"Sunset, field, poppy, sun, priroda" by Roman Grac is Public Domain.

Don’t you wish you could ingest information as fast as Halloween candy? So do we! As learning specialists, we’re always thinking about how to make knowledge digestible and palatable—like those chocolate bars you wish you hadn’t eaten, only good for you! And there are plenty more L&D practitioners on the case, serving up free webinars full of bite-sized information. Check them out!

Wednesday, November 1, 2017, 11AM – 12PM PT: How to Be a Coaching Style Manager (Free for ATD members)

As a manager, your job is to lift up all the employees in your performance spectrum—high-, medium-, and low-performers—and help them do more work, faster and better, every step of the way. Not just because that’s good for business, but also because continuous improvement is the key to keeping today’s employees focused and motivated. You don’t need a special personality or pizazz to be a coaching-style leader—all that’s required are the basic tools and strategies to engage and motivate your team.

Participants will learn:

The different types of coaching-style leaders seen in organizations
The key qualities that define coaching-style management
How to apply and integrate concrete coaching strategies into regular performance management
How to coach even the most hard-to-define performance benchmarks: soft skills such as professionalism and critical thinking

Wednesday, November 1, 2017, 12PM – 1PM PT: Current and Coming Job Skills. How L&D Helps.

Is L&D keeping up with the rapid changes to industry and jobs in the last ten or so years? According to The Future of Jobs report by the World Economic Forum, we aren’t.

An accelerating rate of technological change and other disrupters are transforming organizations and reducing the longevity of organizations and job skills. Research shows jobs skills are rapidly changing, with technology replacing some skills, some jobs being replaced with technology, and new jobs being added. Unstable skills mean workers need to continuously learn to keep up with changes happening in the world, their industry, and their company. And research shows there are gaps between what employers need and what employees can do.

One of the most important ways that L&D practitioners can help with the current and coming job and skill chaos is to help people learn faster, easier, and with less stress. The good news? The learning sciences and other sciences (psychology, cognitive, social and so on) deliver specific and actionable tactics to help with these looming challenges.

In this session, Patti Shank will discuss how L&D practitioners can help people:

Become more self-sufficient learners
Remember and apply on the job
Learn and apply necessary social skills

Patti will show examples and supply handouts from her books, Write and Organize for Deeper Learning and Practice and Feedback for Deeper Learning.

Thursday, November 2, 2017, 9:00AM – 10:00AM PT: Emotional Intelligence – Supporting Others & Ourselves

Research shows that incivility in the workplace has a detrimental impact across a wide range of areas. Lack of support from the people around us has shown to decrease work effort, time spent at work, customer service, quality, and commitment, while at the same time increasing worry, frustration, avoidance, and ultimately turnover.

This webinar will explore the exciting topic of emotional intelligence (EI) through the world’s first scientifically validated model, the EQ-I 2.0, using the acronym S.U.P.P.O.R.T. to connect emotional intelligence skills to actions and behaviours, leading to a more civil and emotionally healthy workplace.

Highlights:

Qualities and characteristics of people in a supportive workplace
Overview of emotional intelligence and the EQ-I 2.0 model, composites, and skills.
Understanding EI patterns and why EI can be developed
A guide to supporting others – Connecting specific EI skills to S.U.P.P.O.R.T.
Supporting ourselves – The EI connection to our overall well-being

Thursday, November 2, 2017, 10AM – 11AM PT: The Evolution of Onboarding: Trends and Future Opportunities

In the past, organizations fundamentally viewed onboarding as the time to prepare all the paperwork and orient the new hires on company policies. All that has changed dramatically due to the increased difficulty of finding talent, and then losing the new hires during the first year. Organizations now focus on the new-hire experience, assimilation, automation, collaboration, and development that reduces time-to-proficiency.

In this webinar, presented by Brandon Hall Group’s Daria Friedman, Principal Analyst for Talent Acquisition, and SilkRoad’s Amber Hyatt, VP of Product Marketing, you’ll learn:

How onboarding is expanding to touch the entire employee journey
How the level of onboarding maturity in an organization impacts key performance indicators
Leading practices for engaging, assimilating, and training new hires
Future opportunities for onboarding practices and technology

Thursday, November 2, 2017, 12PM – 1 PM PT: Helping Your Leaders Make Better Business Decisions

Every day in your business, people are making decisions that affect the bottom line. Many of these financial decisions are made by people who perceive finance as scary, hard, or someone else’s job.

Explore how a large pharmaceutical company applied a novel instructional approach to demystify finance by building a common financial language across the organization in a way that was flexible, scalable, and cost-effective.

If you’ve been looking for a way to empower leaders to make better business decisions, this session is not one to miss.

Tuesday, November 7, 9AM – 10AM PT: Target, Bond, Go Get ’em! Marketing Training in Your Organization

Join this extremely action packed and pragmatic webinar. Learn how to seamlessly fold a marketing strategy for your training function into what you’re already doing!

Define your target population and identify their pain points
Gain trust and bond with managers by providing solutions to their pain
Develop marketing strategies you can implement today
Learn practical tips from the pros
Be seen as the valued business partner that you are in your organization

Tuesday, November 7, 2017, 10AM – 11AM PT: Moodle 3.3 – A New Experience

Moodle is a powerful learning management system, which is widely used by academics, corporations, and non-profits to build online courses and eLearning programs around the world.

Moodle themes let you quickly establish a great-looking platform, without too much development time and resources. Moodle 3.2 and 3.3 have introduced newly designed theme templates that improve the user experience. This webinar will review some of the new features of the themes as well as provide some general tips on how to enhance the user experience in your Moodle site.

Tuesday, November 7, 2017, 11AM – 12PM PT: Achieving Maximum Engagement: How to Leverage the Neuroscience of Learning in the Virtual Classroom

What if the training you deliver in the virtual classroom was so vibrant and compelling that people clamoured to attend your sessions? Your ability to connect with, engage, and stimulate the thinking of your participants is directly linked to your understanding of the neuroscience of learning.

Our brains ignore what is predictable and boring. This session explores the brain’s needs for novelty, contrast, meaning, and emotion to capture and keep your participants’ attention online. Increase novelty with the creative use of relevant games. Enhance contrast by incorporating a variety of facilitation techniques. Build meaningful connections with collaborative learning approaches. Harness emotion with storytelling frames. Explore six brain-based guidelines that leverage the interaction and collaboration tools in the virtual classroom.

Learning Objectives:

Apply six brain-based guidelines in your next web workshop
Increase novelty, contrast, meaning, and emotion in the virtual classroom
Take away an infographic to reinforce brain-based learning approaches

Who Should Attend

Managers in Human Resources, Training & Development, Talent Development and eLearning
Virtual facilitators and instructional designers
Anyone who is responsible for ensuring that learners recall, use, and apply what they learn on the job

Tuesday, November 7, 2017, 12 PM – 1PM PT: Long Term L&D Planning in a Light Speed Business Environment

Join Dr. Allen Partridge in this quest to understand the most common strategies for Training & Development/Performance Solutions in a modern business environment. While defining a maturity map or even creating a snapshot of comparable enterprise learning programs can be a very difficult task, it is even more daunting to understand where your organization is on such a maturity model and to plot a path toward optimized outcomes.

In this fascinating seminar, Dr. Allen Partridge, will guide you toward a better understanding of the most common trajectories toward success in organizational training, use research and case studies to guide you away from some of the most common pitfalls, and help you build an organizational approach that makes sense for your individual needs.

Key takeaways:

The long journey from basic compliance tracking toward a vibrant learning culture
A paradigm for organizational success – Defining your Expectations
Visiting the shiny cities, social, gamification, recommendations, UGC and more

Wednesday, November 8, 2017, 10AM – 11AM PT: Breathing New Life into Safety and Compliance Training

In the conversation about the digital transformation of learning, compliance training seems to be conspicuously absent. Companies continue to rely on outdated and outmoded safety and compliance content, whether out of complacency or fear of change. There is no reason that these types of learning experiences cannot be modernized with the use of video and micro-learning, and in fact there are plenty of reasons to do it.

Join David Wentworth, Principal Analyst with Brandon Hall Group, and George D. Haber, Ph.D., Global Director Instructional Systems at DuPont Sustainable Solutions, as they look at the shortcomings of current safety and compliance training practices and explore strategies for bringing compliance into the 21st century.

Discussion topics include:

The current compliance landscape
Compliance drivers
Opportunities for modernization
Video, micro-learning, and performance support
Examples of companies modernizing compliance

Wednesday, November 8, 2017, 11AM – 12PM PT: Humanized Analytics: How Healthcare Uses Real-Time Feedback to Drive Performance (Free for ATD members)

Healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to deliver effective care to patients, conduct financially viable operations, and report favourable outcomes to government and accrediting bodies. To combat these pressures, healthcare organizations are turning to technology and analytics to improve performance in complex, urgent environments. This webinar will explore how healthcare is adopting real-time feedback among its employees to improve communications and organizational performance.

In this webcast, you’ll:

Discover how improved communication between physicians, nurses, residents, and staff translates to improved organizational performance
Use competency-based, real-time feedback data to drive patient satisfaction, improve outcomes, and simplify and enhance government and accreditation reporting
Accurately measure employee development, increasing your ability to effectively develop and coach employees into leaders

Wednesday, November 8, 2017, 12PM – 1PM PT: What, Where, Why? When? How? Who Cares? Best Practices for Planning, Developing, Implementing, and Supporting Serious Games

Many people in the eLearning realm are attempting to use Gamification and Serious Games to spark employee engagement and drive learning retention. Everyone is working to make the best serious game that will enhance the learning objectives and retain learning. The biggest setbacks for some of these serious games and gamified learning experiences have been little-to-no planning, tough-to-pinpoint metrics, little-to-no implementation strategy, and insufficient or nonexistent post-deployment support. Serious games are living, breathing, evolving things, unlike our eLearning modules we put on the shelf. This session will talk about planning, developing, implementing, and supporting serious games for companies that have never gone down the route of serious games and gamified learning experiences.

There are many serious games that are built for companies and for internal use within our industry. This session will discuss what makes a serious game a success or a failure. This session will also address the proper steps to take throughout each phase of the project to ensure success. This will include best practices, and also will show pain points we have to deal with when going down the route of gamification and serious games.

How to get the dialogue going about serious games
How to plan and develop a serious game (internally or externally)
Best practices when creating the serious game
How to support the serious game after the effort has launched

Thursday, November 9, 2017, 9AM – 10AM PT: It's More than Millennial: Using Video to Bridge Generational Gaps in Learning

Millennials may be the "YouTube Generation," but in the years following their entry into the workforce, they've spread their favourite learning technology far and wide. But as generations from Boomers to Z embrace video as a tool for learning and sharing, each is doing so in its own unique (and often unexpected) way.

This webinar will discuss the ways organizations are using video to bridge generational learning gaps, including:

How to identify video trends that can help you span generational gaps
Discover new and unexpected applications and techniques for using video to support every generation in your workforce
Learn how other organizations use video to establish and enhance corporate social learning and knowledge transfer programs

Thursday, November 9, 2017, 9AM – 10AM PT: Top HCM Trends Get Real Action Items in Live Interview

Find answers to all the hottest HCM topics during this live interview of Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal HCM Analyst at Brandon Hall Group in a round robin approach de-mystify the HCM landscape. Acknowledged as an industry thought leader and subject matter expert in the field of HCM, Michael has over thirty years’ experience in helping organizations achieve breakthrough performance in people, process and technology. In addition to the interview you will be able to ask your questions on each of the four topics.

There are 16 topics in total, split over four weeks. Be sure to register for the session(s) that you’re looking at for a research-based outlook. Attendees will leave with a fresh approach to the topic at hand with research-based insights on how to move past the trends to a real solution.

November 9 topics:

Learning – creating a more impactful measurement strategy
Talent – future of the annual performance review
TA – improving the candidate experience
WFH/HR – transforming into a customer-centric organization

Thursday, November 9, 2017, 10AM – 11AM PT: Ace the Interview (Free for ATD members)

Whether or not you’re actively looking for a job, it never hurts to brush up on your interviewing skills. If you’re thinking about jumping back into the job market or just want to be ready when the right opportunity presents itself, be sure to join Alan DeBack, author of Get Hired in a Tough Market and a contributor to ATD's recent book Find Your Fit, for an interactive discussion about the latest on interviewing skills and preparation.

During this webcast, you’ll learn about:

Common mistakes that people make during the interview process
Recent trends in interviewing, such as video interviews and other pre-employment screening
How to handle phone screening versus in-person interviews
Best ways to prepare for interviews.

When you register, be sure to submit a question for the presenters to answer during the webcast.

Friday, November 10, 2017, 9AM – 10AM PT: Developing the Coaching Skills of Your Managers and Leaders

What are the obligations of managers? The answer to this question varies from organization to organization based on a number of factors such as industry, culture, department, skill level of the team, etc. Regardless of the organization, at the very heart of this question lies a dilemma.

Managers may have to perform well, depending on a variety of situations at various places along a continuum, ranging from ensuring employees comply with established processes and procedures at one end, to career development and skill improvement towards the other end. Who’s to say which of the outcomes is more or less important?

In this webinar, you'll learn:

Why coaching skills are important for your managers, leaders, and organization
What coaching is and how to apply key skills to align with specific employees and situations
An overview of traditional coaching models and what you can do to improve them
How we can get managers to make time to coach
A "coaches’ toolkit" that includes emerging competencies for managers and leaders
The key difference between coaching and mentoring

Tuesday, November 14, 2017, 10AM – 11AM PT: Top HCM Trends Get Real Action Items in Live Interview

November 14 topics:

Learning – linking learning to performance
Talent – action learning for leadership development
TA – the social talent acquisition landscape
WFM/HR – contingent labour and the gig economy

Tuesday, November 14, 2017, 10:30AM – 11:30AM PT: The Missing Link: Measuring the Impact of Sales Enablement on Sales Performance (Free for ATD members)

For many organizations, there’s a persistent gap between sales enablement and selling—one that makes it difficult to connect the influence of training and technology investments to the business results sales leaders care about most. During this webcast, we’ll discuss a new approach for correlating enablement efforts to pipeline in a way that brings sales leadership and sales enablement pros together, aligned to a set of shared metrics, including team capabilities and business outcomes.

In this webcast, you’ll learn:

Methods for aligning sales training and development to pipeline criteria
The benefits of viewing pipeline risk through a lens of sales rep capabilities
Key performance indicators for measuring the ongoing impact of pipeline-oriented enablement.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017, 12PM – 1PM PT: Helping Others to Change by Changing Mindsets

Competencies are a hot item in Talent Management. Just-completed Brandon Hall Group research shows a renewed focus, increased spending, and an understanding that competencies can have a wide-ranging positive impact on the organization. However, the gap between the importance of competencies and effectiveness is mind-blowing, Brandon Hall Group’s 2017 Competency Planning and Management Study reveal. Analysis of the results also reveal five imperatives for a high-performance competency program. Join Claude Werder, VP/Research Operations and Principal HCM Analyst for Brandon Hall Group, and Lorraine McKay, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at HRSG, as they discuss strategies organizations must embrace for success, and recommendations for making progress. The discussion will focus on:

Why competencies are failing to achieve impact
The role of technology in driving high-performance competency management
The essential tools for realizing competency effectiveness
Key differences between high-performing organizations and those lacking a mature competency program

Wednesday, November 15, 2017, 9AM – 10AM PT: Measuring, Monitoring and Managing Support for Employee Development

Employee development programs are often effective at increasing awareness, providing knowledge and improving skills. Performance often translates to the work environment and employees contribute to achieving business goals. Research has found that managers play a significant role in preparing employees for learning events. When they engage learners before and after those events, they also improve learner performance by as much as 55 percent.

The purpose of this webinar is to outline a three-step process for making learning events more effective by ensuring managers are involved. It will show how to measure manager support and how to monitor it with dashboards. It will end with a case study and recommendations for managing support so learning impact is optimized.

Wednesday, November 15, 2017, 10:00AM – 11:00AM PT: Best of DemoFest: Award-winning eLearning in Action

This webinar will showcase some of the award-winning learning projects presented during DemoFest at DevLearn 2017 Conference & Expo.

This year at DevLearn Conference & Expo, dozens of conference participants will showcase their latest technology-based learning innovations at DemoFest, a vibrant and educational experience, similar to a science fair, offering attendees the chance to see a wide variety of projects and learn directly from the designers and developers about the tools, technologies, and processes they used to build them.

See a recap of this year’s winning projects. Learn about the projects that were presented, discover relevant solutions, and leave this webinar with inspiration for your own work!

Wednesday, November 15, 2017, 11AM – 12PM PT: 6 Ways to Deliver More Engaging Training (Free for ATD members)

Are you struggling to capture the attention of your employees, sales team, or channel partners? Would you like your training to be more interactive, effective, and engaging? Does your LMS leave your learners dazed and confused?

Join this webcast to learn how to use virtual learning environments to more effectively engage, equip, and energize your audience. Register now to learn best practices for:

Delivering a more intuitive, engaging training experience
Training your global audience at a significantly lower cost
Adding social learning and gamification to your training arsenal

Wednesday, November 15, 2017, 12PM – 1PM PT: Bridging the Gap Between Designing and Developing for Elearning

Instructional designers today often find themselves in charge of most, if not all, of the overall learning experience design of their eLearning projects—including designing instructions, visuals, interactions, assessments, and even user interfaces. That’s a lot of design work! And while popular authoring tools technically allow you to jump straight into development, skipping a thoughtful design phase can have real costs, as changes in the development phase take substantially longer than those in the design phase. Investing a bit more time up front in design can save you a significant amount of time over the course of your project. But what exact design processes should you use to do this?

In this session, you’ll learn about design considerations before even opening up your eLearning authoring tool. You’ll look in depth at processes to help you explore and outline your design choices, such as storyboards, visual models, and style guides. You’ll discover how these processes can help you manage stakeholder expectations, set up your development phase to be more efficient, and prevent the need for time-consuming design changes after you’ve entered development.

In this session, you’ll learn:

About the various design hats that you might wear during an eLearning project
How to quickly design visual models to help manage stakeholder expectations
How style guides can minimize mistakes during development
How to document a storyboard that speaks the language of development

Thursday, November 16, 2017, 9AM – 10AM PT: Adobe Captivate 2017: The Ultimate Guide to Make the Most of Multi-State Objects

Multi-state objects in Adobe Captivate are a powerhouse of possibilities to create interactions with absolute ease. If you’ve not yet started using multi-state objects to build interactions, now is the time to start using them. You’ll be delighted to discover this magic mantra to reduce the number of steps to create an interaction, and make your timeline look clutter-free.

During this session, Dr. Pooja Jaisingh will show you how to create simple interactions using multi-state objects and simple actions. Then she’ll show you how to take your interactions to the next level by using multi-state objects alongside advanced actions, variables, effects, drag-and-drop interactions, and other features and functionalities of Captivate. Along the way, she’ll share the tips and tricks of making the most of multi-state objects in Adobe Captivate.

Thursday, November 16, 2017, 12PM – 1PM PT: The NO-LECTURE Webinar: Engage Learners, STOP "Yacking" at Them

For trainers and participants, webinars are great, until the trainers simply “yack” at learners. That’s when learners start multitasking, and therefore do not learn from the sessions.

This is unfortunate. Done effectively, webinars are the next best approaches we can use to deliver good training inexpensively. The major pitfall? “THE LECTURE” webinar.

How do you assess webinar design and structure to determine that it engages and helps learners learn instead of boring them to death?
What is a sound and solid design approach for engaging webinars?
How do you apply the NO-LECTURE webinar technique and method in all types of learning? In compliance, technical software, process, people skills and other types of content?
How do you learn NOT TO LECTURE but instead facilitate the optimal emotional and cognitive processes that your learners go through?

Monday, November 27, 2017, 10AM – 11AM PT: Redesigning Healthcare Turning Excuses Into Results (Free for ATD members)

The best way to eliminate emotional waste is through implementing great processes and engaging great people. Leadership based on reality provides leaders with the competencies necessary to change the mindsets of their teams, teach great mental processes that eliminate emotional waste, and ensure top engagement and accountability. The philosophy isn’t just about raising morale but about turning talent into productivity. This approach truly captures the value that leaders can bring to the organization and ensures that value is visible throughout the organization.

In this webcast, become fluent in proven techniques and strategies to:

Conserve team energy and direct leadership resources to people and issues with the highest possible return on investment
Reduce stress and conflict in your own life and the lives of your team members
Enhance engagement and accountability of human resources
Avoid the most common things leaders do to create barriers to their own change efforts
Understand the new employee value equation—the way in which employees truly add value in the workplace
Understand and be able to use a new metric for assessing talent based upon the value employees add to the organization as a whole
Enhance leaders’ ability to hire, coach, and reward those who can truly support the mission of the business
Understand the key elements of development and coaching along with many strategies for fast-tracking the development of future and diverse leaders
Build a performance expectation of thrivability for each employee
Gain fluency in strategies to rally teams to align willingly to organizational goals

Tuesday, November 28, 2017, 10AM – 11AM PT: Building a Culture of Employee Engagement (Free for ATD members)

Learn from a leading public-sector practitioner and author about the business case for employee engagement across organizational roles, and from a senior executive coach on the key levers in employee engagement for the federal government.

In this webcast, explore:

What employee engagement is and why it matters
How to create an engagement culture
What drives improved engagement

Wednesday, November 29, 2017, 9AM – 10AM PT: Competitive Business Simulations: A Powerful Testing Ground for Leading a Business in a Turbulent World

L&D business partners can provide significant value to their organizations by helping current and future business leaders to build the resilience to operate in a turbulent (“VUCA”) world. Many challenging development questions co-exist in today’s business environment: How do we prepare senior-level directors to move into executive roles, where they will need to take business performance to the next level? How do we get our high-potentials to organize and operate as a business team, prioritize, and chart their own course as proactive change makers? How can we build business acumen, a growth mindset and emotional intelligence across functional areas? A competitive business simulation is an immersive experiential exercise that can provide a powerful testing ground to address all of these fundamental challenges that face organizations across industries.

Webinar participants will learn:

How a simulation can help participants to think and act systemically as a (future) business leader—learning to see and manage connections
How to design a competitive business simulation, how to make it interactive, and in which situations to deploy it
How the concept of meeting commitments translates to more robust operational plans, more effective strategy execution, and better business results

Wednesday, November 29, 2017, 11AM – 12PM PT: New Year, New Learning: Top 3 Predictions for L&D Trends in 2018 (Free for ATD members)

A bold prediction: 2018 is the year of mobile learning. Employees will increasingly rely on mobile devices for the discovery of operational knowledge and training content while on the job. This webcast explores three powerful trends: microlearning, which provides small “bursts” of instructional content; in-house content curation, which employs online resources and media; and big data, which captures analytics on content effectiveness and employee engagement. In this webcast, you will learn:

Why mobile technology is critical in today’s learning and development environments to support learners when they need it, not just during formal training sessions
The value of connecting content curation and big data to improve learning materials by measuring content effectiveness
How your company can adopt the right mobile technology to keep pace with all three trends in 2018

Wednesday, November 29, 2017, 12PM – 1PM PT: Get Past the Hype – Finding Value in Trends

Mobile. Big data. AR/VR. There's always something new to explore when it comes to L&D strategy and technology. Unfortunately, it's easy to get lost in the hype. Too often, L&D pros feel like they have to move on to the next big thing before uncovering the true value of a new idea within their learning ecosystem. In this session, we'll discuss the latest L&D trends and clarify their potential impact in the modern workplace. We'll establish a framework to help you assess new concepts within the context of your organization's and your L&D team's readiness.

Thursday, November 30, 2017, 9AM – 10AM PT: Top HCM Trends Get Real Action Items in Live Interview

November 30 topics: