How do you make off-the-shelf content more engaging for your learners? You’ve got the content, but how do you get learners interacting with new concepts and applying them to their real jobs as soon as possible?

Coaching is a powerful and underutilized technique for improving human performance. Every manager can coach others to achieve mutual goals.  Coaching serves different purposes including building competence, encouraging teamwork, securing trust, setting expectations, and measuring success. Different contexts can benefit from different approaches to coaching.

Wake up your online learners! Learn best practices and proven strategies to keep online learners motivated and engaged.

You’ve nailed down your strategy (finally!). Your people want to help the business succeed. Your customers want what you’ve got. So, what’s standing in the way of success? Chances are you haven’t unleashed your hidden heroes - your managers.

The comparison between training games and videos (or lectures, or textbooks, or e-learning, or webinars, or any other training technique) is as meaningless as comparing apples and oranges.

Motivation is the energy that accelerates behavior. Often trainers and instructional designers devote a lot of effort in designing reward strategies, convinced that finding the right reward for the right participant will endow the participant with the motivation to learn. Many of us think of motivation as a "carrot and stick" kind of enterprise, with the mechanism influencing motivation located externally. This chapter will help trainers to choose whether to use reward strategies, and if so, how to use them wisely, with a greater understanding of the consequences of their choices.

Whether you deliver online or in-person training, there is nothing more powerful than managers who support training with well delivered coaching.

In this session, you will learn how to link a learning content strategy that relies upon bite-sized video to organizational objectives. The specific elements of a video strategy each guide a range of choices from how to incorporate the power of storytelling through video to achieve these objectives to decisions about specific video types, styles and delivery tools.  

Step-by-Step process in developing a Story-Based Learning Design micro lesson.  

Ever feel like a rubber band that’s ready to pop? Then YOU must be a department of one! The good news is that you CAN do it. Learn strategies and tips to help move you from feeling "over done" to "can be done!"  

Yes! You can make your technical elearning fun and exciting. How do you accomplish this?  Discover  the "Beng, Beng and Boink Learning," (BBBL) design approach. Most technical training and design aim for the perfect world. The trouble starts when learners are unable "to make" sense of the training because they can not touch, feel and manipulate the content.  The BBBL method is a metaphorical theme surrounding learning by problem-solving, diagnostics and troubleshooting. It’s essential in trial-and-error and discovery learning.

This webinar featuring Tracy and Thiagi begins with a survey of 20 different types of cards that can be incorporated in training activities.

Use Dr. Conrad Gottfredson’s "Five Moments of Need Model" to map your mobile learning needs to the right type of solution.

For the average organization, it takes over 6 months for new hires’ contributions to payback the expense of recruiting and onboarding them. With some straightforward approaches to measuring the onboarding experience, training, and performance of new hires, organizations can significantly accelerate time to productivity and improve new hire retention.

Lack of trust is the root cause of major performance gaps in the workplace. A profusion of data from field research confirm that distrust reduces morale, accountability, and engagement and increases fear, suspicion, and duplication in all types of organizations. Most performance consultants believe that trust building is not a valid intervention. It is—and we can share proven principles and procedures that help us improve trust as a first step in increasing business results.

Why is experience the ultimate best teaching model? Why do we miss out on opportunities for improving performance through experience? Research have shown that the demographics in the workforce are gradually changing. Companies are losing more experienced people. Moreover, it is equally getting more difficult to hire people with experience. Unfortunately, learning environments and training programs focus on the theory about the work, and  not gaining the experience  needed for the work. As a result, companies lose valuable human resource assets and ultimately, their competitive edge as well.

As today's organizations stare down the challenges of ever-increasing compliance regulations, unpredictable turnover, and rapidly expanding cultural and learning style changes among employees, companies are looking for new ways to automate and scale their training efforts. More and more, they're finding that help in video. Adaptable to both formal and informal learning needs, video overcomes today's most common training challenges. It helps instructors increase training quality, speed and effectiveness — all while significantly lowering program costs. But of course, today's learning and development professionals already understand the potential that technology can offer in the modern training environment. Their real challenge? Convincing their organizations to do more. In this paper, we help L&D practitioners tackle that challenge head on, including: • 5 benefits that help convince your decision makers to use video in more ways • 14 ideas for supporting and scaling formal and informal learning with video • 1 technology — the video platform — that simplifies the use of video for L&D Video training is no longer a novel idea. It's the new normal. Make sure your organization isn't missing out. Click below to download this White paper.

I am proud to share that in a few weeks, Training Magazine Network will release a new first-of-its kind member service. Our research confirms this is brand-new. We call it Path to Expertise or Path2X. I am humbled by the experience and learning during the Path2X platform creation and making it available to our members. Thanks to everyone who has helped make this vision a reality. Path2X has these key elements.   1) Power of the Prompt Questions With over 90,000 TMN members asking questions in their search activities, we curate and share these questions with the whole community. These prompt questions get crowd-sourced. We refer to them as, "exploratory thinking," "thinking aloud" or "intense curiosity." As the saying goes, "the solution is possible if we ask the right questions."   It's challenging to formulate these questions and if we reuse and repurpose all of them including the search results, it would save time and add more context to the learning.   2) Freedom to Learn One's Interest Areas We allow members to follow their interests and passions openly through access to unbundled and unrestricted sources of content.   Training magazine is a 40-year-old company. It has developed the best-of-breed resource materials in the world of training. Yet, the breadth and depth of knowledge required by learners surpass our present capabilities to provide this to our members. So, we unshackled our thinking, pushed beyond our current boundaries and uncovered a path for learners to have far-reaching access to varied learning.   We published guest blogs - now 50,000 and growing each day. Our learners deserve to enjoy the abundance of open content from all other sources.   3) Ripple Effects of Insights Encourage real-time insights noting, sharing and tracking.   Savor the moment. As members go through all types of content that they find interesting through the help of a powerful search engine, they are constantly encouraged to record their insights as it happens. The key idea is to allow them to document what they find interesting at the moment. Their learning preferences and interest areas are captured by the system. This provides them a unique perspective of their pursuit of expertise.   In TMN, we capture the ripples of insights, those small and micro instances of learning - as they happen. While in webinars, reading white papers, watching videos, etc. members can quickly record the ripple of their insights. They also share and view other members' insights.   4) Trending and Patterns of Insights are Predictors of Expertise Areas Articulate your expertise/digital tracker.   I like the book Show Your Work by Jane Bozarth. It suggests a profound change of our outlook. When we share our work, we actually learn a lot better. I recall a story from a toxic waste company client about how they apply "Chalk Talk." After each training they ask participants to use chalk and blackboard (may be flipcharts, white boards and markers) to talk about what they have learned.   This is a powerful self-learning process that enables the learners to articulate what they know and correct themselves along the way. Let's call this the digital tracker.   At TMN, we allow members to capture trends and patterns. They discover, learn and track what they are good at and they show it off in the "Trending Report."   5) Celebrate and Stand Out as Experts and Specialists Feedback to self, peers and significant leaders.   Mobile apps and digital watches are so good at this. Their entry into the market is by providing people immediate/instant feedback - whether they are walking, running or consuming calories. The key is feedback for people to correct and achieve their goals. In the Path2X (Path to Expertise), our members achieve this through Path2X eShare.   TMN members can share with friends, peers, leaders and if they wish, in the world of social media like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. We encourage TMN members to announce and celebrate their accomplishments. What is the single most compelling Benefit to TMN Members? The new world of learning is open, limitless, abundant and exponential. It is our ardent hope that TMN members experience first-hand this new learning environment. As they discover possibilities, gain insights into their expertise and interest areas and showcase their achievements, we strongly sense that members will eagerly pass on this breakthrough in learning environments to their own learners - helping them to learn better and faster.  

Being a supervisor is no easy task. It is one of the toughest jobs in an organization. However, being a supervisor also opens up opportunities for both personal and career growth. BizLibrary's program is designed to help you quickly up to speed on your two primary task as a supervisor: creating a high-performance team and creating a great place to work.

As long as people have learned how to perform work-related tasks by observing and interacting with others, informal learning has played a significant role in training and development. This article summarizes this topic by describing seven assertions that have emerged from a structured review of the literature on informal learning.

Building ​Strong ​Relationships  Strategic results and small victories are possible oftentimes because people have built relationships. The faster the results expectations, the more robust relationships are needed. Masters Details Virtual Session: Friday, March 25, 2016. Time: 8:00 AM Pacific / 11:00 AM Eastern * *To request a notice when registration opens please, send us a message.

Continuous learning is critical to the professional success of adults, whether they're learning about the latest innovations in their industry, updating their sales skills, receiving customer service training, developing their leadership abilities, or simply getting onboarding training as few hires. Today, using technology to aid in learning is critical. For some organizations, training provided by a basic learning management system (LMS) is sufficient if you just need to launch and track completion of canned content. But if you want to drive knowledge throughout your workforce, your organization requires more.  

Sales is in an effectiveness crisis, with 47% of sales professionals failing (according to CSO Insights studies). It's easy to blame outside factors. But the truth is, if we're going to turn sales performance around, we have to take a good, hard look at sales process.  To achieve consistent results, your sales team needs an actionable and measurable sales process consisting of your best practices. It needs to be repeatable and easy to follow. Download this white paper to: Learn why mapping out a formalized sales process is worth the effort. Get practical guidance on how to do it successfully. Learn how technology makes effective execution achievable for any sales organization. See inside an organization that increased their profit margin by 50% by better executing their sales strategy.

Recursive learning and Creativity   Learning is a creative process. We start with a question, a challenge, a problem, an opportunity or possibly simple or complex tasks. Then we go back to asking more questions. Because of what we want to do, accomplish or learn, our minds go through discovery and creativity.   The focus of this tip is on Recursive Learning and Creativity. People learn recursively. We connect past experiences, with new experiences, and formulate new insights.    These then, become part of our new and improved expertise. Doing these repeatedly help us build skills, mastery and expertise.   The compounding effect of incremental insights show us where our interest areas are, and where our vocation and our passion lie. People tend to do things that give them pleasure. What gives them pleasure allows them to pursue interests. Eventually and along the way, our expertise is rooted in our passions and vocations, whether we are consciously or just unknowingly pursuing them.   Generating insights is normal and common. But deepening insights which is a creative process requires some level of intensity and penetration of desire. Is it difficult to attain? Not really.   It is easily provided when it is incremental - thinking through your insights as it happens is where the epiphany is. It is like when you eat really great food at a 5-Star Michelin restaurant. It is at the moment when your taste buds savor the flavor - at that moment - where experience is highest. This is the moment of ecstatic insights, sometimes euphoria or the Aha! moment. This is similar to the feeling when one generates fresh ideas to change a product and improve services in order to achieve organizational goals. This is similar to the Aha! moment when one discovers the connection between two previously unrelated concepts. According to David Jones, "Aha! moments may be sudden, but they probably depend on an unconscious mental process that has grown slowly." Jones argues further that we can't truly have new ideas, rather, we can connect existing facts or notions by observing others.  The Social Component of Creativity Creativity does not occur in a vacuum. Experts agree that while creativity or insight is a personal experience, "creative thinking is not so much about an individual trait but rather a social phenomenon involving interactions among people within their specific group or cultural settings."   By curating and sharing back to the community "prompt questions," members find it easier or faster to direct their attention to answers and therefore facilitate discovery and insights.   The most intriguing part about prompt questions is that it sends or kicks off learners into an automatic recursive learning process. When we ask questions, our minds go on autopilot to find what we already know, then search outside to discover what else we can learn about. This allows us to reflect and gain insights -- this is recursive learning or creative musing in action. This happens in milliseconds. Although this is most often unconscious, it is most effective in learning and gaining insights.   Prompt Questions Facilitate Thinking To help members in TrainingMagNetwork.com, we provided a prompt-question-driven search engine. It starts with "I want to learn about__________." After members search a phrase, the results go beyond showing a list of resources. It also presents related prompt-question search outcomes.  See the list under "Also try..." (See Image - 1)  Furthermore, when the member clicks "See all questions", a list of prompt questions appear in a categorized format. See Image-2) Both these steps facilitate the learners’ "creative musings." We introduced the process called "Path2X trending" which means that as you add and record insights, you are able to see your "crumbs" - where you have been and what you have been thinking aloud, and the interests you are pursuing and the knowledge and learning that you are accumulating. In essence you are building expertise, but instead of a whimsical and tentative way, we allow members to see the trends of their insights. Here are the two phases of creative musing:  1. Generative phase - During this phase, one tends to generate different solutions to a given problem. Also known as the divergent phase, the creative mind is in a brainstorming mode and tries to consider a variety of ways in which a problem can be approached and a solution can be had. This is what we commonly call "out of the box" thinking.   2. Exploratory/Evaluative phase - Also known as the convergent phase, during this phase the creative mind tends to focus on the best solution to the problem. No longer is the mind brainstorming ideas, rather, with surgical precision, it decides on what to do and faces the problem head on.  According to Robert L. DeHaan, "During the generative process, the creative mind pictures a set of novel mental models as potential solutions to a problem. In the exploratory phase, we evaluate the multiple options and select the best one." Conclusion Creativity is the result of incremental and recursive learning. While we tend to think of it as an innate talent, it cannot be separated from the social context. As a matter of fact, it is enhanced by social interaction as observed from the curated "prompt questions" by TMN members. With "Path2X trending," members can focus and see the trend of their creative musings.