Investment in training for many organizations often results in a roller coaster effect: a temporary improvement in performance, followed by declines or learning plateaus. According to research published in Learning Solutions, 80% of what employees learn is forgotten within 30 days. Battling this up and down cycle has become a constant challenge for trainers. How do you replace incremental and fleeting increases in knowledge with lasting fluency that learners can call upon in real performance situations?

Is your company ready to launch a new product? Your sales and support reps might not be. If the product is complex, your customers might not know how to use it, either. Training is a critical part of every product launch, as it helps employees and customers in a variety of roles and locations build the knowledge and skills they need to sell, service and use the new product effectively.

For the trainers and participants,  webinars are great, until the trainers simply "yack" at learners. That’s when learners start multitasking and therefore, do not learn from the sessions.

A repertoire of specific techniques and treatments that you can quickly apply in almost any situation, focusing on images and slide layout:

They’re Massive, they’re Open, and they’re Online, and they’re getting lots of buzz. But of all the possibilities offered by MOOCs, the Corporate MOOC model stands out as a way to get real business impact and long-term results from social learning and innovative new technologies.

Choosing strategic technology does not guarantee that you'll be able to reap the efficiency rewards. Whether virtual learning, communities, or management systems, most technology implementations fail to deliver the ROI the business needed. 

Selling is not easy, especially under pressure. Pressure changes how the brain functions; it diminishes our ability to think, make decisions and connect with others. That’s why the ability to manage pressure is one of the things that sets high-performing sales people and sales leaders apart. And it’s one of the reasons smart people often fall short.

There is a lot of excitement and buzz in the industry around "gamification" of learning. What does this mean for instructional designers? Is it possible to blend tried and true theories of instructional design while meeting the needs of your learner population and stakeholders who are begging for games? Does gamification of eLearning even make sense for your organization or the needs of your learners? 

A lot of what we do as learning and training professionals center on building our credibility as EXPERTS in our respective fields. Our desires include becoming a consultant and change agent so we can introduce and lead our leaders to make changes. Failure means we suffer from having low impact contributions on the job. Consequently, we lose excitement and commitment to our roles  as developers and inspirers of people.  

What’s the difference between training targeted specifically at front-line sales managers versus general leadership training targeted at other supervisory functions within an organization? Unfortunately, in many cases, nothing. While it is clear that there is merit to tying sales manager training to an organization’s competency model, most of the training sales managers receive tends to be too blunt of an instrument to address the day-to-day realities of sales management.

Are you struggling with the challenges of delivering training to a global employee base? Would you like to provide more interactive and engaging training? How about social learning - is this one of your training objectives?

Annual performance reviews are a given in business. What is not a given is timely and meaningful feedback throughout the year. Yet research shows that providing ongoing feedback in smaller chunks, while situations and circumstances are still fresh in the employee’s mind, is more effective than a one hour meeting once per year.

Have you caught the facts fever? If you’re comfortable with a subject matter, it’s quite likely you’re infected with the curse of knowledge. In other words, knowing too much gets in the way of communicating clearly to those who know less. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a master storyteller or presentation designer to learn how to choose, prepare and present the right content for the right class - whether in person or online. Join Roger Courville, virtual presentation expert, for a fast-paced and practical session on how to tell a clear, compelling story that both educates and motivates.

How do others do what you do? Are there ways you might improve your own processes? Marrapodi and Getz will share tools like Teamwork, Slack, ProofMe, and Review My Elearning used for collaboration which can significantly streamline project management and improve communication. You’ll learn to document the workflow within your team, examine your workflow for problem areas, and implement and leverage collaborative tools within your workgroup. You will leave with tools you can use in your organization to identify and improve your methods.

What does the release of Articulate 360 mean for you? In this interactive session, we will explore the Articulate 360 Suite of products, including Storyline, Studio, Peek, Articulate Review, Articulate Rise, Articulate Live, Preso, and the Content Library. You’ll learn about the similarities and differences, and practice using the key features of each. If you do not have access to Articulate 360, you may join the clinic and observe.

As a designer, are you taking advantage of the features Photoshop has to offer? Cowcill will teach you how to create memorable images — or fix your current work. You’ll use some of the amazing tools in Photoshop to improve the look of pages coming from a cell phone, you’ll correct damaged images, and you’ll learn how to punch up the color and how to use color to draw attention to a specific area. In the last step, you will start to create and develop simulated (2.5D) and true 3D images. You should have access to a recent version of Adobe Photoshop.

Learn to move beyond the antiquated, costly and slow method of designing and delivering eLearning with microlearning. You’ll get a 5-step process for creating microlearning lessons, an implementation checklist, five free source codes, and links to demos and examples.

As we build more complex interactions and applications, we need better processes to allow us to test concepts, measure results, and iterate until our audience needs are met. You’ll be introduced to sketching and prototyping so you can grow a concept and evolve it with feedback prior to development. You’ll learn to use PowerPoint to quickly create a concept, add interactivity, and gather feedback from mobile devices to desktops. Additionally, you’ll learn sketching techniques and how to convert your concept into an interactive prototype with MarvelApp.