The employment market is fragmented and diverse. Every sector of business requires instructional designers and developers. Many employers prefer Instructional Designers (IDs) with experience in their business sector. This means that subject/content experts with a talent for teaching often move into instructional design using their field-specific knowledge as the key to open the door to course design and development, but with little or no formal preparation for quality instructional design and development. This paper discusses the practice analysis process, including survey results that generated nine primary skill set domains for IDs.  

What are the 3 Steps to Success YOU can take in your first 90 days to facilitate your own success?  We often have the tendency to look around us and see how others are doing things, and then assume, often wrongly, that that is how we must do things. Here are steps that every successful consultant, either knowingly or unknowingly, has followed in achieving success.

This paper is focused on the mobile virtual classroom but don’t worry, we’ll be covering the other concepts (globalization and social networks) in future publications. (The concepts are useful here to help explain the context in which we will be discussing the mobile virtual classroom and its place in the modern virtual classroom.)

Discover the impact of a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous (VUCA) world on current and future leadership requirements.    Learn how thinking agility will help you and your leaders adapt, focus and get more done in a rapidly changing and increasingly noisy environment. Explore four specific steps you can take to build your own and others’ thinking agility. Create your own action plan from the provided checklists to start putting better thinking to work for better performance and results.

This report looks at the implied promises to the instructional design field which include:  -Promises to the instructional designers/developers that they are valued not only financially but also as a professional.  -Promises to the instructional designer/developer’s organization that instructional designers/developers get better, deeper learning and show results through learning transfer.  -Promises to learners that their learning experiences are valuable use of their time and support their current and future work.  Finding ways to reach into organizations for these measures required tapping the instructional design industry and market. A series of focus groups or interviews was planned. This report summarizes the interview process, data, and projected next steps based on interview results. Data gathered about these promises will become part of the ID Certification application process of 2016. 

Successful leaders think differently. They think intentionally about where they are and where they want to go. They think strategically about how they can get there from here. And successful organizations are made up of successful leaders. Can changing your thinking really change your life and how your organization functions? Consider this: after studying successful people for over forty years, John C. Maxwell believes they are all alike in one way: how they think! That is the one thing that separates the successful from the unsuccessful.

Do you wake up every Monday raring to go to work, full of new ideas, confident that you’ll be able to implement them, and passionate about what you do? If so, would you like to stay that way? And if not, doesn’t that sound pretty great?

After spending close to 30 years in human resources and organizational development, and participating  in  countless  retention and succession planning initiatives, I’ve  come to the conclusion that employees are not primarily fired or promoted because of their education, skills, or even amount of experience. Of course, those things are important in their own ways; you are expected to be informed, up-to-date, and capable of doing the job, whatever that might be. However, it’s often the intangibles that define an outstanding employee (or conversely, the less-than-outstanding employee). Companies increasingly understand this shift, and have implemented behavior-based interview techniques during the candidate evaluation and selection process. This approach aims to match the key behavioral and / or trait competencies of an applicant to those that define success in  a  particular job - or in a broader sense, in the larger organization.

Large, global organizations typically operate disparate business systems around the world - increasing information technology costs and impacting service consistency for customers. To increase efficiency and performance, many enterprises choose to optimize their operations based on globally standardized ‘core’ systems. Implementing core software applications, such as SAP, PeopleSoft, SalesForce, Maximo, WorkDay, etc., takes a major investment not only in the technology infrastructure but also in preparing the end-users to operate within the system. Business cases are prepared to forecast the potential savings resulting from the installation of the new application. Assumptions are made on how quickly and thoroughly the users of the application will be able to use it efficiently and effectively. These expectations can be jeopardized if the technology roll-out is delayed or slowed because the users are not ready to meet these assumptions. If a company wants to achieve its business case goals, they need to ensure they get maximum end-user adoption with skilled, competent users.

Today’s dynamic global economy has increased the need for organizational training across all industries. Efficient, cost-effective training and employee development are necessary for day-to-day operations and for meeting strategic business objectives. Many organizations turn to online meeting tools to meet their needs, and there’s no shortage of options. Simple and free. Low-cost/low-feature. Enterprise-grade offerings built for business. But online learning and collaboration require more than a one-size-fits-all solution.