. That dumping is just the beginning of today’s performance management revolution.

This edition of the Brandon Hall Group Monthly Research Spotlight Series reveals the pulse on performance management. Our analyst team will share a high-level summary of key findings from our 2016 State of Performance Management Study.

In this session, learn:

The most critical elements of today’s re-engineered performance management.
Actions the best-performing organizations are taking to kindle a revolution.
How today’s revolutionary actions are creating a process that, at last, matters to your business.

Thursday, May 26, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Yin and Yang – Balancing Mandatory and Elective Employee Training

Does your organization struggle to find a balance between mandatory and elective training? CEO of BizLibrary, Dean Pichee, will take you through the challenges and benefits of both types of training and discuss how to find the balance you’ve been trying to achieve. He’ll give you real examples of what has worked for companies in the past and recommendations to help your organization succeed in the future.

Thursday, May 26, 2016, 10AM - 11AM PT: Top 8 Must-Have LMS Features

The learning management system is quickly changing. Whether you’re in the market as a first-time user, or you’re looking to switch over to a new platform, there are a plethora of new features and functionalities to consider when looking for a modern LMS that will allow you to grow revenue through training, talent development, and continued education. Save your seat to learn about the 8 features a modern LMS should have.

You will learn about: