This short video is part of LLAMA, an Agile project management method. TorranceLearning has taken the best of Agile project management and added a few brilliant instructional design techniques to create LLAMA: the Lot Like Agile Methods Approach. LLAMA gives our clients the flexibility to keep up with changing business needs while creating amazing learning experiences.

On July 30, author and keynote speaker Bob Kelleher will present a webinar for Training Mag Network members and our  guests based upon his research and findings on the topic of his new book, Employee Engagement. Bob has generously provided several chapters of the book for you to download as a preview.  Here is Chapter 10. Chapter 10 Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl: Driving Engagement through Branding In This Chapter: Looking at the relationship between branding and engagement Defining who you are through your employee value proposition Branding internally and externally Using tri-branding to your advantage  

As organizations globalize and transform themselves for a connected, 24/7, just-in-time world, online learning has risen dramatically in importance. And over the last few years, no learning medium has grown faster than online video.

Bringing Everything into View 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.

Have you ever shared your thoughts with someone? On a grander scale, have you tried sharing your work or a potential masterpiece with like-minded people? Sharing your work simply means that it is where your mind is at. It is where your expertise can be found. The patterns of your insights showcase your expertise areas.   Of course you can imagine the satisfaction you get when you receive the approval of people you respect. But the approval of like-minded people is not the only thing. Rather, it's making your work bigger than yourself that matters.     In this fourth installment of my five-part blog series about The All-New TrainingMagNetwork.com Open Learning Environment, I'm going to talk about the importance of sharing your work. The Internet and a good portion of its supporting technology has been the result of open sharing of ideas. Inevitability of Sharing Insight Apart from the climate of openness, we can't expect to enjoy what many would consider to be the greatest invention of modern times. Buzzwords like "open source," "collaboration," and "crowdsourcing" are all synonymous to the sharing of ideas and the climate of openness that it entails.   Although the effort to share one's ideas is not something recent, modern development made it easier to collaborate. According to Josh Lerner and Jean Tirol in their book The Simple Economics Of Open Source, "While media attention to the phenomenon of open source software has been recent, the basic behaviors are much older in their origins. There has long been a tradition of sharing and cooperation in software development. But in recent years, both the scale and formalization of the activity have expanded dramatically with the widespread diffusion of the Internet."   On a more limited scale, programmers have been sharing source codes as early as the '60s and the '70s and this has been called "sneakernet" due primarily to the actual movement of files through people wearing sneakers. I'm sure you can imagine the inconvenience but you get the picture. There is no way ideas can be prevented from getting shared. The Power Behind Sharing Insight Matt Ridley shows that the great progresses experienced by human history have been the result of collaboration or the "meeting and mating" of ideas. 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 and learn and track what they are good at and they show it off in the "Trending Report."  How is Openness Beneficial to Organizational Performance   The advantages of collaboration to organizations are enormous. Bozarth opined, "Showing work offers increased efficiencies, the possibility of innovation and increased ability to improvise, and promises correction of longstanding deficits in organizational communication."   In another study, Martine R. Haas and Morten T. Hansen proposed that, "An organization's  capacity to share knowledge among its individuals and teams and apply that shared knowledge to performing important activities is increasingly seen as a vital source of competitive advantage in many industries."   While it's nice to think about the solo working genius, it's undeniable that we are at a time when certain problems are just too big for the individual to solve alone. We need the insights of other like-minded people whose expertise are in other areas.  Conclusion   The pattern of your insight is a clear predictor of where your expertise lies. While the solo genius presents an attractive picture, sharing these insights expands your horizons. It is only through openness that ideas take on a new life because they meet and mate with other ideas. Innovation becomes possible and inevitable when ideas are shared. Problem-solving is facilitated by not one person but through the contribution of others.

This report takes a look at Training Top 125 tuition practices in 2012-2013, including who offers the program rates, spending levels, courses covered, conditions, and payment practices.

Trello is a nifty website and app that lets us create digital task cards. It’s got a lot of benefits, too. It’s not location-specific so we don’t need to be in the office to update cards or see a board. The user interface allows for almost infinite uses of the app; anything that would benefit from categorizing, chunking, labeling, or color coding could take advantage of Trello. 

On July 30, author and keynote speaker Bob Kelleher will present a webinar for Training Mag Network members and our guests based upon his research and findings on the topic of his new book, Employee Engagement. Bob has generously provided several chapters of the book for you to download as a preview. Here is Chapter 14.   Chapter 14 All Aboard! OnboardingTechniques to Foster Engagement   Recognizing the importance of onboarding Seeing things from the new hire’s point of view Knowing what to do before a new hire starts, on the first day,  and in the first week Establishing performance expectations

This presentation will offer practical yet credible advice on how learning leaders should go about the process of building a business case to formalize learning analytics into the L&D organization and budget. The session will cover critical tools and techniques to establish relevancy for learning measurement and positively create a culture supportive of L&D measurement.

Video is increasingly the tool by which businesses communicate and share valuable information. As organizations continue to find new value in video - creating online training videos, streaming live executive broadcasts, webcasting events, and offering on-demand presentations and product demos - the question of where to keep all this video has become critical. Often this question comes down to two hosting options - video sharing sites like custom YouTube channels, or "the corporate YouTube" video content management system. Each option has its pros and cons, which are discussed in this paper.   Click below to download this white paper.

In the previous tip we talked about sharing your insights. In this fifth installement of the five-part blog series about The All-New TrainingMagNetwork.com Open Learning Environment, we will talk about presenting yourself as an expert and specialist of a specific field.   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.   On the other hand, people with whom members share their achievements are likewise provided the facility for feedback by sharing ideas and comments. Mobile apps and digital watches are so good at this. Their entry to the market is by providing people immediate/instant feedback - whether they are walking, running or consuming calories.   Feedback is key for people to correct and achieve their goals. In the Path2X (Path to Expertise), our members accomplish this through Path2X eShare. Path to Expertise Progress The classic resume is static. It is insufficient because it fails to provide the reviewer a better perspective of the capabilities and experiences of an applicant. With teams, leaders have no immediate way to assess capacities,  status of ongoing learning and new skills developed by team members. They have to wait for evaluation and assessments which may happen only once a year.   In Training Mag Network we try to provide a dynamic way for leaders and members to update interests and skills development. TNM members share their Path2X progress with their leaders, bosses, friends, peers and team. These people are able to comment and have discussions with the member/owner of the report. They can drill down into what resources the TMN member has "actually" studied, reviewed and submitted insights to. Members can share the Path2X report as often as they like. The Path2X Progress Report helps the member "celebrate, announce and demonstrate" their deliberate efforts in building skills and expertise.   The graphics below is an illustration of the Path2X Progress Report. Seth Godin talks about connecting with the customers and standing out as an expert in this short clip of an interview with Bryan Elliott. In the world where competition is the norm, how do you stand out against everybody else? Nowadays, it's not enough to be good at something or be connected to someone, you have to standout. According to William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson, "In today's workplace, creativity has trumped loyalty; individuality has replaced conformity; pro-activity has replaced hierarchy. Those who succeeded were aware of their talents and confident enough to use them to stand out and consistently deliver value to their teams.

An analysis of the overall practices of 2013 Training Top 125 applicants vs. applicants in the four industries most represented in this group: finance and banking, health and medical services, real estate and insurance, and technology.

While the learning side of the team has experience with their roles, it’s pretty rare that anyone actually teaches SMEs how to do theirs. That’s what you’ll do here in this mini-course. Check out the anatomy of a great SME and learn more about your role on the project team.

So, you’re taking on a change. And it needs to happen sooner rather than later, with as little pain and as much support as possible. Simple, right? Being a change leader is never easy. In fact, many change efforts fail outright. Many others never achieve their original visions. This little book is designed to help you think about change in a way that will involve the people who can best help you be successful - formal and informal change leaders, and the people who will be affected by and must implement the change. The goal here is to help you avoid many of the landmines that can derail any change effort.  

Is "doing more with less," resulting in burned out employees? Are you finding it difficult to keep employees engaged?

As technology continues to advance, video accessibility will become more and more important - both in terms of legal requirements and the needs of our world.  Captions have become much more ubiquitous with the growth of online video. Laws continue to close the accessibility gap by requiring captioning in more places where video is found, but people are also starting to appreciate the universal benefits of transcription and captioning.  As video continues to dominate the web and other public spaces, captioning will become less of an afterthought and more of a necessity in an increasingly accessible world. Download this Guide for an excellent introduction to captioning (vs subtitles) their importance to learners and even their role in risk management (see pages start on #24!).

This study explores the thoughts of people working in the field about talent development and its relevance to their work. The researchers specifically asked participants about the role of talent development in their organizations, whether a Talent Development group should be established in their organizations if they didn’t have one, and their impressions of the relationship between talent development and training—and its possible impact on the field.

When you begin a project, one of your first steps will be determining your goals and objectives. If you think of your project like a roadtrip, you can think of your goal as your destination and your objectives as the routes you have to take to get there. Both keep your efforts focused, but they do so in distinct ways. This resource helps you define your goals and objectives in a very effective way.    GrovoMicro

Content. Every employee development program requires it. Every employee needs content to learn. There are no exceptions. This is one of those rare absolutes we simply cannot escape. But if you read about the state of the training industry, it would be easy to walk away believing that the newest application or technology innovation is all you really need to really improve your employee training results. Delivering actual, business benefits from your employee learning and development efforts requires more than simply adding a new application or acquiring a new piece of super-duper technology. What organizations must do is deliver meaningful content to employees.  

Everywhere you look, eLearning content is begging to be captured and put online. Every time an expert gives a lecture, an executive keynotes a conference, a techie gives a chalk talk, a product manager briefs a sales team, or a manager hosts an orientation, valuable content is being created. The trick? How to capture, enliven, deploy, and track it for internal or external audiences. New online tools make it easy to capture your organization's best presentations and most engaging storytellers, turning them into rich, interactive learning content that's available 24/7 from any browser or mobile device.

Accessibility is becoming ever more important to organizations seeking to make all learning accessible and those who want to manage risk through compliance and even where 508 compliance isn't required, through best practices in instructional and training videos.   Click below to download this excellent resources, attend the webinar and watch for the companion piece in your InBox soon, "Beginner's Guide to Captions for Training Videos"

Many businesses approach the market by creating a product or service and then finding a buyer. But that's not the only way. Sometimes the opposite is needed. First, by listening to the market's frustrations and then catering to its needs. This is the idea behind design thinking -- a peopel-centric approach that sacrifices the problem-solver for the benefit of the customer's experience.

Examples, Demo Micro-Learning Ray Jimenez, PhD VignettesLearning.com

So you know you want to incorporate virtual reality into your training. Everybody wants to bring in the new kid and have virtual reality (VR) on their team because the tech is innovative and memorable. VR training experiences have a proven higher retention rate, with retention gains reaching 75% in comparison to standard video, eLearning, or textbook training. VR simulated training has made its way into retail stores, car assembly factories, police academies, all the way to Olympic athlete training.  The possibilities are endless. But how do you turn your VR training idea into reality, and who do you turn to? This new kid isn’t like any training you’ve worked with in the past. VR is not a one-size-fits-all delivery method, nor is it built for quick turnarounds. But here’s the real reality. It’s an investment, and investing in something implies longevity and appreciation in value. Choosing to incorporate VR into your training curriculum or course is not a choice made lightly, nor should it be. This guide is designed to help you set realistic expectations for the VR production process, know what to look for in a great VR development partner, and understand the process of production planning for your next VR training module. Click below to download this  White Paper.