In 2001, Kent Beck and others created the Agile Manifesto to address the high failure rate of projects. Since then, many companies have adopted agile principles but have struggled with the real-world challenges. Despite this change, a large number of projects still fail. The reality is, many companies talk agile, but application varies—standard techniques exist but may not be followed for good business reasons. It may be cool to be “doing agile,” but it’s just not that easy to transition.

As the lines between marketing, communication, and training are blurring, L&D is being asked to think “like a marketer” and develop or promote creative new learning solutions. So how do marketers engage their audience and change people’s behavior despite changing technology and consumer preferences? The secret is their strategy. How can L&D professionals apply these strategies to change learner behavior and engage participants?

How do you take a traditional learning experience like new-hire training and radically reimagine it for today’s learner? More importantly, why should you want to change your approach? There’s a growing consensus in the L&D industry that new employees learn more on the job than they do through formal learning events. Nonetheless, L&D is in a unique position to shape the experience of new employees from day one, which presents a prime opportunity to create a lasting impact as they begin their new roles.

Patient safety and compliance are major issues in hospitals today. One organization’s challenge was how to keep 7,000 professionals up to date and compliant regarding patient safety tasks and medical equipment. The issue was that formal learning wasn’t proving to be effective enough as medical equipment was changing with software updates on a regular basis.

Many businesses’ success depends on their customers and partners being skilled users of those businesses’ products and services. But sometimes those products and services are complex or otherwise challenging to learn. Unfortunately, the more people struggle to understand them, the less likely they are to use them effectively to unlock value (and come back for more).

Most organizations’ vision of digital learning solutions starts and ends with a focus on creating learning resources for staff on the corporate LMS. One organization wanted to go beyond that to implement a strategy that addressed the full range of digital learning in all aspects of people’s work, from organizational development through staff skills and support.

Losing a skilled employee can cost your organization up to twice the employee’s annual salary, making retention a critical cost-saving metric. In today’s economy, people expect more growth out of their jobs, which is evident in the mobility of workers between firms and industries. Giving employees the ability to expand their skills within a company is critical to not only attracting but also retaining the best talent.

Why do so many companies struggle to optimize the impact and ROI of learning management systems? One problem is that people’s learning preferences have moved beyond what most LMS experiences allow. Another issue is that companies can’t afford to invest in tools that don’t add value to their business priorities. A team at InsideView needed to resolve this dilemma quickly.

Keeping training assets current with a constant cycle of releases is a significant drain on resources. Release notes must be scoured for changes, and corresponding workflows identified and prioritized by customer impact, before training content can be updated. This session is a case study of the tools and procedures developed by the product education team at athenahealth to automate this process and more efficiently update assets affected by each release.

As with any team effort, course development projects have specific players with specific functions designed to work cohesively toward one objective: satisfactorily completing on time within budget. It never fails, however, that a new requirement sneaks in at the goal line, forcing designers to scramble for time and resources. What if you could strategize an offense that converts potential obstacles into assets?

Digital learning has arrived, but the learning community is still playing catch-up. When looking at where the L&D industry is going in the future, you need to address two key strategic questions: How can digital learning demonstrate greater value to learners and the business, and how do L&D professionals need to adjust their approaches to learning in order to deliver that greater value through digital learning?

Is the LMS dead? Can a combination of today’s mobile apps, social interactions, and game-enabled microlearning replace yesterday’s “macrolearning” platforms? Do training programs need to be so structured and prescriptive when modern adaptive approaches are now a reality? The ever-evolving educational technology landscape presents more choices than ever, but finding the right solution in the deep and wide pool of possibility is no longer a game.

L&D professionals often think about one single training program only, instead of looking at the entire journey their learners take. Mapping out the learner life cycle and assigning content that engages them along the way not only helps create unforgettable learning experiences and drive individual performance, but also helps with the transfer of knowledge after a training session ends.

With the advent of Web 2.0, the concept of community has been able to extend not only virtually, but also into different sectors inside and outside organizations. The extension and expansion has rekindled interest in community: how it forms, how it can be maintained, and how it can be leveraged for marketing consumer products and services as well as for learning.

Corporations large and small are still too often hung up on content when it comes to enablement. For example, in situations where a tool (such as Salesforce or something proprietary) is being updated, enablement tends to focus on filling learners’ heads with knowledge and understanding of the changes. But knowledge transfer is not enablement. Focusing on content is the wrong approach.

There are many books, presentations, and consultants that focus on LMS implementation, but what you do after implementation can make the difference between simply putting a new system in place and shaping a learning ecosystem that becomes part of corporate culture, aligning compliance, talent development, and business goals. Failure to identify tools to evaluate the health of your learning infrastructure often leads to student abandonment and limits the value of L&D.

The trend of shortening onboarding while still accelerating quality results on the job is driving the increased need for microlearning and performance support. Most of the content people need in those situations is already there in your courses, but making it available in smaller, bite-sized nuggets is only half the challenge; first, learners have to find those nuggets.