What’s the difference between TalentLMS and Leonardo DiCaprio? Well, for one, we didn’t have to wait for decades, or get mauled by a bear on-screen, to get our awards. Rather the opposite: from its early days, TalentLMS has garnered great reviews from eLearning industry outlets, enthusiastic comments from its users, and its share of major and minor awards. And it has done particularly well in this regard last week, as we amassed not one, not two, but three awards (plus several distinctions). At the Cloudswave Awards, which consist of a seasonal ranking of the Top 10 business applications across several categories, TalentLMS made quite an impression, ranking as the second best Learning Management System for the spring quarter of 2016, and as the Best Training Software for the same period. And that’s not just the opinion of some editor at Cloudswave — it represents the weighted average score of 20 critic reviews (which are all accessible from their overall assessment page). Some of our favorite reviews, if we are allowed to boast a little, include: "We’ve been using TalentLMS for a couple of years now to handle developer certifications for people using the Telerik products. TalentLMS has met all our needs, but what we’ve been most fascinated with is their level of support." Lidiya Petkova, Sitefinity Partner Channel Development at Telerik "With TalentLMS we have been able to succeed in one of the most challenging projects for us. As we grow and have presence in several countries, making sure that all of our teams are properly trained and updated is critical. TalentLMS helped us make this happen by enabling an easy and fast way to implement our learning model globally." Carlos Molina VP of Operations and Innovation, IZO "We are offering live, blended and on-line trainings for managers and business analysts (courses: EU project management, Business Process Management, Social Responsibility Management,…). TalentLMS platform offers simplicity, ease of use for admins, instructors and learners. We have received many positive feedbacks from users about ease of use of the learning platform." Tomislav Rozman, Entrepreneur, expert in Business Process Management and IT And to complete the trifecta, we have financesonline.com’s acknowledgment of TalentLMS as the recipient of their "Best LMS Software Award" for 2016". As they put it, "[their] experts did an extensive study of all major LMS solutions currently available on the market and after analyzing their features, pricing plans, support quality, integrations, mobile support capabilities and other factors we know are important to users we found TalentLMS to be the best option available." But that’s not the end of it — TalentLMS also got financesonline.com’s "Supreme Software Award for 2016", "Expert’s Choice Award for 2016", and "Great User Experience Award" for their Learning Management System category (though, unlike the "Best LMS Software Award", those are shared between top performing software in all categories). Of course, we won’t be resting on our laurels — while you all will be enjoying your summer holidays, the TalentLMS team will be working to bring you several new features, enhancements and general awesomeness in our next update release. Oh, and there’s also something brewing for TalentLMS users on the Android platform. But we’ll get to that in an upcoming post… The post TalentLMS rakes in awards - 2016 edition appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

Casinos are not just fun and games. Or rather they are (as long as one takes to gambling responsibly) — but they’re also a very serious business. And as such, they have intensive training needs. In the US alone, the casino industry rakes in around 240 billion dollars to the economy and employs over 700 thousand people. As for international revenues, those are equally impressive, with more than a third of them coming from casino gambling specifically. And while gambling remains a controversial subject, since it’s possible to turn into a dangerous addiction for some people, modern casinos have also expanded their offerings, trying to be more about the hospitality and entertainment opportunities, rather than just card games and roulette tables. Operating a modern casino can be more challenging than running most other kinds of big enterprises. It combines elements of the hospitality industry (a casino is also a big hotel), the entertainment industry (a casino is also a big theme park), the retail industry (modern casinos host numerous shops and retail outlets), and even the finance industry (having to deal with huge sums of money). There’s also the issue of educating employees about all the ethical, legal and other issues associated with gaming and the handling of large amounts of money — which includes a lot of state mandated compliance training. eLearning can be a game changer that enables a scalable, cost effective, and flexible solutions for the complex training demands of the casino industry. Let’s see how. Employee orientation Even in places like Las Vegas, where the lights are on all year around, casino activity is usually quite seasonal, with peak seasons alternating with less busy periods. That’s especially true for the modern family oriented casinos that combine gambling with a more conventional vacationing element, and are thus subject to the seasonality of family vacations. Seasonality, of course, implies temp workers and periodic hiring sprees, which in turn imply the need for frequent orientation (onboarding) courses for new employees. Automating employee orientation with an eLearning management platform like TalentLMS will let you scale up onboarding, on demand, without the traditional delay and overhead associated with in-person onboarding courses. TalentLMS can help you introduce your new hires to their working environment and give them the information they need to start being productive right away, including all the details about your company’s operating procedures, policies and guidelines. Creating your orientation material is easy too, using TalentLMS’ content creation tools to combine new and original material with existing content you might have — including Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, video, audio, images, PDFs, online content, and more. TalentLMS will make sure everything you throw in is automatically converted and LMS compatible (courtesy of our proprietary EncodeMagic engine) and help you organize it all into courses and lessons. Oh, and because TalentLMS is not just a content management system, your orientation material can also include tests and quizzes to help you access your employees understanding of their onboarding material. Training With tens of different facilities, from game rooms, restaurants, concert halls and retail outlets down to logistics and accounting, and thousands of employees, staff training in the modern casino industry is no game. Staff training in the modern casino industry is no game.Click To Tweet An intuitive eLearning platform like TalentLMS, built for (and used by) the most demanding enterprises and organizations, can help you manage it all with ease. First of all, there’s no install required. TalentLMS runs on the Cloud as a modern Software as a Service (SaaS) solution — you just open an account for your casino or gambling business and start adding learners and training material. How’s that for easy? When it comes to managing and organizing training among dozens of facilities and specialties and thousands of employees, TalentLMS offers you all the tools to do so — from Branches, that let you have a separately run, customized and branded training portal per department or facility, to User Types and Course Categories that give you a totally flexible "divide and conquer" approach to managing your learners and content respectively. To not disrupt your regular (and often hectic) workflows, TalentLMS allows your employees to complete their training at their own pace, thus minimizing operation disruptions. That said, if the need for real-time, in-person training arises, TalentLMS can handle that too, either by helping you manage your physical training courses (in a "blended learning" scenario) or through scheduled teleconference and webinar sessions. Last, but not least, with TalentLMS’ reporting tools, you also get instant insight, quantifiable information and detailed statistics on your employees’ attendance and progress, complete with pretty graphs to show to your boss. Compliance and Social Responsibility training Correctly implementing compliance and social responsibility training is a big headache for the casino industry. From international regulations (e.g. with respect to money laundering), to state and municipal compliance requirements, there is tons of material to go through, covering all kinds of operating procedures. With TalentLMS you can easily design, implement and deliver a comprehensive compliance training strategy that covers all aspects of your casino business. At the center of the platform’s compliance training workflow is its built-in support for Certificates, which can be set to be awarded upon the completion of a compliance course (or course curriculum, where compliance requires more than one related course). TalentLMS let’s you create and customize as many certifications you need, and even allows you to add your logo to match your corporate branding. TalentLMS also supports "time-limited" (expiring) certificates, for easily handling state-or company-regulated periodic re-education needs. Of course, for cases where an employee is fired or under examination for wrongdoing, you can manually revoke their certificate from within TalentLMS’ management interface. And with access to several online course marketplaces, you might find that you don’t even need to create your own compliance training courses, as a lot of industry standard ones are already offered as professionally-made, off-the-shelf content that you can just purchase and add to your LMS. Last, but not least, TalentLMS’ attendance logs - which you can find in your "Extended Timeline" that can be accessed through your Admin Panel - can also serve as proof that you have informed your employees about labor safety, customer protection laws, gambling rules, sexual harassment issues, ethical issues, etc., in case of legal dispute (of course, consult with your legal team first to ensure whether this applies to your jurisdiction). Knowledge retention A sustainable business, in the casino industry or otherwise, is a long bet. But what happens when employees come and go, taking valuable operational intelligence with them? Whether it is about how to handle some specific large clients, or what to do to solve a particular logistical crisis, TalentLMS can help you transfer this information from your senior employees experience to your LMS content. By storing this information in a formalized and easily accessible way, you can keep it safe from changes in your personnel and ready to be accessed and consulted at any time. Plus, after it’s safely stored inside your LMS, it can re-used in all kinds of training contexts and become part of your regular training curriculum. Bet on an industry leading LMS Take TalentLMS for a test drive today, and see for yourself how eLearning can help boost your employees’ skills and improve the productivity of your business. No luck required. The post eLearning for the Casino Industry with TalentLMS appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

We have always been strong believers in the web, and in the freedom that web apps give users. The freedom of rich cross-platform applications, that are low maintenance and accessible from every device with a browser. And we’ve shown our support for this philosophy with all our products. Just like the web, though, mobile devices and native mobile apps are here to stay too. And while we’ve always offered first-class mobile web access to TalentLMS (courtesy of a fully responsive user interface), we’ve found that a native mobile application can have several advantages over this approach. Part of it is because mobile web browsers still have a lot of catching up to do. Running on devices with less memory and slower CPUs, and supporting fewer HTML5 APIs, mobile web apps just don’t offer the same speed and experience as their desktop counterparts. Sure, for most mobile web applications it’s good enough. But for the TalentLMS team, good enough have never been enough. That’s why investing in TalentLMS’ mobile experience and offering a fully native version of your favorite corporate LMS is part of our vision for the future of the platform. We have already delivered on this vision for our iOS customers a few months ago. Now, the time has finally come for our Android-using brothers and sisters to share in on the excitement. It’s not that we neglected your favorite mobile platform either (after all, a ton of us here are hardcore Android fans too). We have actually been working on TalentLMS for Android from the start — we just needed more time to get it to work because of all the different Android devices and configurations out there. It’s a slight drawback from having so many choices in the Android world. Whereas we had to test at most 10 different iOS devices (and all made by the same company and with similar specs), there are literally hundreds of Android devices and several OEM customized versions of the Android OS to test on. Not that this would prevent our Chuck Norris-caliber mobile developers from delivering the goods — it just delayed them a little. We’re almost done however, and TalentLMS for Android is coming along nicely. So nicely, in fact, that we have already been beta testing the application in our labs, and we’re ready to bring in the best beta testers we know: actual TalentLMS users. Just sign up here and you’ll get access to beta releases of TalentLMS for Android before everybody else. If you are a TalentLMS customer, you are more than welcome to join the public beta test program and help us squash any potential issues from TalentLMS for Android! The beta testing program is for TalentLMS users only, but if you are not one, you can always sign up for a TalentLMS account here. We are very excited with how TalentLMS for Android turned out, and we are certain that you will be too when you get to play with it, whether as part of the beta program or after its official release. It is due to our commitment to usability and perfecting User Experience that we ask for your help with this, and hope it’s not an imposition but rather, an exciting glimpse into a new part of our joint eLearning lives. We want to give you the features you need, so take our TalentLMS for Android app for a spin and let us know what you think! The post TalentLMS for Android is finally arriving. Help us test it! appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

I find that influencing UP is the most nerve-racking. If you really can't figure out what your leader is thinking, consider this basic list. In the second column give yourself a rating on how well you think your leader sees you performing in this capacity. Brainstorm steps you can take in the third column to improve your ongoing relationship. Implement them by adding them to your calendar.

A very successful CIO took a new prestigious job in a health related company. His experience was impressive and fit well with the goals and challenges of the business. There were only three direct reports who had been running the organization while the job search was underway. None had the breadth of leadership experience to step in to the role and two were set to retire soon. IT played a critical role in the aggressive business growth strategy. In less than a month, the CIO confessed to me that one of these direct reports refused to come to his meetings. This stunned me. Before the year was out, the new CIO took an offer and retired. Clearly, this turmoil will have an expensive impact on the business strategy.  Emotional Intelligence plays a significant role in all of these tales. When fearful, the reptilian brain is engaged. At that point, your brain / body can only implement fight, flight or freeze. It's not a choice, it's an automatic response. Clearly the fight response was being implemented by the leader not attending the meetings. When this continued to occur, the Sheldon group was solidified. If you do not have the authority to hold people accountable, don't take the leadership job. If you are a leader, part of your job is to make your boss look good. As leaders, we are each responsible for aligning our staff to the needs of the organization. It is not the job of one person.  

A small telecomm company was growing quickly. Being small, they depended heavily on one highly technical resource to keep the technology needed optimized. Little by little, this resource became King Sheldon. No decision could be made in the company without his approval. He held the entire business hostage by convincing them that he was the only one in the world that had the expertise to keep the network running. His job was not in leadership, yet he essentially ran the company. The CEO spent less and less time at the office. The turnover of employees increased. Eventually, they business failed.  As a side note, see that the Death Star graphic was part of an actual article in CIO. It is a comical piece, but aren't there more business value oriented things to talk about? Please don't block my cell phone signal. 

What are the important ways we can lead others to a collaborative whole? How do we align our teams and our self to the organization's goals?  David Rock, Your Brain at Work, has been researching the challenge of collaborating and influencing others and provides a good rubric for IT Leaders. He uses the acronym SCARF (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness). All people seek to move away from threats and toward reward. David has defined five rewards, that when leveraged, can help you influence others. The SCARF acronym illustrates the desired rewards in the light blue portion of each box.    In this diagram, the dark boxes represent the opposite- the fear response. Sheldons tend to be fearful as a default, trusting only when trust has been earned. This is a common characteristic of someone with a high compliance behavior found (often) in IT. With a desire for perfection, the fear of being wrong can become a disabler. Note that very common work situations like making a mistake, undefined outcomes, hierarchical decision making, lack of trust and unfair choices can provoke a fear-based response to highly technical people. A new CIO might try praise to convert the Sheldons to a collaborative whole, but this could backfire. Recent research by Carol Dweck and Daniel Pink illustrates that praise unrelated to effort/outcome is ineffective. Donna Volipitta writes in her insightful blog; "Our brains are wired to want to succeed. We just don’t always know how. Feedback should be kind of a feeding frenzy for the brain because, if done effectively, it opens up the opportunity for all types of intrinsic rewards and growth. Unfortunately, this opportunity is often wasted because our natural instinct is to praise ability and reward with extrinsic rewards. The result? We undermine that drive to succeed."

Sheldon does these things well:Seeing Systems- he can read the entire interplay in an organization and knows there is rarely one simple answer. Experiments and Failure- he uses his scientific process background to learn from experiments that are not successful. This is processed as learning not failure.Strategy- he can see the chess board and manage many steps into the future.Ownership- he is (over) confident and owns the small universe that is his expertise.What Sheldon needs to learn:Financial Business Acumen- he needs to learn that outcomes on their own are meaningless if they do not contribute to bringing value to the organization.Resiliency- change is constant and is likely to increase. Dealing in the unknown and chaotic work world is a core competency now and into the future. Seeing Others- observing and learning how to read others is critical to collaboration.Trust- both parties must have equal responsibility since trust is bidirectional.Emotional Awareness and Regulation- growing these emotional 'muscles' is the prerequisite to the Empathy required to drive collaboration.Politics- seeking power and prestige is not bad or good, and clarity of the game is necessary to get work done. 

Knowing our readers, some of you may think that one of these stories is about you. It might just be. If you wonder, use the inquisitive energy to look around you for new ways to grow business value and keep the Sheldons at bay. Whether you lead, work in or work with Sheldons, you alone own your growth. Most of the easy projects have been done, so anticipate growing change, complexity and mystery. As these increase, fragmentation of collaboration will  increase as well unless we all fight back. The anecdote is commitment to this: you have to keep learning. Face your work with clarity by looking at your own assumptions, goals, strategies and outcomes. Commit to your growth and help others grow. Even Sheldon continues to try to understand the world he is in. Here's an offer to help you start: join us for a one hour free webinar and learn how the RMA tools will help you build a new culture with less Sheldons.  ​

Here are four statements. Three are quotes from Sheldon and one is a quote from someone else. Tell us who the fourth quote is from and win a free Behavioral Intelligence Assessment.Are you made of Copper and Tellurium because you are CUTE.What exactly does that term friends with benefits mean? Does he provide her with health insurance?Physics investigates the essential nature of the world and biology describes a local bump.  Psychology, human psychology, describes a bump on the bump.You know that they say.  Revenge is a dish best served nude. Email your answers to pm@russellmartin.com