You’ve found your team’s next superstar — that new hire with the right mix of expertise and enthusiasm with a ton of potential to help your business do great things. But unlocking all that promise takes more than just handing them a laptop and assigning them a desk.   More compelling than a handbook and more cost-effective than on-location events and seminars, video is one of the best employee onboarding investments a company can make. With the right video platform and onboarding program in place, employees learn more, feel more connected and remain loyal longer — all at a significant cost savings to the company. Find out more in this new free guide to using video to support employee onboarding!

xAPI - The training industry is about to get a lot more exciting. And it’s about time. Every other function in our organizations has better data than the training department does. Manufacturing, sales, marketing, finance and logistics all have rich datasets to mine about the leading and lagging indicators of success. Over here in training, we have completions, test scores & questions, and time spent in training, and maybe data from a few other isolated tools. The Experience API, or xAPI (perhaps you know it as the Tin Can Project), affords us the opportunity to leap-frog this situation, giving us not only better data but industry-wide interoperable data like no other function has.   

Your journey and career can seem confusing and hard to define. Think about where you are and how you got there, and you’ll see that career paths tend to be crooked and accidental. Each person is unique and will have interest in their career, changing over time. No one can guarantee their future, but laying out a Career Map primes the pump and changes the way everyone sees opportunities. Use this fillable template to strategically and intentionally think about your Talent GPS career. Presented by: Lou Russell, Director of Learning, Russell Martin & Associates (a division of Moser Consulting) Click here to order.

Work looks completely different in 2017 than it did just a generation ago. Where we work looks different, how we work has changed, and the skills any given employee needs are evolving faster than we can keep up. The pace of change has created a gap between the skills employees have right now and the skills they need to be successful. Deloitte researchers have highlighted this issue, pointing out the "declining half-life of skills critical to the 21st-century organization." Click below to learn more about these trends.

Performance Management Needs a Better ROI The verdict is in. Traditional performance management isn’t producing the results needed. "Despite years of research and practice, dissatisfaction with performance management is at an all-time high." "PUTTING PERFORMANCE BACK IN PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT", SHRM-SIOP WHITEPAPER Then there’s the employee perspective. Research by Tiny Pulse found that 64% of employees surveyed wanted a supervisor check-in at least every two weeks, with 42% of millennials wanting feedback every week. It’s time to move beyond traditional performance management. Leading HR experts recommend getting started on a fresh look at performance management, emphasizing real-time, agile and a focus on results.

Organizations that leverage learning beyond traditional on-boarding and mandated compliance training reap the rewards of a more engaged, more skilled and more productive workforce. But getting today’s distracted, impatient and busy learners to participate in training and development activities isn’t easy. Dealing with the realities of low adoption rates are a reoccurring nightmare for learning and development (L&D) teams. THE COLD, HARD FACTS ABOUT THE DISTRACTED WORKFORCE It’s no secret that you’re competing for your learner’s attention, but here are a few facts that might startle you: • 67% of organizations struggle with low learning management system (LMS) adoption rates1; • 88% of employees don’t have time, or make the time, to engage with L&D oerings, • 64% of managers don’t encourage, enable or follow up with L&D, and • 64% of people are not aware of what is available in their LMS2. The concept of "if you build it, they will come" doesn’t hold true for learning organizations. If you build it, they will not come. Not unless you come up with a solid marketing, content, delivery and engagement strategy to get them there. THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF AN ENGAGING TRAINING PROGRAM The nuts and bolts of an engaging training program really come down to a well thought out strategy focused on the learner’s experience. Many learners forget - or were never really made aware of - the benefits of learning and development. They don’t realize the resources available at their disposal that are designed to polish their skills and advance their careers. It’s your job to make them aware.

Download this interview with memory expert Ida Shessel to gain a deeper understand of how our memories work and how your can help yourself and others use your memory more effectively to improve how well you learn.

CSO Insights’ 2017 Sales Manager Enablement Report compared the win rates on forecasted sales opportunities between companies with a formalized approach to coaching—meaning there is a standard approach used by all sales managers—to those companies where coaching strategies were entirely left up to the manager or done informally. Their findings provide proof as to why a sales coaching initiative at your company is so important: companies who had adopted a formal approach to sales coaching achieved a win-rate on forecasted deals that was 19% higher. In short, developing a strong sales coaching culture offers a great ROI. And great leverage: Each sales manager trained is then empowered to improve the win rates of every sales rep on their team. Here are seven keys that will move you in that direction.

There are dozens of studies and surveys each year reporting on the "state of the training industry." With some modest differences, these reports are consistently reporting very similar data. Among the data points routinely reported are the following: annual per employee spending on training, how many hours of training are available to employees, what training areas organizations are emphasizing, the ratio of training budget to overall expenses or payroll, etc. In other words, you can find a myriad of fascinating metrics all telling about the training industry from the organization’s perspective. What about the employees’ perspective? Aren’t we all supposed to be training employees?

No matter how fun your game-based solution is supposed to be, you will still need a plan for launching it, promoting it, and measuring it. How will you communicate about the game? Will you require players to play? How will you incentivize play... or do you need to incentivize?