Sometimes discarding or letting go of seemingly efficient LMSs which significantly fail to meet business needs, provides a fresh start and changes the game to produce far better returns. Studies have shown that companies are systematically changing LMSs into newer and better suited learning systems to support newer learner needs and business demands.

Work looks completely different in 2017 than it did just a generation ago. Where we work looks different, how we work has changed, and the skills any given employee needs are evolving faster than we can keep up. The pace of change has created a gap between the skills employees have right now and the skills they need to be successful. Deloitte researchers have highlighted this issue, pointing out the "declining half-life of skills critical to the 21st-century organization." Click below to learn more about these trends.

Your company as well as many others are suffering from "expertise drain" or loss of "experienced workers." There is difficulty in getting new employees to fast track toward expert performance. Training functions are expected to help fix this problem. However, just like schools and universities, most of our training and eLearning courses are curriculum driven and task specific, far removed from the need for rapid expertise development.

Performance Management Needs a Better ROI The verdict is in. Traditional performance management isn’t producing the results needed. "Despite years of research and practice, dissatisfaction with performance management is at an all-time high." "PUTTING PERFORMANCE BACK IN PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT", SHRM-SIOP WHITEPAPER Then there’s the employee perspective. Research by Tiny Pulse found that 64% of employees surveyed wanted a supervisor check-in at least every two weeks, with 42% of millennials wanting feedback every week. It’s time to move beyond traditional performance management. Leading HR experts recommend getting started on a fresh look at performance management, emphasizing real-time, agile and a focus on results.

In this session, we'll discuss the essential steps needed to build a learning measurement strategy to sustain a practical and scalable measurement process. The session will also explore the key elements to build the measurement culture including leadership, skills, tools, and technology. Real-world examples of measurement strategy in practice will be provided.

Organizations that leverage learning beyond traditional on-boarding and mandated compliance training reap the rewards of a more engaged, more skilled and more productive workforce. But getting today’s distracted, impatient and busy learners to participate in training and development activities isn’t easy. Dealing with the realities of low adoption rates are a reoccurring nightmare for learning and development (L&D) teams. THE COLD, HARD FACTS ABOUT THE DISTRACTED WORKFORCE It’s no secret that you’re competing for your learner’s attention, but here are a few facts that might startle you: • 67% of organizations struggle with low learning management system (LMS) adoption rates1; • 88% of employees don’t have time, or make the time, to engage with L&D oerings, • 64% of managers don’t encourage, enable or follow up with L&D, and • 64% of people are not aware of what is available in their LMS2. The concept of "if you build it, they will come" doesn’t hold true for learning organizations. If you build it, they will not come. Not unless you come up with a solid marketing, content, delivery and engagement strategy to get them there. THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF AN ENGAGING TRAINING PROGRAM The nuts and bolts of an engaging training program really come down to a well thought out strategy focused on the learner’s experience. Many learners forget - or were never really made aware of - the benefits of learning and development. They don’t realize the resources available at their disposal that are designed to polish their skills and advance their careers. It’s your job to make them aware.

Gamification should be thought of as a design sensibility and not merely a digital tool. It is a thought process and a methodology to think about engaging and motivating learners. While a result of gamification is often fun, the ultimate outcome behind developing a gamified approach is increased engagement and motivation.

Download this interview with memory expert Ida Shessel to gain a deeper understand of how our memories work and how your can help yourself and others use your memory more effectively to improve how well you learn.

You’ve heard of employee engagement, but how do you take it from an idea to an actionable plan? Training is pleased to partner with Bob Kelleher for the virtual book launch of his latest work, Employee Engagement for Dummies! From the author of Louder Than Words and Creativeship comes this all-inclusive, step-by-step guide to all things employee engagement.

CSO Insights’ 2017 Sales Manager Enablement Report compared the win rates on forecasted sales opportunities between companies with a formalized approach to coaching—meaning there is a standard approach used by all sales managers—to those companies where coaching strategies were entirely left up to the manager or done informally. Their findings provide proof as to why a sales coaching initiative at your company is so important: companies who had adopted a formal approach to sales coaching achieved a win-rate on forecasted deals that was 19% higher. In short, developing a strong sales coaching culture offers a great ROI. And great leverage: Each sales manager trained is then empowered to improve the win rates of every sales rep on their team. Here are seven keys that will move you in that direction.

Chance are, you didn’t dream of becoming a designer of elearning when you grew up, did you? Most of the working instructional designers in the elearning business got here by accident. So now that you’re here and doing this work, how can you become a more intentional practitioner? We’ll take a look at four key areas to focus on in order to become a well-rounded elearning designer, talk about ways that you can take your practice to the next level, and share some quick tips for better elearning design.

There are dozens of studies and surveys each year reporting on the "state of the training industry." With some modest differences, these reports are consistently reporting very similar data. Among the data points routinely reported are the following: annual per employee spending on training, how many hours of training are available to employees, what training areas organizations are emphasizing, the ratio of training budget to overall expenses or payroll, etc. In other words, you can find a myriad of fascinating metrics all telling about the training industry from the organization’s perspective. What about the employees’ perspective? Aren’t we all supposed to be training employees?

The complaints are familiar: Traditional means of managing organizational knowledge - in reports, status meetings, and standard operating procedures - just don’t work very well. We amass piles of documentation yet can’t find what we need when we need it, we find out too late that a task was already accomplished, better, by someone in another organizational silo, we spend hours never finding the information we’re looking for.

No matter how fun your game-based solution is supposed to be, you will still need a plan for launching it, promoting it, and measuring it. How will you communicate about the game? Will you require players to play? How will you incentivize play... or do you need to incentivize?

If implemented correctly, e-learning can positively impact any organization. But so much of the e-learning created and invested in today relies on technology, and focuses on content instead of the learner and improving performance - the result - boring e-learning and wasted budgets!

Goal management is among the most powerful methods companies have to execute business strategies. Thousands of studies have examined the impact of goal management on workforce productivity.  The common finding from this research is: Effective use of goals often increases employee productivity levels by 25% or more.  The financial value of goal management is staggering given the relatively low cost associated with implementing goal management methods. Because the value of goals is tied to fundamental psychological principles of employee behavior, the benefits of goal management do not depend on being in a certain industry or market.  If a company employees people then it will benefit from better goal management.

As elearning developers we often get caught up in designing only what we know from experience. Same holds true with elearning developers using Articulate Storyline. The more you know, the more options and ideas become evident to solving instructional design challenges. The more you know about variable programming in Storyline, the world opens up to unlimited design possibilities.

NeuroTracker evolved out of a pure science approach through years of research at Prof. Faubert’s Visual Psychophysics & Perception Laboratory. Designed to uniquely measure and enhance high-level cognitive function, it has become established as a valuable research tool for understanding human performance. The not-for-profit CogniSens Applied Research Center (ARC) supports an increasing number of NeuroTracker research projects across a variety of science disciplines. To date, published studies discovered important neuroscience findings in the following areas. Measurement NeuroTracker provides objective cognitive metrics on brain functions fundamental to human performance, and also relevant in cognitive conditions. High-level mental processing is required to perform NeuroTracker at increasing speed threshold, as such, measures have been found to differentiate elite performers from amateur, reveal characteristic of brain development with age, identify impairment with healthy aging or learning related disorders, and possibly to help to detect function-related brain damage, such as with concussions, and reveal non-contact sports injury risk.  

The digital skills gap is hardly news to American workers. Of the more than 200 million adults in the US digital workforce, only one in ten consider themselves very proficient with the digital tools they use every day. As companies move quickly to adopt new cloud-based platforms, such as Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, and Adobe Creative Cloud, as well as new types of tools for marketing, analytics, communications, and more, employees and managers are hard-pressed to fit digital skills training into jam-packed schedules and tight budgets.

Executing talent management activities before they’re needed is an earmark of a successful business. With aging workforces and a shortage of critical talent being among the biggest challenges facing today’s businesses, strategic workforce planning - the discipline of forecasting future gaps between demand and supply of critical talent, to ensure that you have the appropriate workforce mix three, five or ten years from now - has become one of HR’s most important responsibilities.

What are your employees learning today? Or maybe a better question might be, are your employees learning today? If you aren't certain of the answer to either question, or the answer to either question is negative, you might have a problem. And the problem might not be your employees, either.

Analytics are at the heart of a modern data-driven business. When it came to content, we used to rely almost entirely on anecdotes and guesswork. That is no longer good enough - content is at the heart of the sales and marketing process and we must know how it is being used and how it is performing.   Marketing Automation tools made that a reality for marketing content. They let marketers analyze and optimize content marketing efforts during the first half of the sales cycle, providing analytics to show how effectively content moves customers through the funnel. But until recently, as soon as a deal was handed off to the sales team, it entered a content black hole.   There has been no way to answer very basic questions about sales content. Do reps have what they need? Do they use it? Do customers pay any attention to it? Does any of this actually generate real revenue? Even in our increasingly data-driven world, sales content has remained back in the days of guess and hope. But an emerging set of Sales Enablement platforms has changed that. They manage sales content throughout your sales engagements and use analytics to give you full visibility into how that content performs. This guide walks through eight reports that answer the key business questions about sales content and shows how to use them to optimize the way your company engages with customers.

In 1969, the Project Management Institute (PMI) was founded. Project Management specialists were building roads, buildings, the new 'computers' and lunar modules. The AT&T telephone operators still plugged wires into boards to transfer calls! Paper memos slowly communicated work to be done. Multitasking was unheard of. The PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) established a standardized and control-focused approach to doing projects, much like ADDIE brought to the new field of training.

Is your learning strategy firing on all cylinders? We're currently in the process of benchmarking learning techniques and technologies used across multiple Training Magazine's Top 125 winners. During this one-of-a-kind webinar event, we'll share some discoveries from preliminary data on innovative best practices in such areas as proactively establishing an informal learning strategy, using mobile at the right time and for the right reasons, engaging participants in social learning communities, extending learning to partners and customers, creating macro-level blends; and much more.