It’s one thing to be clear, concise, and in control of your message when you’re speaking to a group of people in a live conference room setting. It’s an entirely different thing to keep audience members attentive and engaged when presenting virtually.

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.

Analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation (ADDIE) are all important steps in the design of effective e-learning applications or any learning program. While there have been many adaptations of ADDIE, many of them were made before we had today's tools, challenges, and opportunities.

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? Best-selling author, keynote speaker and bona-fide expert on employee engagement, Bob Kelleher has researched and reflected on these issues deeply.  In his new book, I-Engage:  Your Personal Engagement Roadmap" Bob offers valuable insights and even potential solutions.  Click below to download the first chapter of this latest revelation.  It begins... Engagement is the key. Back in 2003, global consulting firm Towers Perrin (now Towers Watson) identified and defined an intriguing concept that would go on to revolutionize the way companies thought about their most important asset: their employees. Called "employee engagement," it was originally loosely defined as "the capture of discretionary effort." Discretionary effort, simply put, means going above and beyond at one’s job, or putting in additional effort, because one wants to do so. 

Most of the issues that keep us up at night or prevent organizations from being successful are not problems that can be solved. Rather they are paradoxes that need to be managed. Unfortunately, most of us never learned to distinguish the two…or the methods to address the paradoxes.

Just as B2B sales strategies must adapt to increasingly savvy buyers, sales training must change too. This brief discusses how newer training content and methods can result in a better, smarter sales force.

A memorable learning experience must effectively balance rationality and emotion to deliver flow, transmergence, and loyalty. This requires you to see learning experiences in a new way, and design in a new way. The Learning Experience Canvas is the new way.

Attention spans are dropping at the same time technology is advancing, leading to a digital skills gap costing the U.S. economy 1.3 trillion dollars in lost productivity. Therefore there’s an ever-growing need for new and better ways to teach, learn and train the 21st century workforce -- and Microlearning is the solution. This white paper is designed to educate L&D professionals on the advantages microlearning can offer their organizations and a brief introduction on how to create it. In this white paper you’ll learn: Why microlearning is better for learners Why microlearning is better for trainers and creators The principles of effective microlearning and how to create it for your own organization  

Millennials are infiltrating the workforce while managers and older generations are scrambling to understand and work with this fascinating group. The phrase "What’s up with the kids these days?" is not a new one, but with millennials, there seems to be an entirely new set of challenges and opportunities. By 2015, Millennials will outnumber Boomers in the workforce - Are you ready?

Despite billions spent on leadership development, the investment doesn’t seem to be having the impact one would expect. This may be due to the lack of traction these programs typically have when it comes to lasting behavior change. This white paper provides 22 lessons that will help increase the likelihood that the skills learned in a leadership development program will "stick" and be used on the job.

Our organizations are living through change and are learning organisms that need to adapt to and leverage the dynamics of change. The continually accelerating speed of change over the last several years has made employers and learners (employees) more impatient. Improvement or growth is sought in today's climate for any investment to provide its return in a relatively shorter period of time than a few years ago.

2013 Integrated Talent Management Survey Results   Two different divisions trip over each other, recruiting the same candidate. A consulting firm is unable to meet staffing needs for a new, tightly scheduled project. An organization doesn’t have a clear picture of up-and-coming leadership for succession planning. A business merging with another company can’t easily identify overlap of staff skills. Sound familiar? All of these scenarios point to poor integration of HR solutions. At SilkRoad, we feel this topic is so important that we surveyed 380 HR professionals on their integrated talent management systems and processes. We've compiled those results into a comprehensive (and complimentary!) report. This report highlights the survey results and explores the most pressing questions confronting talent management professionals, including: How truly integrated are talent management functions in organizations? What are the most common talent management functions that companies integrate? What are the biggest pain points organizations experience due to lack of integration? What kind of data do professionals want, but can’t access? Big Data: What is it and are talent management professionals planning to use it? How important is "social" talent management to professionals, and what do they see as its greatest application? Are companies enabling mobile access to their HR data?

Are learning games effective? Does gamification work? What are some practical examples of successful implementations of games and gamification in practical work environments?

It is hard to fault the idea that appraisal reveals an employee’s abilities and a development plan should follow naturally from that. The smooth link looks good on paper. The reality is a good deal messier. It is not that HR is doing something wrong, just that the process is harder than it looks. Understanding why it is hard will lead to better results. Download this complimentary ebook and gain a full understanding of the link between appraisal and development, and what you can do to smooth this tricky process.

Are your employees increasingly mobile, but your learning programs aren’t? If so, you’re missing out on an effective way to support your programs, make an impact on learning results, and be relevant to your employees’ day-to-day jobs.

The reality of business today means that organizations will have to grow the talent they need when they can’t find it. Developing talent internally over the long term will be most of the solution. You’ll want some recommendations in your back pocket when your CEO turns to you for answers. Learning managers will be seen as the go-to resources when it comes to compensating for major skill gaps in talent. By socializing learning, mobilizing the technology, creating strategic stretch assignments, partnering with institutions, and speaking to the bottom line, HR can make learning an integral solution to filling skill gaps in the organization.

"Boring". "Tedious". "Painful". "Do I have to?" These are the moans and complaints of learners as receivers of the data-dump type of very technical and compliance forms of eLearning.

Social business tools are not entirely new. Enterprises have been using virtual tools such as chat and message board tools for years. Yet today, Gartner predicts that by 2016 half of all large organizations will have internal Facebook-like social networks, and that 30% of those will be considered as essential as email and phone.   Why are we seeing such a rapidly accelerating interest and business investment in social business implementations, especially as Gartner notes in Enterprise Social Networks (ESN)? How do you understand how ESNs can help you and how do you get started? Don't get overwhelmed. Download this free eBook from Bloomfire to learn how.

We know the majority of learning that happens in the workplace (and everywhere else) is informal and not in any one tool or system. People are constantly learning to do their jobs, solve problems, and to get better at the things they care about. In order to support people we need to strive for more personalized approaches. We need to focus on figuring out where a person is at, what they need to do, what they want to do, and help to remove the barriers stopping them. This is very, very hard to do when every person in a company uses multiple systems that don’t communicate with one another. We would spend more time than it’s worth to login each place, hunt for information, and make notes about each disparate collection of activities.

I spent this summer writing the second edition of my book Web-Based Training. One of the topics that required updating was blended learning. In the four years since the book was published, the term has taken on several new means. In my research I found the term blended learning referred to four different concepts.

Chances are, your CEO's get the numbers - things like EBITDA, ROI, net and gross revenue, income statements, balance sheets, and related 'hard' data. But perhaps they don't put the same focus on your firm's 'soft' business needs like Employee Engagement.

As instructional designers we are constantly being bombarded with new technologies and new trends. It’s difficult to distinguish which are fads, and which are worthy of our investments of time and resources. The safest, and often most expedient course of action is to continue to focus on the delivery technology we know is NOT a fad, the traditional classroom. After all we’ve been using the traditional classroom forever, how can we possibly go wrong teaching in a classroom in front of an audience? As new technologies, like the virtual classroom, eLearning, and social media, are introduced, we continue to play it safe by trying to make these technology experiences replicate the classroom.

Sheryl Sandberg, author of the new book, "Lean In", tells a story about a businesswoman’s conversation with her 5 year old daughter. She explained to her daughter that when women are promoted and succeed in business, they are liked less by their co-workers. The daughter said, "Then I wouldn’t want to be promoted, because I want to be liked."

Don’t miss this opportunity to get the inside scoop from three Training Top 125 judges who will pinpoint what they look for in Training Top 125 applications during the scoring process. Whether you are a veteran Training Top 125 winner or filling out the application for the first time, this special complimentary Webinar can be the key to increasing your score and ranking.