Leadership has been the tip of everyone’s tongue of the last decade. From convention keynoters, to coaches, to political pundits, everyone insists they want a cadre of leaders to carry out their mission. So for all the talk, techniques, training, and tips on the leadership topic, you’d think managers, executives, and professionals at all levels would have the concept down pat by now.  Not so.  A few are still off track. Leadership Defined: It’s NOT a Position

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Having recently run a workshop on how ICF competences overlap with management and leadership competences and are therefore just as applicable for an in-house coach as an external one, I suddenly realized that they are also applicable to those wanting to be a great associate (a person who works as a self-employed resource for another business). The over-riding message is one of collaboration, partnership and integrity. For purposes of this article the customer is the employing organization (yes they are your customer) and the client is the recipient of the service being provided. Great associates need organizational and communication skills, interpersonal and literacy skills. Like the God Janus, they need to be able to look both ways at the same time; focus on customer and on client. You may be doing associate work whilst you build your own business (keep it separate and not at the expense of your customer). You may be a professional associate, hate selling and business management and passionate about delivery - even more reason to do it well. It is all too easy to work on the direct relationship with the client and this causes distrust and unrest. Your customer has valued your knowledge and expertise and taken the risk to employ you to work with their clients. You too need to value that trust and reciprocate. Your customer is also your project manager and any queries or concerns should be referred back, not resolved without communication. Regular updates should be exchanged and all deadlines completed on time. You need to look after your customer’s business as that is the goose laying your golden eggs. You may be an associate to more than one customer - if so you need to have clear agreements with each and be transparent about what you are doing and for whom. Where are the boundaries? So in order to help - the ICF competences are translated in this context, allowing you to be role model for the coaching profession and to use one set of competences across your work. A. SETTING THE FOUNDATION Meeting Ethical Guidelines and Professional Standards - this is where you need to wear several hats. You need to be true to your profession, the ethical guidelines and code of practice and how to apply them in the course of your work being careful not to misrepresent yourself or agree to work which is outside your sphere of competence. You also need to be true to your customer’s brand - representing them and not yourself, selling on business for them and not yourself, and ensure you behave and deliver work in a way that supports their brand identity, referring back work which for any reason is not compatible with your competence, beliefs and values and way of working. The only addresses and contact details you should share with clients are those of your customer - being an associate is not the way to build your network, database and own business. Standards also include care of materials and resources. What is to be shared, loaned or returned. Who is the owner - customer or client? Establishing the Agreement - you need to clearly understand what is required in the assignment, how it is developed and evaluated and confirm your business relationship and specific parameters with your customer as well as the procedures and processes with the client. You need to agree with both customer and client what is appropriate in the relationship and what is not, what is and is not being offered, and the alignment between the customer’s and client’s responsibilities as well as your own. Check whether there is an effective match between your beliefs, values and competences with those of the customer and the client. B. CO-CREATING THE RELATIONSHIP  Establishing Trust and Intimacy with the Customer - they are trusting you to represent their business. Are you able to partner with them to do that, without marketing your own business, arranging to do work on the side or selling in competing organisations? Do you have the ability to collaborate to create a safe, supportive environment that produces ongoing mutual respect and trust. Having established the relationship with the customer, you need to work with the client (on the customer’s behalf) and demonstrate genuine concern for the welfare and future of the client or his/her organisation. Can you continuously demonstrate personal integrity, honesty and sincerity, establish clear agreements and keep promises? Are you able to demonstrate respect for client’s perceptions, learning styles and wellbeing and all on behalf of your customer? If not, then ask yourself whether you should be accepting associate work. Are you able to create and build relationships on behalf of your customer, be honest with yourself, reflect on your work and be open to new learning? Do you use humour effectively and professionally? Are you flexible and can you be professional - managing your state and emotions, keeping personal issues to yourself and maintaining a business relationship. Are you able to accept and solicit feedback and keep your judgements out of the relationships? COMMUNICATING EFFECTIVELY How able are you to focus on the needs and desires of your customer and to support their brand in the context of serving the clients? Are you able to attend to your customer’s agenda rather than your own agenda for the client. Can you faithfully deliver your customer’s materials, ethos etc without changing it ‘because you think you know better’? Are you able to have ‘professional reviews’ with both customer and client without becoming defensive? How much back ground work are you willing to do e.g. client preparation by reading their website and finding out how your work fits into their personal or organisational strategy? How good are you at fact finding and asking questions that help the client move forward? Can you generate future work or interest in future work for your customer? How well do you comply with relevant legislation and manage diversity - using language appropriate and respectful to the customer and client (e.g., non-sexist, non-racist, non-technical, non-jargon)? D. FACILITATING LEARNING AND RESULTS Do you have the ability to integrate and accurately evaluate multiple sources of information, and to make interpretations that help the client to gain awareness and thereby achieve agreed-upon results? Can you go beyond what your customer shares and add value to their perceptions of the client situation? Are you able to work with the client to identify underlying concerns, typical and fixed ways of perceiving their world, differences between the facts and the interpretation? Can you share insights and facilitate new learning that results in new business for your customer? How do you celebrate success with your customer? The associate needs to be able to stick to the delivery plan with the client, to make urgent changes and justify them to the customer, otherwise discuss all changes with the customer as soon as they occur. You need to have the ability to hold attention on what is important for the customer, and to leave responsibility with the customer to take action whilst moving the client towards their stated outcomes. At the end of the day your customer puts trust at the top of his/her agenda. This is followed by; reliability, professionalism, delivering the right thing in the right place at the right time in the right way, feedback and evaluation, more work for the customer and then a choice of more work for you. Partnership is key, along with a great work ethic, positive attitude, independence (no spoon-feeding), keeping up with professional development, honing your practical skills, and not letting your "soft skills" like "personal qualities, habits, attitudes and social graces" fall by the wayside. The post Being the best associate you can be appeared first on The Performance Solution.

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Engagement. One of the biggest buzzwords around. Everybody wants it, craves it, strives to "boost" it. How could eLearning escape this trend? Thankfully, in the case of online training, there is one invaluable tool that can actually help you achieve this. But let’s get to the basics and we’ll talk all about it as we go along. One of the biggest challenges in eLearning is keeping your learners motivated and engaged throughout the process. "Throughout", by the way, is the key word here: everybody can have people engaged for the first few lessons of a course. Having them engaged for the whole course though, is a whole other matter. Attention wanes, work and other more pressuring matters get in the way, lessons get more challenging and difficult to follow, learners get impatient, generally speaking, life works against engagement and your courses. Some learners even see learning as a chore from day one — especially when it comes to mandatory courses and compliance training that they just have to complete because of state or company policy, or to meet certain KPIs. Keeping the course content appealing and presenting it in an interactive and interesting manner (e.g. using multimedia, interactive elements and well written content) is a great start to keeping the learner engaged. But to really take learning engagement to the next level, you might need to bring in the big guns we mentioned earlier. That’s right, we’re talking about… Gamification in TalentLMS Now, with some run-of-the-mill LMS your mileage may vary, but if you are using TalentLMS, gamification couldn’t be easier. TalentLMS offers a complete gamification engine that supports the best and most well-known reward systems, including points, badges, levels and rewards (in the form of discounts) that you can customize to your own needs. Points can be awarded when learners perform various actions in the system — from simply logging in to successfully completing units, courses, tests, assignments, ILTs, acquiring certificates or contributing to discussion topics. You can choose which actions will give out points and customize the number of points awarded for each action. Badges are awarded in a similar way to points, given out when a user has reaches a milestone for a specific action (i.e. 4, 8, 16 logins or 8, 16 passed tests, etc.). TalentLMS’ gamification engine ensures that the difficulty in acquiring badges increases incrementally as the learner advances in his training. You can upload your own badge icons and customize their names. The badging system has been designed to be compatible with Mozilla’s OpenBadges initiative, letting learners collect and display all of their badges in a single place. Levels are linked to courses. TalentLMS lets learners unlock a level of courses when they gather a specific amount of points, badges or course completions. Courses that belong to levels higher than the user’s show up as "Restricted" in the learner’s dashboard and are not accessible until the required goals have been met. For example, you could configure TalentLMS so that each level of courses gets unlocked once the learner has acquired 3000 points. According to the setup shown in the following image, the learner would have to successfully pass 4 tests, acquire 2 certificates and have contributed to at least 5 discussions in order to collect the required points. Levels work similarly to course Availability Rules, where courses will become available based on whether the prerequisite courses have been completed. Similar to "High Score" listings in arcade games, Leaderboards display a ranking of the top 6 learners in your portal in terms of points, levels, badges, courses completed and certifications. Admins can toggle leaderboard visibility to make them visible or not to all learners. Rewards are a performance award that comes in the form of a discount — as such it makes sense for eLearning portals that sell courses. It’s a more tangible form of reward given to users for their continued engagement and loyalty to the program. Admins can choose to offer a Reward-based discount when learners reach a predetermined amount of points, badges or levels. Resetting Points, Badges & levels At any point in time, you can choose to reset the points, badges or levels for users belonging to a specific group or branch. Adding a deadline by which users must acquire certain amount of points, badges or levels creates a sense of urgency to meeting the goals and can dramatically increase motivation levels. You can combine this with external incentives, as well, such as a day-off of work, a prize, or some monetary incentive. Developing a gamification strategy The first step in implementing a gamification scheme would be identifying your goals. Here are some examples of potential goals: 1) Motivate users to complete more courses 2) Increase the frequency of logging into the portal 3) Acquiring higher grades on tests and assignments 4) Promote participation in discussions 5) Motivate users to attend ILT sessions 6) Motivate users to complete more surveys The second step would be designing an implementation strategy. You would need to decide if you will use a specific rewarding system or a combination of them. If we take the scenario that a company’s goals are (a), (c) and (d), the following could be a potential set up using a combination of points and badges. In this case, the learner would get 150 points for each completed course, 160 points for contributing to discussions and 10 points for every upvote on other people’s comments. In addition to points, the learner would also get a badge when they complete 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 courses, as well as when they score 90%+ in 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 completed tests or assignments. To further promote competition you can also enable the leaderboard for points and badges, allowing each user to see how they score against other learners, and even link this scheme to course levels. Conclusion Sometimes, the best way to get some serious engagement is to add a little gaming element. It works with everybody, from little kids, to senior enterprise employees. TalentLMS’ powerful and customizable Gamification engine lets you add as much or as little gaming and competition elements to your training program, and fine-tune it to meet your particular goals and use cases. The post Gamification use cases and best practices with TalentLMS appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

We talk a lot about how to go into the depths of TalentLMS and customize it, make it work for you. We flaunt our new features for you as soon as we implement them. We dive into the world of eLearning to bring insights and proven methods to make your courses shine. But let’s step back for a moment. Why do you even need an LMS? Well, there’s a simple answer to that. If you sympathize with any of the scenarios that you read below, it is probably time you seriously considered using a Learning Management System. 1. Your approach to learning is disorganized If you need blended learning (meaning using both eLearning and live sessions, either in-person or via teleconference) in ONE place, then you should use a Learning Management System, like TalentLMS. By making learning accessible to all those who need it is the main focus of a Learning Management System. It allows you to make use of a fully responsive and organized platform which will increase the knowledge of your workforce, far beyond what you ever thought possible. This will, in turn, serve to make your learners more satisfied and energized, increasing their productivity. 2. Your learners are bored Better technology means better learning and by using a variety of different learning techniques, including websites, quizzes, and gamification, your learners can stay engaged for longer and will inevitably gain more. To avoid boring them, you can try out a variety of methods and create an exciting learning experience. Encourage social learning and include interactive and immersive features in your LMS to get the most out of your material and coax your learners to excellence. 3. You need to evaluate efficiently In order to track and report on learner performance efficiently and with ease, you need to use a system such as TalentLMS. With reporting features that make the whole process simple and straightforward, you will have access to automatic reporting and tracking, rather than having to do this manually. You can see the results from Courses, Branches Groups, Tests, and Surveys with the click of a couple of buttons. And of course, you can filter these down by user type or by the presence of a certificate. By using these features properly, you will be able to demonstrate how successful each course was or the progress of your learners without any hassle. Automatic results from TalentLMS reporting make evaluation easy. 4. You need to cut costs Learning Management Systems like TalentLMS are a proven way to train effectively while simultaneously cutting costs, meaning you win on two important fronts! You can alleviate some of the pressure in your admin staff by making their job easier, while also saving money on travel and logistics. With TalentLMS, you also have zero implementation costs. And, given that there is zero risk involved, and you can actually decrease annual costs, why would you even stop to think about it? 5. You want to keep everything near With a cloud-based LMS, you can keep everything streamlined, manageable, secure and easy to access. You are also able to integrate with other vital software and can make sure that your data is always up-to-date and accessible. In addition, your learners only have one place to go to for all their training needs. This makes for an efficient learning environment because everything is where it is expected to be, and this level of organization means that the stress of learning disappears. 6. You need to comply with industry standards By using a Learning Management System such as TalentLMS, you can create compliance training courses to comply with any standards you may have to live up to and prove that your staff has complied. You can see who has completed which course and when and have a succinct record at your fingertips. You can use this as proof that your company is in accordance with all industry regulations, with minimal hassle. In some jurisdictions, you can even take this to court, if the need arises. It’s probably obvious by now, but these issues are all too familiar. Most businesses will face one or the other at one point. This, therefore, demonstrates the importance of using a Learning Management System to take the hassle out of the daily management of your company and focus on producing knowledge, not transmitting it. So, don’t stall and don’t hesitate: take TalentLMS for a free test drive and see for yourself just how much eLearning can do, with the bare minimum of effort. The post 6 signs that show you need an LMS in your life appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

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In the previous installments of this series of posts, we took a look at how TalentLMS fares with Compliance Training and Instructor-led Training. This time we’re having a look at using TalentLMS as an onboarding tool. Hop on! Employee Onboarding 101 So what’s this onboarding thing and how does it fit with eLearning? While onboarding is not about training in some particular skill, it is closely related to corporate training, as it involves giving new hires all the information they need to start being productive at their new job. That’s where the name comes from, too, as it simply refers to welcoming those new employees "on board" your company. There some standard items to include in an onboarding program, and some not so standard, that depend on your particular industry and business needs. In general, your onboarding courses will need to have a welcoming message, a high-level description of the new hire’s roles and responsibilities, a short introduction to the company (its history, culture and values), any company or department-wide rules or guidelines that employees need to be aware of (customer service guidelines, professional ethics code, work harassment laws, etc.), and other similar items. Depending on your industry, you might also want to inform your users of particular legal compliance requirements, like food storage, if you run a restaurant chain; safety rules for construction or factory workers, etc. Other nice items to have, include career advancement paths, the company’s organizational hierarchy, job perks, and in general, any kind of frequently asked questions that new hires have. What kind of businesses need an onboarding program? Basically all business above a certain size. Sure, in a small shop you might be OK with just a meet and greet session, where some senior employee welcomes and fills in a new hire about what they will be doing and how. For businesses with a larger number of employees though, especially ones with high workloads and pressing deadlines to meet, an online onboarding program makes sense for several reasons. First, it spares your senior employees from having to onboard and "babysit" new hires. When time is of the essence, they will be much more valuable doing actual productive work. Second, it helps you gather all your introductory material and makes it re-usable and formal, while you giving you total insight and control over what goes in it. This way you don’t get the phenomenon where some new hires hasn’t been told something important because the senior employee assigned to inform them forgot about it, or where new hires are told incomplete or false information. Third, having your onboarding material in an online LMS means you can test your new hires to find out how well they absorbed it, which is especially important when it comes to company guidelines and compliance rules and regulations. Last, but not least, not only can your new hires study the onboarding material from anywhere they are, but all of your employees can refer to the exact same information, any time they want. It will be up there, in your LMS platform. Oh, and with TalentLMS for iOS and Android, your learners will be able to access that info on the field too — even when offline. Employee Onboarding with TalentLMS As we already said, onboarding content is kind of, but not 100%, like regular training content. Thankfully, the two share content creation, editing and management needs, which makes an eLearning platform like TalentLMS a great option for employee onboarding as well. For writing your onboarding content, you just use the same, tried and true, content editing tools that TalentLMS provides for regular training courses, including rich widgets, embedded internet content, multimedia (video, audio) and auto-conversion of all kinds of office formats (PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, Excels, PDFs, etc.). For some onboarding material you might not even have to write anything, as TalentLMS comes with an integrated marketplace with hundreds of lessons that you can just buy and incorporate into your onboarding content (including compliance training material). On top of this, you have all the usual TalentLMS gamification and testing machinery available, to help you increase learner engagement and test their progress in absorbing their onboarding material. And if you decide to combine onboarding with compliance training, then TalentLMS offers a flexible Certificate system so you can tag your employees upon successful completion. Finally, if your business has several departments, facilities or international locations, you can use TalentLMS Branches to create independent onboarding programs (complete with their own customized and independently branded custom online portals) for every different unit in your company. Conclusion In this post, the third in our "many faces of eLearning" series, we had a look at corporate onboarding with TalentLMS. Stay tuned for our upcoming posts, where we’ll be examining further use cases for TalentLMS. The post The many faces of eLearning #3: Onboarding with TalentLMS appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

Competency based training has become prevalent in the past few years, notably for its ability to adapt to individual learner requirements and test learners in only the areas that they need to be tested. Unsurprisingly, many eLearning providers have become wise to the idea of bringing the principles of traditional competency based training into the production of eLearning delivery, the benefits of which we’ll cover below. But there’s a knack to getting this right; so how should you go about it? What is competency based training? Generally speaking, competency based training works on the principle that learners must demonstrate competency in any given area before being able to progress with their learning. This is best explained with an example. Example: Call Center Let’s say that every new agent that joins a call center needs to go through General Induction Training. The first course may be ’How to Greet Customers When Picking Up the Phone’. In order to display competency in this learning, all new employees are tasked with a role play call. Those that pass the role play can move on to the next stage of learning, but those that fail to meet standards may need to revise that course to reinforce their learning about the different services offered by the business, and how to greet each type of customer appropriately. Why implement competency based eLearning? Why should we study the principles of competency based training when delivering eLearning? 1. Saves time - users can fly through modules for which they already have expertise; the ones that would have usually unnecessarily slowed them down and made their experience less stimulating. 2. Engagement - because users are only being tested in areas in which they do not possess sufficient existing knowledge, they will almost always be in a state of constant engagement, which studies show often leads to learning success! 3. Success in achieving learning outcomes - competency based training demands that learners demonstrate just that; their competency. While eLearning would have to be more rigorous in some areas in order to accommodate for this, if an employee does possess any existing knowledge in an area, they will still have a less cumbersome eLearning experience overall. The necessary programming in adding features and creating extended versions of modules will be an up front investment, when you compare the production of competency based eLearning to that of typical eLearning. However, the combination of a bespoke experience and the outcome of a comprehensive grasp of how to actually utilize the knowledge learners have acquired will result in them enjoying greater satisfaction from their eLearning. If executed properly, the final outcome should be that learners complete their training with greater recall of key information and excel further in their roles. How is competency based eLearning delivered? Repetition and playback Consuming information is different to absorbing it - using a combination of standard assessment methods (such as questions, fill the blanks, etc.) and more pioneering methods (such as video, visuals etc.) to test competency is a best practice. Recalling and understanding are not the same as being able to explain something, which is why deploying a range of methods and technologies for assessing a candidate’s learning helps ensure competency. Context Another surefire way to test whether a learner thoroughly understands their new knowledge is to change the context. Reading off a screen and relaying that information verbally in a calm setting isn’t very challenging - and neither is completing on-screen questions or puzzles. Instead, try case studies or role plays to put the information into a real-life context that challenges the learner and makes them actually think about the information they have (hopefully) absorbed. Segmentation To successfully construct competency based eLearning that allows each individual user to have a truly tailored experience, you need to begin individualizing every independent section of your content. The reason for doing this is to ensure that your LMS enables administrators to deselect users from unnecessary modules of learning in which they are already competent. To begin this process, you should start by mapping out your content - and this process will be much easier if your subject matter lends itself to being sequential, rather than non-linear. If your content isn’t sequential, you should still identify links and relationships between individual courses and create rules based around these. Once again, the initial investment required for this production process will be substantial, but it could prove worthwhile, considering the benefits outlined in this article. Survey Finally, you’ll need to design some form of survey that accompanies your content map. This can allow you to identify a starting point, knowledge gaps and areas of expertise for each individual learner, and serve them the appropriate eLearning courses. In a sense, when learners complete this survey they are crafting their own, customized training! There’s a lot to take in - and that’s without any real specifics on executions or granular details. We haven’t been exhaustive in our listing of benefits and considerations either for this same reason; you first need to decide if competency based eLearning is for you! A good example of a company managing this style of eLearning well at the moment is the popular language learning app, Duolingo. If you’re familiar with the app, you’ll have a better understanding of the principles discussed above. If not, and need a working idea of competency based eLearning, check them out and get a practical idea of how this great methodology works. So, where have we left off? Competency based training is a great way to get learners engaged and focused on what’s important to you and them. It helps them apply their knowledge in the work context, which is, after all, the reason behind having a corporate training program in the first place. Give it a try and enjoy the improved results! The post Competency based training: The why and how for eLearning success appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.