Free T&D Webinars for June 2014

It's hard to believe we were wearing mittens just a couple of months ago! Spring is well into its stride, and everywhere you look, things are blooming. This is a great time of year to shake off any remaining cold-weather cobwebs and make an action plan. Why not check out a free webinar or two and get some fresh ideas? We hope they will inspire and motivate you.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Creating Highly Effective Virtual Teams – A Case Study

Can a virtual team be as effective as a co-located team? This is a question that organizations are debating, and the arguments on both sides are very compelling. The reality is, a virtual team can be very effective if the correct conditions are met and maintained. It’s about putting together the right personalities, ensuring they have the right tools, and leading the team successfully. After discussing the arguments for and against establishing a virtual team, this workshop will use real-life examples to address six key enablers for success:

• How to form the virtual team

• How to enable the virtual team

• How to maintain the virtual team

• How to protect the virtual team

• How to lead the virtual team

• How to reward the virtual team

Tuesday, June 3, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Leading Collaborative Virtual Teams

As advancing technology and globalization continue to impact many organizations, it's clear that virtual teams require consistent attention, direction, and recognition from managers. Strong work relationships remain critical to drive productivity and support innovation, trust, and nimble teamwork. But building and maintaining strong relationships becomes challenging as teams become more dispersed. What must a leader do in the virtual workplace to effectively manage distributed team members? After attending this one-hour webinar, you'll be able to:

• Design your "game plan" around eight practices used by the best virtual team managers

• Bring attention, direction, and recognition to your virtual team

• Build accountability even when you can't sit down next to your colleagues

Tuesday, June 3, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Trends in the Corporate Training Market: MOOCs and Online Development Programs

In today’s online environment, the ability to learn any subject is merely a click away. People can use the Internet to learn how to play guitar, bake a cake, or repair a dishwasher. Open online courses allow learners to easily drop into learning environments that meet their specific needs. Why shouldn’t they be able to learn business skills and concepts that will help develop their skills and grow their careers in the same way? With the growing skills gap, it is more important than ever to invest in continuous learning within the workplace. Join Senior Analyst David Wentworth of Brandon Hall Group as he explores the power of incorporating an online learning platform to attract top candidates, train new employees, and develop the skillset of their workforce. Key takeaways include:

• A look at how individuals learn best today and what that means for the future of corporate learning

• The role that MOOCs play in the corporate training environment

• How organizations can adapt their learning and development programs to keep their employees’ skills up to date

• Real-world examples of companies successfully embracing online learning platforms

Wednesday, June 4, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Three Top Tips for Applying to Brandon Hall Group’s Excellence in Technology Awards Program

Are you a solution provider that offers phenomenal, innovative technologies to learning, talent management, HR, or sales and marketing organizations? Or are you an organization that has created or implemented technologies to help streamline, save costs, and improve productivity within your organization? Then we want to hear from you, and invite you to apply for the Excellence in Technology Awards Program in mid-June. The program offers you an opportunity to showcase your products, which will be reviewed by Brandon Hall Group’s elite analyst team and industry experts. Now entering its 20th year, the Brandon Hall Group 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.

This 15-minute webinar will offer you step-by-step instructions, including:

• Overview of a simple process for applying

• nside tips on what the judges look for in the applications

• What not to do

Thursday, June 5, 2014, 7AM – 8AM PST: Coaching with a Global Mindset (Free for ASTD members)

This webinar will develop a foundation for understanding what coaching is and how culture influences the coaching process. Participants will harvest the creative potential generated when people who think and act differently come together. In today’s interconnected and interdependent global workplace, it is vital to shift paradigms from cross-cultural to intercultural to inclusiveness. By doing so, we build bridges across the cultural, linguistic, generational, and gender divides found when working across national boundaries, organizational boundaries, and the boundaries created by different disciplines and educational backgrounds.

Tuesday, June 10, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Key Practices for Developing a Game-Changing Candidate Engagement Strategy

The name of the game in recruiting has changed in recent years. With competition for talent at an all-time high, sourcing has become a long-term strategy. As if talent acquisition teams didn’t have enough on their plates with finding qualified candidates and getting them in the door, they’re now expected to attract and engage talent on an ongoing basis. To accomplish this task while keeping up with their day-to-day responsibilities, some have drawn inspiration from customer relationship management techniques used by marketers and salespeople to keep leads warm and foster repeat business. The result is rapidly evolving into a standard component of effective talent acquisition best known as candidate relationship management (CRM). Join Brandon Hall Group Talent Acquisition Analyst Kyle Lagunas as he discusses key practices in CRM, including:

• Establishing a working definition and value-add of candidate relationship management

• Identifying effective CRM techniques in use by today’s most successful hiring organizations

• Highlighting tools and technologies available to support CRM as part of a long-term talent acquisition strategy

Tuesday, June 10, 2014, 9AM – 10AM PST: Leaders as Teachers: Improve Organization Foresight and Fast Sight(Free for ASTD members)

Foresight means seeing what’s ahead. Fast sight means responding to change faster than competitors. Learn how a leaders-as-teachers (LAT) approach improves these two essential characteristics of sustainable success. A formal LAT program develops leadership capacity to analyze and learn from failure; encourage discussion, debate, and experimentation; distribute wisdom deeper into the organization to strengthen alignment and execution; and create a culture that is open to learning. When leaders teach, they create environments to help teams discover, adapt, and respond effectively to changing business conditions. This session will teach participants:

• Evidence to build a business case for a LAT approach

• Ideas to shape the size and scope of an approach that will succeed and survive long term

• Considerations for expanding the role of leader-teachers far beyond the boundaries of the traditional classroom

Tuesday, June 10, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Zeroing In: How to Meet Your Leadership Development Challenges

As many industries recover from a withering worldwide recession, organizations are focusing on new ways to expand the strategic contributions of their leaders. AchieveGlobal conducted research with 50 major companies to get a clear picture of what leadership development looks like—the challenges, goals, approaches and outcomes—and to share insights you can apply in your organization. Join us to zero in on new findings on critical ways to develop your leaders, including:

• Challenges – Surprisingly, rather than grappling with external business conditions (the economy, technology, etc.), organizations are more stressed about solving eight functional leadership development challenges.

• Goals – Regardless of the challenges they face, most organizations want their leaders to be able to improve day-to-day results in nine behavioral areas.

• Approaches – To reach their goals, organizations need to decide how much they’ll commit to learning initiatives. Consider four ways to define your learning initiatives and key questions to help you decide which approach to take.

• Outcomes – The webinar will conclude with details on how four top organizations in different industries successfully met their most pressing leadership development challenges.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Bridging the Gender Gap – A New Approach to Shattering the Glass Ceiling

Despite strong efforts in many organizations, women continue to be poorly represented in top leadership roles worldwide. This means many businesses are failing to reap the well-documented "gender dividend." So what are all these well-meaning companies doing wrong?

Chances are, they are looking at “advancing women leaders” as a development issue, or perhaps as a hiring-and-promoting challenge—when, in fact, it’s a culture change issue. Advancing women into leadership roles successfully requires bringing together all stakeholders (and both genders) in a concerted change effort, with support and energy from top leadership. The organization must change, to bridge the gender gap and make the very best use of all its talent, thereby gaining a competitive advantage. In this webinar, you will learn:

• The gender dividend: the business advantage of developing women leaders in the organization

• Why addressing this challenge as a change effort that brings many stakeholders together is essential to success

• How your change management initiative can succeed in bridging the gender gap to include everyone

• How to use your talent management strategy as a key lever

• Some specific skills women leaders need to be effective in positions of power

Thursday, June 12, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: A Framework for Mobile Learning

Mobile learning may still be in its infancy, but according to a new Brandon Hall Group survey, it is proving to be effective, and high-performing companies are leading the way. The challenge is where to begin. Organizations are struggling to understand whether mobile learning is important to them, and if so, how it fits into their learning landscape. In fact, according to Brandon Hall Group’s 2013 Mobile Learning Survey, only 21 percent of companies worldwide have a formal mobile learning strategy.

Join Senior Analyst David Wentworth of Brandon Hall Group and Pete Barrett, NetDimensions’ President (Americas) and General Manager of NetDimensions Interactive, as they examine what a fully mature mobile learning framework looks like and offer ways for organizations to either get started or move ahead.

Key takeaways include:

• A view of the current mobile learning landscape

• Mobile learning strategies of high performing organizations

• Real-world examples of mobile learning and performance support in action.

Thursday, June 12, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Let Go and Replace Very Old LMSs that Do Not Support New Learners and Business Needs

Studies have shown that companies are systematically changing LMSs into newer and better-suited learning systems to support newer learner needs and business demands. But how do you assess whether it’s time to make the change? In this webinar you will learn:

• What are the common moans and complaints based on studies about LMSs, their cousins LCMSs, Knowledge Management and Performance Support systems?

• Where are the fracture points between learner and business needs, and the capabilities and strategies of LMSs, etc.?

• How do you conduct, collect, and present data to determine whether it’s time to let go or replace your LMSs?

• What important strategies must you plan and prepare to implement the change?

• How do you ensure that the new solutions will meet new learner and business needs?

• What are models and examples of learning systems that are highly flexible, affordable, and creative, and that allow learners to go through discovery, play, and structured learning?

Monday, June 16, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Mediocrity or Greatness: Transformational Leadership in an Incremental World(Free for ASTD members)

The world is changing so quickly that just being competent or improving incrementally isn’t sufficient for sustained success. Yet most organizations are satisfied with only getting a little better, consistently resisting more transformational initiatives. This webinar presents a proven, low-risk methodology for developing transformational leadership throughout an organization. Based on the recently published book The Star Factor (written by the presenters), the webinar shows people how to discover the “wisdom” that makes star performers exceptional. This webinar will teach you to use the latest in the neuroscience of learning to develop others in your organization to think and act like the stars and transformational leaders.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Big Data(Free for ASTD members)

This webcast is based on the recently released report from ASTD and the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) titled, Big Data, Better Learning? How Big Data Is Affecting Organizational Learning. The report dives into the trending field of big data and examines how organizational learning is gathering and leveraging big data for training and development.

Join Carol Morrison, senior research analyst at i4cp, and Jenny Dearborn, senior vice president and chief learning officer at SAP, as they explore the findings of the report and how organizations are using big data.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Best of Performance Support Symposium: Extending the Learning Blend with Performance Support

Organizations today face an urgent need to continuously support learning and performance on the job. The scope of the learning environment extends beyond classroom and online blends to include learning and performance-support opportunities at the point of work. Considering workforce mobility alone forces a reassessment of how we design, develop, and deliver solutions at the point of work. While we excel at linear learning methods in formal training, the work context requires a more diverse mix of smaller, task-level, role-specific learning and performance-support assets.

Participants in this session will learn how to create seamless, edge-to-edge solutions that extend a blend of the right learning and performance-support assets to the right learners and performers—at their moment(s) of need, in the right amount, in the right format, and to and from the right devices. You’ll learn why expanded discovery at the point of work reshapes and drives agile, iterative design and development methods that extend into the post-training point of work.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: The Business Side of a Successful Performance Consulting Practice – Session 2: Finding Your Niche

This series is for you if you are new to consulting or are thinking about starting your own consulting practice in the areas of training, e-learning, process improvement, or performance improvement. The series will explore issues like:

• If I’m good at what I do, why do I need to worry about the business side of my business?

• Why should I find a niche? I like doing a lot of stuff and I’m more interesting getting paid.

• Why should I worry about legal structure stuff? I hire people for this.

• What will insurance do for me? What’s the difference anyway?

• Contract! I didn’t sign up to be a lawyer.

• I already have a network. Why worry about marketing channels?

This session is about finding your market niche so you stand out in the noise of established players, wannabes, and has-beens. You will understand the importance of branding yourself in ways that distinguish you in the marketplace.

Thursday, June 19, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Using Kirkpatrick® to Move Beyond Training Order-Taking

Do you feel like the order-taker in the training drive-thru lane? Then you won’t want to miss this new webinar. During this session, you will discover tactics to create more meaningful communication with training requesters so that you can better understand the performance and results that the training is intended to support. You will learn the critical questions to ask that will allow you to move beyond the training talk and into conversation about organizational needs. You will witness role plays demonstrating how key conversations could occur, with a focus on where the conversation went well and where it veered off track to assist you in managing your own conversations successfully.

Whether you lead a training department or are an instructional designer hoping to get better direction and feedback, this session will assist you in creating and delivering training that impacts performance and key organizational results.

Tuesday, June 24, 10AM – 11AM PST: Why Sales Training Doesn’t Work and What to Do About It

Improving performance of the sales team is likely the most difficult task any Sales manager or trainer faces. The pace at which we work and the amount of information needed on the job is overwhelming. Traditional methods of training just don’t work. Join experts from Sales and Marketing Management (SMM) magazine and Brainshark to learn how to turn training from a one-time event into a continuous journey that leads to increased sales. On this webinar with SMM and Brainshark you’ll learn:

• Strategies to take training to the next level with continuous sales performance support

• Techniques for creating a sales training process and tips on how to implement it

• How to measure and understand what works

Wednesday, June 25, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Is the Loss of Institutional Knowledge Hurting Your Company?

Over the next decade, organizations will experience the largest wave of retirements in history. To further impact turnover rates, Gen X and Gen Y workers on the average are leaving after only five and two years of service respectively. Without a solid and ongoing information succession plan to capture, transform, align, and track your employees’ tacit knowledge, your company’s ability to maintain and/or increase its performance will be affected. Register below to hear more about this challenge and to learn about strategies you can implement at your company to protect your institutional knowledge.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: The Positive Workplace: Bridging the Gap Between Science and Exceptional Performance(Free for ASTD members)

Everyone is talking about the positive workplace! From The Journal of Positive Psychology to Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal, improving productivity through workplace well-being is the hottest topic around. Join industry-leading experts Kim Rowe and Patrick Howell for this dynamic, application-focused webinar, and learn to transform your workplace into a positive one. Find answers to some important questions:

• Why do some organizations change, grow, and perform better than others?

• Why do certain employees remain engaged, stay focused, and exude optimism, while others are easily distracted and disengaged?

• What makes some organizations great places to work, fostering lasting friendships and professional relationships?

Thursday, June 26, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: The Culture Factor (Free for ASTD members)

Lewis Thomas once wrote: “If the air is right, the science will come.” The “air” in organizations has to be right for everything else to come, from gaining a marketplace advantage to attracting top talent, engaging employees, and developing new ideas to sustained profitability. Effective leaders are great at creating cultures that supply that air because they know that until they get culture right, nothing else will work well, at least not for any length of time. In this webcast, we will discuss why culture is such a game changer, strategies to create a culture that produces business results, and some immediate steps you can take today to up the air quality in your organization.