The future of workplace learning panel discussion

The Vancouver chapter of the Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD) will be hosting a panel discussion on The Future of Workplace Learning in September. Limestone Managing partner Stephanie Jutras will be one of the five panel members!

Come and join the discussion and explore the different learning and development trends through a series of question and answer panel discussion. You'll gain valuable insights, practical ideas and new perspectives listen to and engaging in conversation with the learning experts’ panel speakers. Light snacks will be available.

Mark your calendars for Wednesday, September 24th, 2014 from 5:30 - 8:30pm. The evening will be held at the BC Liquor Distribution Branch, 3200 East Broadway, Vancouver (West of Rupert Street, parking on site and the skytrain is nearbly).

You will need to send in an RSVP if you are attending. And don't forget to bring your business cards for networking and a prize draw.

Free Webinars for September 2014

It seems like summer goes by faster every year. As the days grow shorter and the beach becomes less tempting, indoor activities start to beckon. Why not get cozy with one of the free webinars being offered this month? We hope they will inspire and motivate you.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014, 6AM – 7AM PST: BEST Webcast Series: Tech Mahindra—Aligning Learning to an Organization's Vision & Mission to Drive Business (Free for ATD members)

In this webcast, Tech Mahindra, an ATD BEST Award winner, will discuss how learning can become a strategic differentiator for organizational growth.

During this webcast, you will learn to:

• Align learning goals to the organization's mission.

• Draw business outcomes through learning initiatives.

• Create a self-sustained learning model.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: Learning From Diversity and Inclusion Leaders: Prudential Financial and Pepsico (Free for ATD members)

Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) is recognized as being a necessity to compete and thrive in today’s global, changing workplace and marketplace. Many organizations have discovered that putting the aspiration to create an inclusive environment into action is quite challenging. Join us for this interactive webinar, where we will explore two in-depth case examples: Prudential Financial, ranked number eight in the DiversityInc. Top 50, and PepsiCo, which has established innovative ways to reward and recognize individuals and teams who exemplify D&I. As a result of this webcast, participants will:

• Learn how Prudential and PepsiCo establish priorities for D&I investments and obtain senior-level sponsorship.

• Discover how Prudential and PepsiCo engage employees at different levels in their respective organizations to get involved.

• Learn examples of “big wins” at Prudential in the workplace and marketplace.

• Learn how PepsiCo creates rewards and recognition programs to promote diversity best practices globally.

• Explore where PepsiCo and Prudential see D&I headed in the future

Wednesday, September 3, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: A Leader's Guide to Getting Things Done (Free for ATD members)

Getting things done in complex organizations doesn’t get any easier. Developing leadership gets squeezed out by the challenges and pressures of organizational life. Influential leadership is a new framework for making things happen, and for navigating between the short-term pressures and the long-term purpose of developing leaders.

Short, sharp, and practical, this webcast will share simple ideas that leaders can apply immediately to begin influencing more effectively, making faster progress, and freeing up time to allow their leadership to flourish.

Thursday, September 4, 2014, 5:30AM – 6:30AM PST: BEST Webcast Series: ICICI Lombard – Learning is Protein for the Organization's Muscle (Free for ATD members)

Hear how learning is the protein in the corporate diet at ICICI Lombard, a nine-time BEST Award winner. Learning is the perpetual fuel that satiates each employee’s personal desire to constantly stretch and grow. It adds variety and substance to every job and develops the muscle needed to drive a career. It enhances the flexibility and endurance that helps rise to new challenges. Most importantly, learning is the building block that helps the entire company to continuously grow, strengthen, and be more resilient. In this webcast, you will learn how to design remedial actions to optimize performance levels and build the knowledge and capability base across the organization.

Thursday, September 4, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Finding Balance in Blended Learning: Making the Move to Interactive Online Training

In-person training is reliable, personal, and interactive. Online training is scalable, cost-effective, and empowers people to learn at their own pace, on their own time. With today's agile workforce, blended learning offers the best of both worlds. 

Yet online learning is too often limited to videos and slide decks, meaning learners may spend more time checking Facebook than learning the material. So how can organizations successfully make the move to online training while creating the same kind of captivating and engaging experiences found in person? 

In this lively webinar, you will...

• Learn how to create interactive online learning experiences that your audience will love.

• Explore ways to migrate lecture-style materials and exercises into online courses.

• Receive actionable tips on how to convey concepts interactively and keep your learners engaged.

Immediately following the webinar, participants are invited to remain for a semi-private demonstration of the new Versal for Organizations platform.

Thursday, September 4, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: Moving Beyond Compliance: Integrating Your LMS and CRM(Free for ATD members)

Most learning management systems (LMS) are put into place to implement and track compliance training. To ensure 100 percent employee compliance, it is essential to integrate the LMS with the organization’s CRM system. Your sales force most likely uses the CRM system every day—they probably don’t use the LMS every day. In many organizations, the LMS and CRM can leverage each other to achieve better product training and education. Better-trained partners can lead to improved customer satisfaction and reduced support costs.

Attend this webinar and learn how to:

• Identify business cases for LMS/CRM integration.

• List the benefits your organization could achieve with an LMS/CRM integration.

• Diagram the system work flow for a typical LMS/CRM integration

Friday, September 5, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Marketing Strategies for a Targeted Job Search: Tips for Attracting the Attention of Employers (Free for ATD members)

Are you prepared to market yourself? Ask yourself these questions to find out:

• When was the last time you revised your résumé?

• Do you know what T&D competencies or expertise you want to showcase in a marketing campaign?

• Can you describe the professional image or brand you would like to project?

• Is your professional story up-to-date so that it represents the present into the future and not the past?

This session provides practical and useful tips for:

• Developing a marketing action plan.

• Identifying your market.

• Viewing résumés as a basic marketing document.

• Preparing for interviews.

• Creating a positive and confident mindset.

Essential to a successful marketing campaign is knowing how to tell a story and what story to tell to whom. This session teaches those skills and more. Learn what it takes to get the recruiter to listen to you and place your name on the follow-up list. This discussion also will include some of the differences between  phone or face-to-face interviews and those held at job fairs and employment programs.

Monday, September 8, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Workforce Management Study: Findings Preview

Powering meaningful analytics, workforce planning, and managing a dispersed and diverse workforce: These are some of the most critical workforce management challenges revealed in Brandon Hall Group’s latest research. We invite you to join Mollie Lombardi, principal analyst and study lead, as she shares a sneak peek at some of the initial findings from this breakthrough study, including how organizations are rising to meet these challenges. She will cover:

• An overview of key concerns, drivers, and trends in workforce management.

• Study demographics.

• Insights into how organizations are using technologies like automated time and attendance, scheduling, absence management, and payroll solutions to drive business value.

• How top-performing organizations are integrating workforce management with key talent and business processes.

• The planned output from the study, including a timeline for publications on key topics.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: 2014 Excellence Awards Winners Revealed Sept. 9th

And so the countdown begins! Winners of the prestigious 20th annual Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards in Learning and Development, Talent Management, and Human Resources & Sales and Marketing will be announced in a live web event. Register for this much-anticipated live announcement and see which organizations will be dubbed as this year’s prestigious Gold, Silver, and Bronze awards winners in more than 50 categories.

Your hosts, Brandon Hall Group CEO Mike Cooke, COO Rachel Cooke, and VP/Corporate and Product Development Claude Werder, will take you through the winners of each category and highlight their achievements. As part of the program’s 20th anniversary, all winners will be honored at Brandon Hall Group’s HCM Excellence Conference 2015 to be held January 28–30 at the Hyatt Regency Pier Sixty-Six in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Conference presenters include select Excellence Award-winning organizations, who will take you through their journey of developing and deploying programs, strategies, modalities, processes, systems, and tools that have achieved measurable results.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Building Coachable and Approachable Employees for Training Success

The world of training is changing. The days of all-day workshops and seminars are behind us. Employees need to be developed, but there is little time allowed for the old traditional ways. This is where the world is changing, and NOW has never been a better time for trainers to build their value!

Employees and managers must share the responsibility for performance development. This webinar is dedicated to teaching the foundational principles that learners need to become high performers, and how trainers and managers can train and coach them.

• What the foundational principles are.

• Why foundational principles are required to develop targeted skills.

• Why development of the foundational principles will drive coaching and training success.

• How to create coachable and approachable employees.

• How to assess employees’ learning capacity.

• How managers can coach non-coachable and approachable employees into high performers.

• Why coaching is Training’s # 1 Supporter.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Beyond the LMS: Building a Virtual Training Strategy

Join Training Magazine for a live webinar where you will learn how to create virtual learning environments that deliver an interactive learning experience. This webinar will also discuss how a virtual learning environment can complement your existing learning management system—increasing learner engagement, improving knowledge retention, and reaching learners at their point of need.

This interactive webinar will feature guidance on how to:

• Increase the reach and effectiveness of your training programs.

• Use a virtual learning environment to provide an outstanding learning experience.

• Enhance and extend your existing learning management system.

• Extend the life of training sessions and content.

Wednesday, September 10, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: SharePoint for Training and Compliance (Free for ATD members)

Training and compliance are now more than ever a necessity in the corporate world. Adhering to applicable laws and regulations concerning your business is vital, and failure to do so can lead to severe penalties. Leveraging an option like SharePoint for training and compliance can effectively reduce security risks and challenges associated with compliance. In this session, we’ll discuss some examples of using SharePoint to support training and compliance in organizations. Topics include:

• Managing training curriculum.

• Employee onboarding/orientation.

• Workflows and version control.

• Project management.

• Using SharePoint as LMS.

Join guest speakers Dr. Shawn Andrews and Matthew Smith as they walk you through some practical examples based on business problems, solutions, results, limitations, workarounds, and lessons learned.

Thursday, September 11, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: How to Add Adventure, Challenge and Discovery in Learning Lessons

Learners often feel that training and eLearning are the least interesting and engaging activities. They have no time. They are busy. So, we need to push hard or force them to complete courses.

What if your courses provide the learners a sense of adventure, challenge and discovery? What if the courses become so inviting that learners are glued to the screen and refuse to end the course? What if they rave about the course and attribute high praises? What if your course is virally promoted to other learners as a “must experience” learning event?

In this webinar, you will learn:

• How to avoid using word learning games, but still add adventure and excitement in your courses.

• How to use heroes (super bosses, employees, customers, etc.) or villains (really obnoxious bosses, employees, customers, etc.) to represent learning challenges.

• How to add provocative exercises and interactivities that enthrall learners into action and learning.

• How to set up an adventure-based exercise by following a step-by-step process.

• How to make sure learners not only get excited but also use the knowledge.;

Thursday, September 11, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: New Technologies for Virtual Coaching (Free for ATD members)

The latest innovation in achieving performance improvement has arrived, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Many of us are experiencing the pressure of  decreased budgets, remote teams, and an increased need for performance coaching.

In this webcast, we will share the key reasons why talent development suffers, and how to overcome those pitfalls and unleash performance. We will also share the latest in a leading, web-based technology platform that helps accelerate talent development.

Friday, September 12, 2014, 9AM – 10AM PST: The Executive Speaking Presence(Free for ATD members)

What makes us gravitate toward some speakers over others? What is it that makes some people easy to listen to, while others put us to sleep? What can we do to be a great speaker?

This session takes an in-depth look at what it takes to be a successful speaker today, and how to maximize your executive presence in front of any group. We’ll examine 12 key aspects of verbal communication that will help you succeed in presenting, leading meetings, training, and engaging others in successful conversation.

In this webcast, you will learn to:

• Maximize your personal appeal by expressing a fine balance between strength and warmth

• Enhance your content by creating clear, compelling messages and delivering them powerfully.

• Boost your impact by turning presentations into interactive and appealing conversations.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 10AM – 10:30AM PST: Brandon Hall Group Membership: Dynamic Tools for Business Improvement

Whether you work within a Talent Management, Talent Acquisition, Learning and Development, or HR/Workforce Management function, a Brandon Hall Group Membership unlocks answers to questions that every organization needs in order to excel in today's fast-changing business environment.

If you are looking to enhance your human capital management processes, develop a better strategy, plan a major technology purpose, or initiate an organizational transformation, Brandon Hall Group can help with its vast array of online resources and advisory and training services. Our members receive unlimited access to research, and generous collaboration time with our team of expert analysts.

Learn more about how BHG can be part of your team. We will provide you with:

• A short update on the latest research

• A tour of our Research OnDemand member centre, DataNow (benchmarking database) and KnowledgeBases (database of technology solution provider profiles, and comparison tools).

• Overview of strategic consulting services.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: When Remembering Really Matters: The Power of Serious Games for Learning

Remembering is hard. Forgetting is easy. Employees have to complete a lot of training during the year—so much so that it is simply impossible for them to remember everything that is asked of them. “Processes, policies, terms, Oh My!” While business-critical for organizations, so much detail can be overwhelming to learners.

This session shares research on remembering—and forgetting—and identifies techniques that foster long-term retention. It then connects these techniques to games and explains how games can help form long-term memories ... and business results. We'll share recent research on games and case studies that demonstrate how games can be used for learning.

Attendees will be entered to win a free "starter" package for use in your organization and—after the webinar—are invited to remain for a focused exploration of the game-creation platform, Knowledge Guru.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014, 10AM – 10:30AM PST: Working with Brandon Hall Group: Many Options, High Value

All solution providers need tools to connect with clients, and Brandon Hall Group  provides you with a wide variety. Our newest and best include:

• BusinessBuilders: A research-based tool that helps organizations make a business case for new technology purchases. Available for licensing.

• DataNow: Our new online platform that puts customizable research results in your hands as soon as our analysts close a survey. You can instantly filter data by company size, revenue, and region; reports on major verticals are also available. DataNow comes with all Ultimate memberships.

• KnowledgeBlasts: Short research reports—on topics like technology selection and implementation—that deliver compelling data as well as tips on how to succeed. Available for licensing or as part of our Premier or Ultimate membership packages.

• KnowledgeGraphics: Research data for your clients or prospects to put to immediate use. One-page, colourful graphics available for licensing or as part of Premier or Ultimate membership.

Learn more about these tools—and other services Brandon Hall Group offers to solution providers—at this insightful webinar.

Wednesday, September 17, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Subject Matter Expert + Tablet = Faster, Cheaper, Better Video Learning Content

In this session, we'll discuss a whole new way to gather video learning materials from your subject matter experts. Rather than dragging them to a recording studio, why not put the studio in their hands?

We'll introduce you to a new class of tablet-based video production tools that makes it easy and even fun for SMEs to share their knowledge with the organization and its customers. You'll walk away with a couple of great new free tools and a lot of insight into how to fit these tools into a learning program.

We'll cover:

• New, easy-to-use tools that will let your SMEs create content right from their tablet.

• Best practices for using these tools effectively.

• How to make this content even more effective with easy post-production tools.

• How to coach your SMEs to get the best possible on-camera performance.

Thursday, September 18, 2014, 9AM – 10AM PST: Cracking the Hidden Job Market (Free for ATD members)

In this fast-paced, 60-minute session, national job search expert Laura M. Labovich will share with you:

• Why the "reactive" job search approach is a time-drainer and waste of time.

• The importance of being proactive in your job search campaign, and why it's too late to land the job once the job is posted.

• How a job target can enable you to help your network to help you better.

• Why a company list is like a GPS for your job search.

• How to become an insider—because insiders get hired!

Friday, September 19, 2014, 9AM – 10AM PST: Six Keys to Career Resilience(Free for ATD members)

It is commonly believed that “training is always the first to go” when organizations need to cut the budget, leaving many corporate training professionals looking for work. You often hear “let the problems roll off you like water off a duck's back,” but do you know that ducks aren't always waterproof? It takes a certain process for a duck to stay afloat, as well as for us to keep our career afloat. Building career resilience is crucial to your success. Using the metaphor of a duck’s waterproofing and relevant real-life case scenarios, we will explore the six steps to help you build your career resilience.

Tuesday, September 23, 10AM – 11AM PST: Creativity Matters: Why Creativity Is Crucial and How to Develop Creative Employees (Free for ATD members)

Global business trends underscore the important role of creativity and creative problem solving in the new millennium. Indeed, many reports published in the last several years highlight creative thinking, innovation, and creative problem solving as essential 21st-century skills for both individuals and organizations. Unfortunately, most schools and organizations are not effective in developing these crucial skills. A recent Conference Board report on job readiness skills listed creativity as one of the 14 applied skills most desired about new hires, yet creativity was also the number one skill organizations felt least prepared to develop among employees.

The purpose of this session is to highlight how these trends support the need for more concerted and systematic efforts in promoting creative thinking in individuals and organizations. Some of the topics to be explored and experienced include:

• What is creativity?

• How can I become a more effective creative thinker?

• How does creative thinking relate to leadership effectiveness?

• How to develop the creative talents of employees.

Tuesday, September 23, 10AM – 11AM PST: DataNow: Easy-to-Customize Research for HCM Practitioners

Brandon Hall Group for more than two decades has produced great research on Human Capital Management. But providing research that is quickly accessible and customized to each client’s needs has been challenging. Until now. This webinar introduces new research that is instantly accessible and customizable for your needs through Brandon Hall Group’s new DataNow platform. In this webinar, Brandon Hall Group analysts will show highlights of recent learning, talent acquisition, and workforce management research that can you can see in various formats, filtered by company size, revenue, and more.

In this webinar you will:

• See highlights of just-released research on Workforce Management, Social Talent Acquisition, Compliance Training, and Social Learning.

• See how you can quickly filter data by company size, revenue, and much more!

• See how data can be quickly exported to share with your team.

Wednesday, September 24, 10AM – 11AM PST: The Agile Organization: Improving Time to Decision through Collaboration

Modern organizations are driven by their ability to react, change, and make decisions quickly. But attaining that agility can be difficult as organizations continue to become more diverse and dispersed. It takes more than just collaboration tools. It takes an organizational commitment to a collaborative culture, supported by the right tools and technology, to let organizations move faster, perform better, and win more often.

Join Mollie Lombardi, VP and principal analyst, workforce management, of the Brandon Hall Group and Shelley Schmoker, VP Marketing at Bloomfire, as they look at the links between agility and collaboration. The webinar will discuss:

• How your organization can harness collaboration to improve decision making.

• The key strategies to building and reinforcing a collaborative culture.

• How collaboration not only supports internal processes like learning and performance, but how it impacts sales and customer service

Wednesday, September 24, 10AM – 11AM PST: Best of DevLearn: Streamlining Your eLearning Production Process for Efficiency

Clients want high-quality courses quickly and inexpensively, but there are many parts to creating eLearning courses, so you need an effective and efficient production process. A training, tracking, and performance monitoring system will let you increase your quality and decrease your production time and costs.

Session participants will learn best practices for documenting procedures, establishing clear roles, and creating tools, job aids, and checklists. You’ll get access to many of the tools and checklists. In this session, you will learn:

• The data types to capture and analyze about your current production process.

• How to map out your production process at both a macro and micro level.

• How to create a knowledge base to help train team members and reduce effort.

• How to create systems for effectively managing production.

Thursday, September 25, 10AM – 11AM PST:Strategies for Training Groups with Mixed Reading and Communication Skill Levels – Part 1 (Free for CSTD members)

Are you frustrated by mismatches between the materials you have to deliver, and the literacy, communication, and other foundation skills of the people who show up?

What can you do to increase your success in supporting learning with mixed level groups? Building support for literacy and foundation skills into your instructional and assessment strategies can enhance learning outcomes and support employees in developing their skills. Best of all, strategies for supporting literacy and foundational skills are often more engaging, memorable, and fun for everyone.

This is the first of a two-part webinar series offered by the Advancing Workplace Learning project in partnership with CSTD. To learn more, please visit the website. www.advancingworkplacelearning.ca.

Friday, September 26, 8:30AM – 9:30AM PST: Creating Engaged Employees (Free for ATD members)

The word "engagement" evokes different impressions from different people. What does the word mean? Why should anyone care about engagement? How can an organization create and sustain a culture of engagement? This presentation will answer these simple, yet profound questions. Upon attending this webcast, participants will be able to:

• Define the word “engagement.”

• Explain how to make the case for engagement with leaders and key decision makers.

• Build an organizational culture of engagement and sustain it.

Participants also will receive an instrument to compare their organizations' engagement culture to best practices.

Monday, September 29, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: Employee Brain Performance: Leveraging Neuroscience to Improve Critical Thinking (ATD subscriber content)

Science offers surprising information about what really engages employees and makes a difference in optimizing their performance.

Claire Herring is the head of product at Blue Ocean Brain. Claire is a human capital performance improvement expert. Her work has been featured on the Hallmark Channel, in Real Simple magazine, Fitness Magazine, and Women’s Health. She combines her experience as a Big Four executive with advanced degrees in cognitive science to help organizations optimize employee performance and elevate critical thinking. As head of product for Blue Ocean Brain, Claire helps organizations promote cognitive skill improvement through intellectual challenges and fun experiences that are brand new 365 days a year.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: 3 Keys to Getting Employee Engagement Right

It's estimated that unengaged workers cost the US $350 billion/year and that US businesses lose $11 billion annually as a result of employee turnover. Clearly engagement is a key priority for all organizations—so why is it so low? And more importantly, what can be done—quickly—to get it right?

Join us as Mahan Tavakoli, Regional Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer for Dale Carnegie, shares best practices and action steps you can take immediately to start improving employee engagement.

Takeaways include:

• Why organizations have largely failed to turn engagement around despite all the buzz.

• Latest research into the drivers of employee engagement.

• Actions individuals can take—immediately—to start boosting employee morale.

Tuesday, September 30, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: From Searching to Shopping: Leveraging E-Commerce within Your LMS (Free for ATD members)

An extensive catalogue of training content provides tremendous value to an organization and its learners, but ensuring that learners can easily find and access the courses and resources they’re looking for is crucial. Luckily, there are many creative ideas that we can borrow from online retail to help learners find what they’re looking for and even discover content they didn’t know they needed. Finding ways to increase user adoption ensures your learning resources are used and valued!

In this session we will explore ways to leverage e-commerce capabilities to enhance the traditional training and development searching experience. You will learn how to:

• Replace the standard enrolment processes with an intuitive shopping experience.

• Expand the reach of your content through targeted promotions.

• Leverage cross-sell offerings.

• Monetize content to external users’ bases.

It's official! Limestone Learning and Lambda Solutions are strategic partners

Lambda Solutions and Limestone Learning have become strategic partners to provide current and future clients with full-service online learning solutions.

Lambda Solutions is a Moodle certified services partner and a Totara Platinum partner providing systems integration, customization, training and support to enterprise-class customers, including Mt. Sinai Hospital, Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, Alberta Blue Cross, and Canada Health. The company has offices in the United States, Canada and Europe.

Brent Harvey, the VP of Sales and Marketing at Lambda Solutions comments,

“Lambda is really excited to be partnering with Limestone Learning. As experts in instructional design, Limestone Learning provides a like-minded approach to customer excellence. Lambda’s customers will benefit from Limestone’s industry expertise and best practices ensuring the best of both worlds with content creation and benefiting from a platform to deliver flexible e-learning within your organization.”

Limestone Learning is very excited about the opportunity of partnering with the Lambda team!

Read the full press release here.

Limestone Learning team member recognized as 'One to Watch' by ASTD

About a year ago a young woman named Susann (Sue) Prenderville sent my partner Stephanie and me a LinkedIn request asking if we could meet for coffee. She and her partner had moved far away from friends and family in Ireland for work in the U.S. Once contract work ended there, they headed up to Vancouver, B.C. Sue reached out to a number of individuals in the local learning community wanting to make new connections. This is how we first met her.

We got to know Sue over time and eventually she started working on projects for Limestone Learning. She is now a valued member of our Limestone team and we are fortunate to have her. Her sunny personality, her passion for learning, her persistence in getting it right and her willingness to go the extra mile when needed is part of what makes her who she is. She has made such a difference in our personal and professional lives since we’ve first met her. Being in the field of learning and development for over 30 years, it’s easy to forget the days when we were eager new instructional designers wanting to take on the world. Sue has brightened our lives with her passion, enthusiasm and fresh ideas and has given us fresh perspectives and greater enthusiasm for doing what we love to do at Limestone.

We learned last week that Sue has just been awarded the Association for Talent Development (formerly ASTD) “One to Watch” award. Six young professionals are awarded this honor per year in the training and development profession industry who are "dedicated, forward-thinkers and passionate about applying effective and creative solutions to challenges facing their organizations – and our industry". Sue will receive a complimentary ATD membership, a feature in the November 2014 T&D Magazine, a month’s feature on ATD’s One to Watch page and a recognition award next May at the 2015 ATD conference in Orlando, Florida.

We are so excited for her and offer sincerest congratulations to her from Stephanie and myself and the entire Limestone team.  Sue truly deserves to be the “One to Watch”.

Free T&D webinars for July 2014

Happy summer! July is just around the corner, and so is that baking summer heat we look forward to every year. It’s fun to bask in the sun, but when you’re ready for some shade, why not check out a free webinar or two? July is full of good ideas—we hope they will inspire and motivate you.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Designing eLearning for Maximum Motivation

When asked to identify the weakness in most eLearning, designers and students alike often note the failure to engage the learner’s attention as a chief problem. The problem is, “How do you motivate the learner while still doing the serious work of instruction?”

In this webinar, Ethan Edwards will explore the importance of motivation in the design framework for eLearning and present rules for creating maximally motivating eLearning, which will be illustrated through several successful corporate eLearning courses. In this webinar, learn to:

• Analyze the importance of motivation in an eLearning design framework

• Apply six rules for creating maximally motivating eLearning solutions

• Examine design considerations for content, scope, difficulty, judgment, levelling, content placement, and user control

Tuesday, July 1, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: Absolutely, Positively Achieve Level 4 Outcomes (Free for ATD members)

In this webinar, James Pepitone will brief you on what experienced work design consultants know about how to increase business results that are specifically dependent on people. James will help you see and understand the broader system of challenges involved. He also will share numerous stories from his work partnering with his clients’ training and development functions to create Level 4 business results. Participants will learn:

• Why most training programs do not achieve Level 4 outcomes

• The primary factors determining business results dependent on people

• How to respond more effectively to the expectations of managers

• How to absolutely, positively achieve Level 4 outcomes

Wednesday, July 9, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: How to Create a Learning Measurement Strategy

In this session, you'll learn the essential steps needed to build a learning measurement strategy to sustain a practical and scalable measurement process. The session will also explore the key elements to build the measurement culture, including leadership, skills, tools, and technology. Real-world examples of measurement strategy in practice will be provided. This webinar will:

• Provide an overview of learning measurement strategy

• Discuss the criteria to create a strategy that sustains a measurement process

• Listen to real-world examples of how learning measurement strategy is successful

Wednesday, July 9, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Research Spotlight: Workforce Management Trends

Workforce management is often the misunderstood stepsister of the Human Capital world. Images of timecards and payroll reconciliations can be shudder-inducing. But today's modern workforce management is all about how organizations can use technology to optimize processes and help improve efficiency, effectiveness, and employee engagement.

Join Mollie Lombardi, Brandon Hall’s new Principal Analyst covering Workforce Management, as she discusses:

• What workforce management means to today's organizations

• How technology can drive transparency, integration, and analytics to drive business results

• Where workforce and talent management intersect, and how to manage the integration points

• The role of mobile tools and modern business intelligence in optimizing the workforce

Wednesday, July 9, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: Talent Development Reporting Principles (TDRp): Standards for the Reporting and Management of Human Capital (Free for ATD members)

Talent Development Reporting Principles (TDRp) is an industry-led initiative to develop and implement internal reporting and management standards for all key human capital processes, such as L&D, leadership development, and talent acquisition. TDRp employs common industry measures to create three standard statements and three standard management reports to enable practitioners to run talent like a business, ensuring that planned, measurable outcomes are delivered effectively and efficiently. In this webinar, Dave Vance will discuss what types of measures should be reported. He also will explain how to:

• Organize measures into three standard TDRp statements

• Create three management reports from the key measures in the three statements

• Show alignment and expected impact of talent initiatives

• Use the reports to execute with discipline

Thursday, July 10, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: Connecting Learning to the Bottom Line and Showing Impact(Free for ATD members)

In this webinar, Martha Soehren, the chief talent development officer at Comcast, will present a compelling case for using a governance structure to help drive the learning agenda and learning strategy with a keen focus on aligning learning outcomes to business metrics. The Comcast team of 500 L&D professionals uses a standard training measurement strategy that leverages Kirkpatrick’s model and connects the dots from analysis to evaluation. Martha will share a couple of business impact stories and some of the lessons learned from their work. This work is important to Comcast as the largest mass media and communications company in the world by revenue. It is also the largest cable company and home Internet service provider in the United States, and the nation's third largest home telephone service provider.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: How and When to Allow Learners to Cheat in Compliance Courses

Experience shows us that learners try to circumvent or trick the learning process or "cheat" the eLearning compliance course. This behaviour often happens when the requirements of the compliance course are impossible to meet or are completely unreasonable. In the process, the learners find a workaround that designers, developers, and trainers condone. How do we address the dilemma about rigid, inflexible, tracking-only types of eLearning? How do we make a difference in spite of our limited capacities and roles? In the webinar, you will learn:

• What can be done to reduce the pain of boredom and poor learning in compliance courses?

• How do you engage learners during the certification course, even with rigid tracking requirements?

• How do you differentiate between the typical compliance course and story-based compliance course learning environments?

• How can you help learners obtain a few main ideas, yet still comply with the tracking requirements?

• How do you find opportunities to identify must-learn content and apply the “embedding technique” in stories used in your course?

• How do you avoid confusing the administrative control function with the learning function of compliance courses?

Tuesday, July 15, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Manage More Effectively with Emotional Intelligence (Free for ATD members)

It is said that emotional intelligence (EQ) is the key indicator of our success in business, relationships, leadership, and even in our personal happiness. But what makes EQ so important?

This webcast will help you understand how better relationships produce better results. When leaders have EQ skills, team members are motivated to work better and more quickly. They also have more respect for those in leadership, and tend to have a greater sense of pride in their work and in their company.

To ensure that we're leading effectively, we should all have our emotional intelligence skills assessed, and decide if we should work to improve our EQ. This work will pay off, as our emotional intelligence enables us to establish relationships founded on trust, confidence, and respect—qualities of great importance to us as managers.

Thursday, July 17, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: The Accidental Instructional Designer

Chances are, you didn’t dream of becoming a designer of eLearning when you grew up, did you? Most of the working instructional designers in the eLearning business got here by accident. So now that you’re here and doing this work, how can you become a more intentional practitioner? We’ll take a look at four key areas to focus on in order to become a well-rounded eLearning designer, talk about ways that you can take your practice to the next level, and share some quick tips for better eLearning design. In this session you will:

• Explore the four slices of the “eLearning pie” so you have an understanding of the big picture that is our industry

• Identify your own sweet spot as an instructional designer and identify areas where you could dig deeper in order to advance your practice

• Apply simple strategies to your current projects for better eLearning outcomes and more engaging designs

Thursday, July 17, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: Putting Our Brains Back in the Office (Free for ATD members)

What is a "brain-friendly workplace," and how might you play a role in developing brain-friendliness in your organization? Applying recent neuroscience research to management practices, process and system design, and organizational culture, Dr. Erika Garms will introduce the concept of brain-friendliness, compare it to other organizational improvement methods, and offer recommendations for both evaluating the current degree of brain-friendliness in a work group or organization and embarking on an effort to leverage pertinent neuroscience to improve your workplace. Join us for an eye-opening (and mind-opening) session during which you will learn:

• What a brain-friendly workplace is

• Why learning and development professionals are uniquely positioned to drive and support brain-friendliness at work

• How brain-friendliness compares to high-engagement or productivity cultures

• Ways to implement small changes quickly for the beginning of a culture shift

• How to apply principles of brain science to your work

Tuesday, July 22, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Engaging Learners through Game-Thinking

Gamification should be thought of as a design sensibility and not merely a digital tool. It is a thought process and a methodology to think about engaging and motivating learners. While the result of gamification is often fun, the ultimate outcome behind developing a gamified approach is increased engagement and motivation.  In this webinar, explore several methods for applying game-thinking to your own online and classroom learning designs.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: 10 Ways to Ruin Your E-Learning: A How-To Guide in Reverse(Free for ATD members)

In many professional areas, it is usually a good strategy to look to common practices in the field as a guide—maybe not for the most cutting-edge ideas, but at least for reliable models to follow. Unfortunately, in eLearning this can often be a recipe for disaster. Join Ethan Edwards, chief instructional strategist with Allen Interactions, on a journey uncovering the 10 most common design practices that are sure to ruin your eLearning.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Best of mLearning DemoFest 2014: Award-Winning mLearning in Action

This year at mLearnCon, dozens of conference participants will show off their latest mobile learning projects at mLearning DemoFest. Presenters will offer fellow attendees the opportunity to see cutting-edge mobile learning and performance support solutions in action, and share information about the tools, technologies and processes used to build them. Meet some of the winners from this year’s mLearning DemoFest in this free webinar, and see their award-winning solutions.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Top 125 Think Tank: Benchmarking Your Learning Strategy against the Best-of-the-Best

Is your learning strategy firing on all cylinders? We're currently in the process of benchmarking learning techniques and technologies used across multiple Training Magazine's Top 125 winners. During this one-of-a-kind webinar event, we'll share some discoveries from preliminary data on innovative best practices in such areas as proactively establishing an informal learning strategy, using mobile at the right time and for the right reasons, engaging participants in social learning communities,  extending learning to partners and customers, creating macro-level blends; and much more.

In this webinar, you will learn about successful strategies used for:.

• Just-in-time, informal learning

• Mobile learning (using mobile for the right purposes)

• Engaging learners in social learning communities

• Training partners and customers

• Blending techniques and technologies for maximum utility

Wednesday, July 23, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: PM Blasphemy: When Not to Do PM the Official Way (Free for ATD members)

In 1969, the Project Management Institute (PMI) was founded. Project Management specialists were building large buildings, roads, bridges, some of the first computers, and lunar modules. AT&T telephone operators still plugged wires into boards to transfer calls. Paper memos slowly communicated work to be done. Multi-tasking was unheard of! The PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) established a standardized and control-focused approach to completing projects, in the same way ADDIE standardized the new field of training.

Flash forward to 2014: Our work is filled with interruptions, unending work, dysfunctional multi-tasking, and highly-matrixed organizations. To be successful, we have to look at our project artifacts and tools in a new way. Join Lou Russell to learn about shortcuts that help “accidental” project managers organize and adapt to chaos.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: ROI of Public Speaking (Free for ATD members)

This event will teach the public speaker how to show their clients the benefits of hiring them for a public speaking event using tried-and-tested methods of ROI. Participants will be able to answer one or all of these questions:Will this make me money? Will this save me money? Will this solve a problem?

Attendees will then be able to report on these results, showing their clients the ROI of their speaking engagements. Reporting on the ROI level of evaluation is a powerful tool for the public speaker to sell their services and improve their clients’ business. By the end of this webcast, attendees will learn how to:

• Define the ROI process for public speaking opportunities

• Determine if ROI is right for their service

• Map the ROI to a client’s requirements from a public speaking engagement

• Communicate on industry- and client-specific results of public speaking opportunities and training

• Put the puzzle together: evaluation process of public speaking engagements

• Overcome the barriers of ROI

• Report data so that they are perceived as usable and relevant to the target audience

Wednesday, July 30, 10AM – 11AM PST: Employee Engagement for Dummies

You’ve heard of employee engagement, but how do you take it from an idea to an actionable plan? SilkRoad is pleased to partner with Bob Kelleher for the virtual book launch of his latest work, Employee Engagement for Dummies! From the author of Louder Than Words and Creativeship comes this all-inclusive, step-by-step guide to all things employee engagement. Join us as Bob takes attendees on a journey through his brand-new book. He’ll explain concepts that will help you foster employee engagement, a concept that furthers an organization's interests through ensuring that employees remain involved in, committed to, and fulfilled by their work. Learn about:

• Creating a new-hire onboarding checklist

• Implementing a new-hire employee orientation process

• Learn how to improve employee engagement

Thursday, July 31, 10AM – 11AM PST: Show Your Work: L&D's New Frontier

The complaints are familiar: Traditional means of managing organizational knowledge—in reports, status meetings, and standard operating procedures—just don’t work very well. We amass piles of documentation yet can’t find what we need when we need it; we find out too late that a task was already accomplished, better, by someone in another organizational silo; we spend hours never finding the information we’re looking for. 

"Working out loud" (also known as "narrating work" or "showing work") is an increasingly easy way of overcoming a lot of these problems. L&D is uniquely positioned to help in the effort, supporting workers with new tools and techniques for sharing tacit knowledge, building bridges between talent pools, sharpening communication, and helping organizations build better maps of work and activities.  This session explores some approaches to showing work—and how L&D can help.

Thursday, July 31, 10AM – 11AM PST: Using Social Collaboration to Accelerate Traditional Learning

According to Brandon Hall Group’s Business Focus 2014 survey, more than 50 percent of organizations say social media will be of great interest to them over the next 12 months, more so than a shortage of talent, Big Data, or global expansion. Companies are recognizing the power of social and collaborative tools for learning, yet most struggle with exactly how to leverage them.

Join David Wentworth, Senior Learning Analyst with Brandon Hall Group, and Shelley Schmoker,  VP of Marketing for Bloomfire, as they examine how social media can enhance and accelerate your organization’s traditional learning models. Discussion topics:

• The rise of social learning technologies

• How does social fit?

• Bridging internal and external social media

• Examples of companies leveraging social/collaborative learning

Thursday, July 31, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: What's New in Training Effectiveness? (Free for ATD members)

In this fast-paced and interactive webinar, 6Ds® Company CEO Andy Jefferson and CLO Dr. Roy Pollock will introduce fresh insights into what makes training truly effective. You will come away with practical ideas you can implement immediately to boost training transfer, reduce learning scrap, and move from order-taker to strategic business partner. Andy and Roy will introduce key concepts from the 6Ds® and ATD’s Learning Transfer Certificate Program, including:

• The only two questions that matter when it comes to training transfer

• The six disciplines practiced by the most effective training organizations

• The weakest link in corporate training programs and how to mend it

• The implications of neuroscience for training design and delivery

• Why performance support must be built from the beginning

• Guiding principles for practical and effective program evaluation

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.

A learning leader is gone but not forgotten

Sad news arrived in my inbox this morning...

Dr. Donald L. Kirkpatrick passed away peacefully on May 9, 2014, with close family by his side.

Don was a luminary in the training and development industry. His four levels of training evaluation created in the 1950s became the industry standard for measuring the impact of training programs.

Click here to read Don's obituary.

Free T&D Webinars in May 2014

Traditionally May signifies new growth and development—it’s a time for sowing seeds and seeing what sprouts. The very best gardens grow when we strategize and plant carefully. Just as our flower beds need water and sunshine, our minds love new ideas, and this month there are tons of interesting webinars to help your professional life flourish. Check out one of the free sessions this month—we hope they will inspire and motivate you.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Creating an Engaging, Empowering and Electrifying Learning Culture That Drives Results

Successful organizations understand that people are their most important assets. When high-performance businesses understand employees’ core skills and development needs, they’re more likely to achieve superior results. But building out a dynamic learning culture that really understands your employee needs is not a simple task. Join this session for a lively discussion on how to build out a learning culture that will generate superior business results for your organization. Learn:

• Why it’s important to engage leaders across your organization when building a learning culture—and how to approach them.

• Top things to consider for delivering impactful training and development programs to your organization.

• How to tie your learning culture and programs back to business results.

Thursday, May 8, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Captivate Your Virtual Classroom

Captivate your virtual classroom with these ready-made activities for online training. Attend this interactive webinar to learn how to:

• Immediately engage your virtual classes.

• Teach technical topics using creative techniques.

• Instantly apply activities for interaction.

• Increase participant interaction with GoToTraining.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Grow Your Emotional Muscle

Join us for a Power Hour and build a personal strategy for growing your own emotional awareness and regulation:

• Learn how to notice and change the thought processes that trigger debilitating emotions.

• Identify the triggers that take you off your game.

• Set a goal to reduce the stress that keeps you from the success you are capable of.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Thinking of Replacing Your LMS

This session will help you reduce your fear and create a strategy for success during the process! Your business needs are changing fast, and so are the demands placed on your current learning technology. Learning leaders must stay a step ahead of their business, but that can be difficult when dealing with antiquated technology and limited delivery options. Do you have that nagging awareness that it is time to switch your learning technology, but haven't wanted to face the reality of doing so? Join David Wentworth, Senior Learning Analyst for Brandon Hall Group, and Saba's Charles DeNault, Senior Director, Product Marketing, as they share insights that can help reduce your fear of change and increase your odds of success. They'll discuss best practices from hundreds of successful transitions for creating a strategy for the upgrade, as well as tools and tricks for preparing your organization for a limited-impact change.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Learn to Get Your Expertise Utilized – Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting Skills: An Introduction

Bill Brewer will introduce participants to the basic concepts underlying Peter Block’s highly successful Flawless Consulting workshops. The principles are simple and practical.

These workshops, continually updated and enhanced by Peter Block, and the basis for his best-selling book Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, teach staff professionals the competencies to successfully navigate the consulting relationship in situations where they have influence but no direct control. In the last 25 years over 1,000,000 people in hundreds of companies worldwide have been trained using Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting workshops.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: Creating More Effective Online Training Through Interactivity – No Coding Required (Free for ASTD members)

Slide decks and videos are wonderful training tools, but have you ever wondered if there is a better way to engage learners? Are you leveraging the power of computers and the Internet to bring training to life? Join Christopher Poseley, vice-president of business development at Versal, to explore the value of active learning, and detail how to create interactive online courses that rival classroom-style exercises. Learn methods to improve retention and make training more effective. View case studies from companies at the forefront of online training. Takeaways:

• Interactivity and engagement is key to establishing long-term training retention.

• Consistent assessment throughout an educational experience is necessary to track learner progress and ensure quality training (and ROI).

• Discover a new, interactive training platform through Versal.com.

Friday, May 16, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: Organizational Conflict: Get Used to It and Use It (Free for ASTD members)

Organizational conflict can be debilitating to a manager and negatively harm organizational productivity and employee engagement. Organizational conflict does not have to be dysfunctional—you can leverage it positively with the right strategies. So how do you remake this dreaded workplace activity into something positive? This webinar will better equip you to:

• Accept the dual nature of conflict—its disadvantages and its benefits.

• Assess the potential benefits you can achieve by handling your workplace conflicts more strategically.

• Avoid harming your organizational standing by becoming unbalanced in your conflict resolution approach (too nice, too aggressive, or too collaborative).

• Improve your working relationships and organizational standing by using appropriate conflict-resolution strategies.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Putting HR in the Driver's Seat of Collaborative Talent Management – 4 Talent-Centric Technologies to Tune Up Your Talent Strategy

Social media, collaborative learning, the pervasive power of video, and shifting workforce demographics are changing how we recruit talent. They also impact how work gets done, by whom, how knowledge is shared, and how we continuously learn and develop. As social tools climb the maturity curve, HR must lead in making organizations more talent-centric and ensuring they strengthen internal connections and promote the company culture—from recruitment  to onboarding, to developing and retaining talent.

Join Laci Loew, Vice President Talent Management and Principal Analyst at Brandon Hall Group, and Kevin Grossman, Director of Product and Content Marketing at Peoplefluent, to learn how analytics can help forecast critical talent needs throughout the employee lifecycle. It’s time to tune up your talent strategy and put you in the driver’s seat! Join us!

Wednesday, May 21, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Best of mLearnCon: Tools and Techniques for Creating Mobile Learning

This webinar showcases one of the best-rated, most popular sessions, speakers, or topics from mLearnCon 2013 Conference & Expo, now available to all through this special online presentation. Join Qualcomm senior director of mobile learning Geoff Stead as he shares some of the mobile strategies, tools, and technologies that help Qualcomm reach all 28,000 staff. Geoff will demonstrate Qualcomm’s latest in-house mobile-learning apps and discuss their mLearning development tools and approaches. Participants in this session will experience the mobile learning available to Qualcomm staff; be able to ask Geoff specific questions; and learn tips, tricks, and best practices for your mLearning projects.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: Mentoring Partnerships: An Intergenerational Strategy (Free for ASTD members)

Do you agree that the differences among the four to five generations in the workplace are affecting productivity, retention, engagement, staff development, and succession planning? Do you realize that different mentoring approaches have similar goals? This session introduces a unique contemporary mentoring strategy that provides a two-way, mutually beneficial learning experience addressing these intergenerational challenges. The resulting outcomes are to retain and expand working relationships among the generations for reinforcing talent engagement and productivity and identifying future leaders.

Thursday, May 22, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Pinterest for Learning (Free for ASTD members)

One of the unique products to emerge in an increasingly crowded field of social tools is Pinterest—a fun combination of social bookmarking, images, commenting, and public sharing. It’s a great place for connecting with and sharing resources for your own professional development. So, you might be wondering how Pinterest can be used for learning and development.

Join Jane Bozarth for a quick example-filled tour of using Pinterest to support your practice and your professional growth.

Thursday, May 22, 10AM – 11AM PST: The Google Analytics Approach to Measuring Learning: Allowing You to Move at the Speed of Business

Learning is the engine that drives performance, so why is it that we can’t link the training we provide to performance? Today, we create learning using any number of rapid authoring tools, and then attempt to measure the effectiveness of that learning through metrics such as time-in-training, completion rates, and test scores. Unfortunately, these don’t tell you if the training you are providing is actually working. The business wants more. They want low-level, actionable metrics that speak their language. This can only be accomplished when we take a “Google Analytics” approach to measuring learning.

Join us for this webinar with Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer at the Brandon Hall Group, as he shows you how to apply the same “Google” content metrics the rest of the business uses to your own training content.

Thursday, May 29, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want

Despite economic conditions, unemployment levels, or any other business factor imaginable, your best employees—the ones you need most—want one thing from you, plain and simple: to support their growth and development.  Study after study confirms that development is the single most powerful tool managers have for driving engagement, retention, productivity, and results. Yet HR leaders know that career development is frequently the thing that gets sidelined unless or until the organization demands that some form be submitted during regular review cycles.

This session sheds a much-needed light on specifically what managers can do—within the time-starved, priority-rich, pressure-cooker environment in which they operate—to support employees’ careers. And it comes down to this: engage in short, ongoing conversations with employees about their career options, needs, and passions. It’s really that simple... and that complex.

Free T&D Webinars for April 2014

For many people this time of year represents a frenzy of activity. With fiscal-year time crunches and tax preparation, not to mention new business, it’s all we can do to keep up! But it always pays to make time for learning, and this month there’s a fantastic selection of free webinars to support you in your quest for excellence. We hope they will inspire and motivate you.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: The Business Side of a Successful Performance Consulting Practice

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 such as business practices, niches, legalities and insurance, and networking. Session 1, Starting Your Own Practice, is about the three sides of a successful consulting practice and the often undervalued role the business side plays in being profitable and sustainable. You will learn the importance of using business acumen to support your practice expertise.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: First-Time Leaders: Leverage Leadership Insights to Accelerate Success(Free for ASTD members)

“If only I had known then what I know now about leadership.” Most people become good leaders only after stumbling through new situations, making mistakes, and learning from them. If you attend this webcast you will benefit from several lifetimes of leadership insights, learning from others' mistakes and positive experiences to cut out a lot of stumbling and pain and accelerate your success as first-time leaders.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Pushing and Pulling: Winning the Learning Tug-of-War

In order to work together so everyone in a business community is well informed, sometimes we need to push information out and sometimes we need to pull it in. Social networking and learning typically involve sharing vital information and hoping our colleagues pull. Wouldn’t it be great if we could push and also validate that the pull occurred? Let’s talk about how to play this game of informational tug-of-war and ensure everyone’s a winner.

Wednesday, April 9, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: CLOs and Training Leaders: When Design Really Matters, Picking Our Battles

If you’re a CLO or training leader, you realize there are times when your clients are just checking-the-box, and a death by PowerPoint is what they want. Part of being a leader is having a track record for results—and knowing which battles to pick. This means you can identify projects, initiatives, and curricula that really must deliver results. And you can develop sponsors who value the investment and are open to collaborating on a genuine training solution. This session looks at strategies and tactics for driving retention, reinforcement, and transfer of learning. At the macro level the session addresses the organization and the change-management tasks that must be tackled. Using a different lens we will look at the micro level and explore tactical and tools such as e-learning, social media, and m-learning that can help drive retention and transfer of learning.

Wednesday, April 9, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: The Benefits of Virtual Onboarding (Free for ASTD members)

Effective onboarding is critical to ensuring that new hires are quickly acclimated to your company culture, trained, and ready for success. Today’s onboarding programs, however, face new and difficult challenges posed by a geographically dispersed, multigenerational workforce. In this webcast, Tom Masotto, vice president of product management at ON24, will discuss how virtual onboarding environments can be used to:

• Train your global new hires at a significantly lower cost.

• More effectively assimilate new employees into your culture.

• Provide ongoing training, networking, coaching, and mentorship.

• Tailor your communication to multigenerational differences.

Thursday, April 10, 2014, 6AM – 7AM PST: BEST Webcast Series: Enabling Next Gen Learning Systems and Practices at Tata Consultancy Services (Free for ASTD members)

India's largest information technology services company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), is growing at a rapid pace, and its learning and development team is ready to take on the challenge. Hear how TCS structured real-life situations to re-imagine the four streams of the learning ecosystem. You will also learn how TCS institutionalized virtual learning to provide a personalized learning experience through Next Gen learning practices.

Thursday, April 10, 2014, 12PM – 1PM PST: Nurturing Emerging Talent

A 2012 report by Deloitte identified eight trends in human capital that will have the most business impact over the next 18 to 24 months. One of the trends identified was the development of next-generation leaders. Identifying and nurturing emerging talent increases the availability of experienced, capable employees prepared to drive future growth. Alan Fine will explore the fundamentals of a high-performance environment, and the basic activities that create empowerment, accountability, and trust for managers and the emerging talent they lead. You will discover the three elements at the heart of high performance and will learn how to recognize and address obstacles that are getting in the way. Finally, you will explore a simple and reliable process that reduces interference, creates focus, and unblocks performance breakthroughs.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: How Change Gets Stuck (Free for ASTD members)

The path to implementing change in an organization isn’t always smooth. On the way, you run into frequent speed bumps, wrong way signs, and even concrete barriers. These road hazards on the way to change are obstacles that prevent you from moving forward. Despite your best intentions, you and your change initiative can get stuck. In this webcast, you will learn the warning signs that your change initiative is stalled, and identify some of the root causes that may be preventing the organization from making progress. We will also discuss what you can do to get unstuck, and how to avoid getting stuck in the first place. Bring your challenges and your experience to this interactive session where we’ll uncover the common obstacles to organizational change.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Research Spotlight: Highlights and Trends for Human Resources Systems

Trish McFarlane, Brandon Hall Group's Vice President Human Resources Practice and Principal Analyst, will present statistics on what drives HR system decisions, mobile solutions in the HR systems, key findings on why organizations change HR systems, and key practices in implementation. In addition, Brandon Hall Group Chief Operating Officer Rachel Cooke will present additional trends and highlight exclusive resources available to members of Brandon Hall Group through its Member Center. This webinar will include:

• Statistics on the importance of specific features that drive HR system decisions.

• Statistics around the impact of mobile solutions in HR systems.

• Key findings on why organizations change HR systems.

• Key practices in implementation.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: Busting Myths, Facing Facts about HTML5 (Free for ASTD members)

HTML5? You’ve heard of it. It’s the most widely accepted standard for delivering high-quality, media-rich content on multiple devices. And yet there are ambiguities and misconceptions about what HTML5 can really do for your bottom line. Dig a little deeper and you hit issues concerning cost and complexity. What are the answers? In this webcast you will learn:

• What HTML5 is and its importance to content portability.

• The key benefits of having learning content in the HTML5 format.

• The process of developing and converting content.

• The metrics and standards to determine efforts for conversion and development.

• The common pitfalls to watch for during the development /conversion process.

Thursday, April 17, 2014, 10AM  – 11AM PST Creating Interactive Videos from Really Boring Talking Heads, Lectures, and Demo Videos

Most videos in training and elearning are talking heads, lecture-type presentations, or demonstrations of a product or process. Case in point: your training director suddenly decides that it is good for the CEO to present an idea. Or your company has a library of videos that can be repurposed for training. They are costly and took a long time to produce, hence the need to be “put to good use.” In this webinar, Ray Jimenez will discuss these topics:

• What do you do with really boring lecture and demo type videos? How do you make them engaging?

• What do you look for in a video, and how do you find opportunities to add interactions?

• What are the steps to augment your videos with interactions like discovery exercises, games, test exercises, and activities to improve retention and recall?

• If you are to start from scratch, how do you plan to create a new video and make sure they are provided interactive components?

• How do you cut costs, increase the speed, and increase the quality of your videos?

Thursday, April 17, 2014, 11AM  – 12PM PST: More Than Just "Click Next": Creating Innovative and Interactive E-Learning (Free for ASTD members)

Years ago, e-learning development was a complicated process requiring a full team of professionals. Rapid e-learning development tools changed all this. Now a single instructional designer can take on a project from start to finish. While these tools reduce costs and trim timelines, this sometimes comes at a cost to the final product. When the tools aren’t pushed beyond the basics of what they can do, we often end up with the dull “Click Next” e-learning that people dread taking. This means we need to use these tools differently for them to be effective. Attend this live, interactive webinar to:

• Learn what makes an e-learning experience engaging and interactive in the first place.

• Discover new ways to design innovative learning experiences with e-learning tools.

• Determine which e-learning features you should (and shouldn’t) use to increase interactivity.

• Know when e-learning isn’t the right tool for the job.

Friday, April 18, 2014, 9AM – 10AM PST: Frontline Leadership (Free for ASTD members)

This webcast is based on the ASTD research report: Frontline Leadership: Developing Tomorrow's Executives. The purpose of this report is to gain insight on training and development practices that are aimed at frontline leaders so that professionals can change and improve their processes in assisting frontline leaders to be successful. This study, produced in collaboration with the ASTD Forum, is based on the analysis of 513 learning professionals from various sectors and organizational cultures. Presented by Sarah Matney, senior curriculum designer and consultant at Ingersoll Rand University, this webcast will discuss Ingersoll Rand's journey in creating their frontline leadership development program, which has trained over 1,850 leaders across the globe and in a myriad of industries.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014, 10AM  – 11AM PST Innovative Intelligence: The Art and Practice of Leading Sustainable Innovation in Your Organization

A decade’s worth of executive surveys on innovation highlight a significant gap between what leaders say they want and what their organizations deliver. Over 80 percent of leaders surveyed believe innovation is important for their future success, but fewer than 30 percent are satisfied with their current level of innovation. So why, despite all the talking, have leaders not given innovation the attention it requires? This presentation explores the following questions:

• What is the innovation gap and its root causes?

• What are the three core principles for sustainable innovation?

• What is the systematic approach to innovative thinking that leaders utilize to gain insight and discover innovative solutions to complex issues?

Tuesday, April 22, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: The Business Leader's Bottom Line: Aligning Learning With Organizational Needs (Free for ASTD members)

Business leaders are under tremendous pressure to account for the performance of their division. “Supporting” business functions like workplace learning, however, are not held to the same scrutiny as operational business functions. Leaders typically view supporting functions as budgetary “black holes,” unable to prove direct contributions to business results. This is no longer the case. Leaders expect supporting functions to contribute to organizational objectives. This webinar identifies how to get your leaders to value workplace learning and how to make it a valued business partner. You will learn how to:

• Address the secrets business leaders believe about learning investments.

• Answer your leader’s questions that validate “learning” effectiveness.

• Discover how business leaders actually position learning in the workplace.

• Learn what leaders mean when they say, "return on learning investment.” (It’s not what you think.)

Wednesday, April 23, 2014, 10AM  – 11AM PST: 10 Big Data Insights for HR & Training

Big data is not just for the IT department.  What are some of the insights we can gather from big data that will affect how you plan your HR and Learning Strategy?  How do you set up your learning initiatives to contribute to additional insights on performance in your organization?  Join a conversation with award-winning authors and learning thought leaders Karie Willyerd and Heather Maitre as they explore specific ideas on how to use big data today. 

Wednesday, April 23, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: Grateful Leadership: Using the Power of Acknowledgment to Engage All Your People and Achieve Superior Results (Free for ASTD members)

Effective leaders must find ways to enhance people’s level of engagement, commitment, and support, especially in the difficult periods all organizations experience at one time or another. Engaged employees work with passion and feel connected and loyal to their organization. This yields higher productivity, sales, and results. This can be accomplished through the practice of Grateful LeadershipTM. Learning takeaways for attendees:

• Understand the need for Grateful Leadership to create a culture of appreciation in the workplace and overcome the barriers to using acknowledgment.

• Demonstrate the language and subtleties of authentic and heartfelt acknowledgement behaviour so that people can and will practice and use them immediately following the webinar.

• Describe how to coach teams, managers, and other corporate stakeholders in how to use Grateful Leadership to produce breakthrough results.

Thursday, April 24, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: Actions Louder than Words: 6 Steps to Improved eLearning Activities

There’s much frustration with the limited range of interactivity found in eLearning programs. Arbitrary multiple-choice and true-and-false questions, even when masquerading under flashy game-like interfaces, fail to engage learners’ attention. Worse yet, they usually fail to teach. Too often designers feel bound by the limits of actions available to the learner—senseless button clicking, random dragging, confusing entries. But, even working within the constraints of low-level authoring tools, it is possible to design eLearning activities that will engage, motivate, and captivate the learner’s imagination and enhance post-training performance. In this session, Ethan Edwards will present six simple and easily achievable transformations to make your eLearning interactions more impactful.

Monday, April 28, 2014, 11AM – 12PM PST: Leading Change Courageously (ASTD Subscriber Content)

This webcast uses data from interviews with 60 executives in 14 Fortune Global organizations to highlight eight actions that matter in leading successful organizational change. The presentation suggests that a key leadership action involves integrating learning into change—courageously.

Tuesday, April 29, 2014, 10AM – 11AM PST: A Street-Level Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience

Since the early days of “creativity training” and “problem solving,” brain research has vastly enriched our understanding of human mental process. New research findings with very practical, down-to-earth applications may well revolutionize our  understanding of the ways people think, learn, and perform. Functions like social intelligence, emotional intelligence, practical intelligence, cognitive preference, neuro-leadership, design psychology, and subliminal impacts of colour, language, and narrative are opening up new ways to approach teaching, learning, and development. According to Karl Albrecht, training is actually “applied cognitive neuroscience, and all learning professionals are aspiring neuroscientists." Albrecht will discuss the components of applied cognitive neuroscience; their implications for human development; and how to apply them in your work, career, and personal life.