Wrong month? Check out our latest list of free L&D webinars.

“Nature, dandelion, macro, close up” by David Reed is licensed by Pixabay.

Most years at this time, taxes are the most stressful thing happening. But with the COVID-19 pandemic running its course, this is a year like no other — a year in which we’ve rapidly adapted to working from home, meeting virtually, and finding new ways to be productive and manage our deliverables. We’re getting creative about how we communicate, sourcing new tools and strategies, and more than ever now, leveraging online learning. This month’s crop of free webinars offers tons of hints and suggestions for our new modes of work.

(Wrong month? Jump to our latest free L&D webinars posts.)

Friday, May 1, 2020, 9AM – 10AM PT: You Can’t Beat ’Em, So Join ’Em — Training’s Role in Informal Learning
Many of us obtain the knowledge and data we require to complete our work by using the Internet. This informal learning trend is unlikely to change soon, so training professionals need to find a way to address it. Some are threatened by this reality, while others have been tasked with quantifying and evaluating it. In this webinar, with Jim Kirkpatrick, Ph.D., Senior Consultant at Kirkpatrick Partners, and Wendy Kirkpatrick, President of Kirkpatrick Partners, will explain why informal learning’s actually an opportunity for you to expand your influence as a learning and performance consultant, and deliver increased value to your organization. You’ll learn where to invest your time and resources to create the greatest training impact. You’ll hear how you can evaluate and report the impact of both formal and informal learning. And you’ll come away inspired to design and manage integrated learning and performance plans that’ll position you as an indispensable team member in the eyes of stakeholders.

Friday, May 1, 2020, 11AM – 12PM PT: Coaching for Behaviour Change (Free for ATD members)
Coaching’s an effective tool for developing people and producing positive behaviour change because it aligns with almost any learning theory or learning principle. Because coaching’s a just-in-time, customized approach to development, it’s far more cost-effective than more prevalent one-size-fits-all approaches to learning. What if you already understand the potential benefits of coaching, but are unsure of how to do it well? Increase the effectiveness of your coaching interactions in this webinar with Sophie Oberstein, the author of ATD’s 10 Steps to Successful Coaching.

Monday, May 4, 2020, 11:00AM – 11:30AM PT: Demo: Move On-Site Training Online with Maximum Impact (Free for ATD members)
The digital transformation of learning is happening now. Learning professionals are leading the revolution to transition in-person workshops online. Whether your training is employee onboarding or leadership development, sales training or digital transformation, these critical training initiatives can’t be delayed. Join Juan Moran, Solutions Consultant at NovoEd, for a demo to learn how NovoEd’s collaborative learning platform enables global enterprises to transform in-person workshops into highly engaging digital learning experiences.

Tuesday, May 5, 2020, 9AM – 10AM PT: Create Stunning Graphics for Elearning
Good visualization improves understanding, recollection and adoption. Poor or no visual communication impedes learning. Make your job easier: use clear, compelling designs to achieve your learning objectives — no design skill needed! Learn to turn any content into professional graphics using PowerPoint, free and low-cost tools, and a few tricks the pros use. Watch Mike Parkinson, Owner of Billion Dollar Graphics, build elearning graphics real time. See how easy it is — when you know how. All participants get free graphics, icons, step-by-step instructions, and other helpful tools and resources.

Tuesday, May 5, 2020, 11AM – 12PM PT: Performance Development and Goal Setting for Agile Teams (Free for ATD members)
More companies are moving to agile working processes because of the digital revolution and transforming nature of working across borders. Instead of strict hierarchies, organizations like Gore, ING and Spotify are changing how they work to become more collaborative and enable effective decision making. For HR teams, this means creating ways to support cross-functional teams, as well as designing systems that move and adapt as fast as the company so employees can continue to grow and develop. Join Culture Amp’s Senior People Scientist, Sahra Kaboli-Nejad, and Lead Customer Success Coach, Brit Ferguson, for an interactive webinar as they dive deeply into this mindset shift and explain how you can set up your teams and company for success.

Wednesday, May 6, 2020, 10:30AM – 11:30AM PT: Preparing L&D Professionals for the Age of Self-Service Learning (Free for I4PL members)
It's easy to see how the corporate learning function might be perceived as losing relevance and purpose in an age of increasing access to good self-service learning — why engage a whole team of L&D folks when you can simply Google it or watch a YouTube explainer? But that's missing the point. Learning, truly transformative learning, should be relevant, contextualized and part of a journey of development. This webinar, hosted by Candida Fridman, Management Consultant and Ian Klein, Vice President of Solution Architect both at Hemsley Fraser Group, will cover:

How the L&D function can maintain relevance and prove its worth to key decision-makers.
What challenges are organizations trying to overcome? Will the learning solution cure the problem or prevent the symptom?
The importance of a learning culture in the age of self-service learning.

Wednesday, May 6, 2020, 11AM – 12PM PT: Five Best Practices to Help Your Learners Thrive in the New Virtual Landscape (Free for ATD members)
As we continue to adjust to new ways of working, learning organizations are quickly adapting their strategies from face-to-face facilitation to virtual and digital environments. It’s imperative that leaders evaluate their learning ecosystem, convert existing content to new digital experiences and keep their teams engaged through an effective learning journey. During this interactive session, Matt Donovan, Chief Learning and Innovation Officer at GP Strategies, and Cara Halter, Instructional Designer at GP Strategies, will share five best practices that will help your learners (and learning strategies) thrive in the virtual workplace.

Thursday, May 7, 2020, 9AM – 10AM PT: Awesome Makeovers from PowerPoint Slides That Suuuuuck
There are many ways to wreck a PowerPoint slide. This session will not show you how to become a brilliant designer, but will help you get by with the skills that you do have, by showing you makeovers of slides that do not require a degree in the arts, and in fact were performed by a member of that massive majority not possessing one. Rick Altman, Director of BetterPresenting will show before-and-after examples of real slides, created by real people, for real circumstances. They carry the hope that you’ll watch them and think to yourself, “Hey, I can do that, too.”

Thursday, May 7, 2020, 11AM – 12PM PT: Relevancy and Accessibility: The Keys To the Learning Experience
Remember that age-old philosophical question about whether a tree makes a sound if it falls in the forest when no one’s around? The same can be asked of learning environments: If you create relevant learning content but don’t make it easily accessible, will anyone use it? These days, delivering learning experiences requires a comprehensive content strategy that’s much bigger than the LMS. Join this webinar with David Wentworth, Principal Learning Analyst at Brandon Hall Group, Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer at Brandon Hall Group, and Jeff Carr, CEO at Inkling, to learn what it takes to optimize the relevancy and accessibility of your learning content.

Monday, May 11, 2020, 11AM – 12PM PT: Delivering Accessible and Inclusive Content for All of Your Audiences (Free for ATD members)
In the haste of pivoting for online presentations, don't forget to include audiences who have different needs such as auditory, visual, physical and cognitive access considerations. Save yourself time, heartache and money by designing for inclusion from the start. In this session, Maureen Orey, President of Workplace Learning & Performance Group, will provide you the tools to:

Increase awareness of access needs (and the laws that require accessibility).
Practice writing alt text for pictures and graphics.
Integrate various design strategies to meet those needs.

Tuesday, May 12, 2020, 9AM – 10AM PT: L&D to the Rescue
No need to explain that times are crazy. Organizations are desperate for timely and pertinent instruction as their people work from home. It’s great that L&D is the function your staff demands, but the budgets are slashed. Instead of doing the obvious — converting your existing workshops into boring webinars — L&D must be innovative, nimble and uplifting to deliver quality learning while keeping the cost low. Join Lou Russell, President and CEO of Russell Martin & Associates and L+EARN, to discuss how great L&D practitioners are avoiding “dialing it in.” Instead, learn how L&D can quickly and cheaply create new ways of helping people do their jobs well.

Tuesday, May 12, 2020, 11AM – 12PM PT: Using Video in Training: What to Look For and Why (Free for ATD members)
Video’s a unique beast. It's more engaging than a training manual, but sharing it on your LMS (or worse, on YouTube) can create problems. It helps you scale your training worldwide, but every new recording is a pain to produce, and it would be ideal for just-in-time learning, if only it could be effectively searched. If the way you use video in employee training feels stuck in 2003, don’t miss this webinar. Dave Dumler, Head of Product Marketing at Panopto, will help you distill your video training aspirations into concrete plans for 2020, including ideas for what you can present, who you can look to for help and which tools you’ll need to make it all happen.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020, 9AM – 10AM PT: Now What? Smart Choices and Considerations Once Your Training Is Online
The workforce landscape has forever changed, and innovation shouldn’t stop at just getting it all online or converted to digital quickly. A focus on performance should always be the focus and measure for all training and curriculum. The L&D industry is lucky in that it has been moving toward remote and individualized training modes for years. Web-conferencing tools like Zoom and WebEx and individual asynchronous elearning solutions offer enormous potential for the creation and deployment of accessible and effective alternatives to Instructor-Led Training (ILT). In this webinar, Ethan Edwards, Dean and Senior Instructional Strategist at Allen Academy, and Ellen Burns-Johnson, Senior Learning Experience Designer at Allen Interactions, will:

Share best practices and expert advice for leveraging digital delivery solutions.
Assess the challenges and considerations in choosing learning solutions such as virtual classroom training (VILT), asynchronous elearning training solutions and even blended learning.
Evaluate what the next steps look like to turn your transition into a long term success.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020, 10AM – 11AM PT: Online DemoFest: Explore Game-Based Learning Solutions
DemoFest is an attendee-favourite activity that takes place during The Elearning Guild's conferences. Designers and developers showcase their best work in this science-fair setting and discuss the unique tools, technologies and processes they used in their projects. This series of four webinars showcases some of the creative learning solutions developed by members of The Elearning Guild community to solve real problems in organizations today. In this second of four showcase events, you’ll explore solutions created for the game-based category. These projects were designed to solve specific learning challenges using game mechanics or gamification approaches to engage and motivate learners in understanding and using new approaches and content in their work.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020, 10:30AM – 11:30AM PT: Five Ways to Jazz Up Your Next Live Virtual Session (Free for I4PL members)
With professionals spending more than 40% of their time in meetings, as well as a shift to more virtual training, live virtual sessions of all kinds are growing in number. What helps your virtual session stand out as impactful, memorable and useful? In this highly interactive hands-on webinar, you’ll explore five different techniques for adding more interaction to your live virtual sessions. Join Effective Virtual Conversations author Jennifer Britton as she explores practical things you can incorporate into your next zoom, Skype or conference call.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020, 12PM – 1PM PT: Grow Champions of Training! How to Effectively Market Your Training Function
Marketing. It’s one extra thing to do on our ever-growing list of tasks, and it’s usually a skill set we didn’t pick up along the way. In this action-packed and pragmatic webinar, you’ll learn how to seamlessly fold a marketing strategy for your training function into what you’re already doing. Maria Chilcote and Melissa Smith, Managing Partners at The Training Clinic, will explain how to:

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.

Thursday, May 14, 2020, 9AM – 10AM PT: Managing Stress in a Constantly Changing World
Our changing world requires us to deal not only with the COVID-19 pandemic, but global warming, increasing natural disasters and ongoing disruption led by technology. Stress resilience has become the top skill needed for health, happiness and career longevity. But how do you help employees manage stress when it’s unique to each person? Join Joe Burton, Founder and CEO of Whil Concepts, and Carl Crisostomo, Product Manager for Content at Saba, for this experiential webinar. Learn how you can help employees foster the mindset for resilience, positivity and sustainable success. See first-hand how specific techniques help to improve focus, innovation, collaboration and leadership. Leave with easy, repeatable techniques to help reduce stress and build resilience for your own well-being. You’ll never have this much fun learning about stress.

Thursday, May 14, 2020, 12PM – 1PM PT: Test Your Learning Systems to Meet Open, Adaptive and Extreme Flexibility
Today's learners are continuously adaptive to new demands from business demands. They learn while working, so learning systems must be malleable and extremely flexible. There are no downtimes, no stoppages and no friction — they allow continuous support to workers. This webinar is hosted by Ray Jimenez, Ph.D., Architect of TrainingMagNetwork.com and Chief Learning Officer of Vignettes Learning.

Wednesday, May 20, 2020, 10AM – 11AM PT: Online DemoFest: Get Inspired by These Academic Learning Projects
DemoFest is an attendee-favourite activity that takes place during The Elearning Guild's conferences. Designers and developers showcase their best work in this science-fair setting and discuss the unique tools, technologies and processes they used in their projects. This series of four webinars showcases some of the creative learning solutions developed by members of The Elearning Guild community to solve real problems in organizations today. In this third of four showcase events, you’ll explore projects from academia that easily cross over for use in corporate settings. These projects were designed to address various performance challenges. You're sure to draw inspiration and practical ideas from these well-planned and precisely executed solutions.

Wednesday, May 20, 2020, 11AM – 12PM PT: Progressing the Pipeline: How to Enable Virtual Sales Training at Scale
Sales for companies around the globe have been disrupted by travel cancellations and remote work in the face of COVID-19. Managing a dispersed sales team’s a unique challenge. Corporate travel restrictions mean less contact with prospects, with the industry and with the market. But with the right strategy, sales managers can succeed. In this webinar, Jake Miller, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Allego, and Vanessa Mericle, Manager of Instructional Design of ReliaQuest, will share actionable steps for keeping sales training going.

Thursday, May 21, 2020, 8AM – 9AM PT: Create Interactive Social Distancing Project Using Adobe Captivate
During these unprecedented times, social distancing’s the need of the hour. Join Dr. Pooja Jaisingh, Lead Elearning Evangelist at Adobe Digital Learning Solutions to see how we can use the information available on this topic to build an interactive and animated Elearning course using Adobe Captivate. You’ll learn how to use interactive objects, multi-state objects, drag and drops, simple actions and automatic forced navigation in Adobe Captivate to build simple yet interesting interactions. You’ll also learn about tips and tricks to quickly convert any content to elearning interactions, without using any advanced features.

Thursday, May 21, 2020, 12PM – 1PM PT: Proven Strategies to Keep Remote Workers Engaged, Enthused and Effective
We’re living in unprecedented times. Work as we know it is changing. In order to thrive, organizations must re-invent themselves and embrace the new normal. As a former Fortune 500 business executive who has seen it all, Jill Christensen understands how organizations operate, and what they need to do to attract, retain and engage employees — whether they sit under your nose or work remotely. Are remote workers super productive? Yes, but they also tend to feel more disengaged and neglected. In a day and age when many people are “sheltering in place,” the companies that will come out on top are the ones that create and execute a strategy to effectively manage remote workers.

Tuesday, May 26, 2020, 11AM – 12PM PT: Resilience, Grit and Innovation in Times of Crisis (Free for ATD members)
During this webinar, you’ll come to understand why your brain is so challenged by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. David Rock, CEO & Co-Founder of NeuroLeadership Institute, will provide the tools you need to develop specific language for how to manage day to day and develop a deeper understanding of the actions needed to build resilience for you and your team. He’ll share the critical habits everyone needs and how to use neuroscience to activate habits at scale.

Wednesday, May 27, 2020, 11AM – 12PM PT: Mastering the Fractured State of Sales Enablement and Training (Free for ATD members)
Are you ready for virtual sales training? Companies around the globe are cancelling sales meetings and in-person training sessions to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. Sales enablement managers and sales trainers are wondering how to get new hires up to speed and keep teams on track. Building a virtual training program when you’ve relied on in-person meetings may feel like an impossible task. Fortunately, there are proven tactics to quickly and easily train remote teams. In this webinar, Mary Charles, Sales Enablement Director at Allego, and Tunde Aldarondo, Partner Account Manager at Allego, will share actionable steps for how to transform your training.

Thursday, May 28, 2020, 10AM – 11AM PT: Unlocking Opportunities for Immersive Learning
Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have been widely used in the gaming and marketing industries for years. As the technology advances and device costs comes down, we’re seeing the learning industry finally begin to capitalize on the applications and benefits of VR and AR. From simulating difficult conversations to recreating hazardous environments, these technologies are allowing organizations to give learners the kind of hands-on, immersive learning experiences that in the past have been too costly or dangerous to reproduce. Join David Wentworth, Principal Analyst with Brandon Hall Group, and Betsy Geller, Senior Learning Consultant at Conduent, as they explore what these technologies mean to the future of immersive learning.

Friday, May 29, 2020, 8AM – 9AM PT: How Covid-19 Has Turned Mobile Delivery Into the #1 L&D Priority (Free for ATD members)
COVID-19 has taught us that video’s no longer optional. It has also exposed how the video experience can be dull or dynamic — so much depends on delivery. How we design and deliver the video experience makes all the difference when it comes to engaging talent. Join William Arruda, Founder of Reach, and Ora Shtull, Co-Founder of CareerBlast, for an action-packed webinar on how to optimize video as a learning resource from design through delivery.