Nearly 48 percent of employees believe they are ready right now for a career change according to a survey by global talent-mobility consulting firm Lee Hecht Harrison. The hiring market is getting tighter as the economy improves. To attract and keep the technical talent required for your organization is a strategic project, and it will not be successful if you treat it like a “hope and a prayer.” Your competitors are trying right now to steal your top technical staff. To retain and grow your valuable technical talent requires three key accountabilities: hire the right person, onboard and grow the person, and manage him or her through career and succession plans.

In this session you will learn how to mitigate the risk of losing key employees by creating a solid hiring and retention strategy, then translating this into a successful and repeatable technical talent process. You will leverage a project charter template to define the boundaries of developing this repeatable process, and learn about automated tools that map to the phases.

In this session, you will learn:

• The importance of investing in a proactive process to engage and keep valuable technical talent
• How to charter a project to create this strategic process
• The automated tools to support your technical talent’s ongoing engagement
• How to use templates to determine the best approach for your organization

Audience:
Intermediate managers and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
Job benchmark assessments and coaching reports.

Accelerated change, moving technologies, globally diverse audiences, increasing demand. We’ve been talking about these and other pressures that senior L&D leaders face for decades. The trouble is that the pressures are not going away. Today’s L&D leaders must align learning to needs, move quickly to improve performance, and add value. They are increasingly looking to technology to help.

In this highly interactive session, you will learn what actually works and what doesn’t. Our research reaches out to over 45 nations for 10 years, but this will be the first time any of the practical findings have been presented in the United States. You will take a fresh look at the hard evidence from over 17,000 learners and 3,500 international L&D leaders. You will learn the strategies of the top-performing L&D teams around the globe and see how they are improving productivity, increasing engagement, enhancing agility, AND improving efficiency.

In this session, you will learn:

• The critical importance of having an evidence-driven rather than a technology-driven learning strategy
• About evidence of bottom-line business impacts that will blow the minds of your senior stakeholders
• Direct insights from learners that will change your thinking forever
• How your strategy really compares with your top-performing peers in the rest of the world

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced designers and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A

Learning professionals commonly build online content, using both off-the-shelf and custom tools. These tools may create web content, be destination sites, or be content repositories of some sort, like an LMS or CMS. What do you know about the security vulnerabilities of these tools? One of the core principles of security is that you can never be 100 percent guaranteed safe from attackers. However, if you know and understand the potential vulnerabilities of your toolset, you can work proactively to reduce the risk that your work becomes the vector for a breach.

In this session you will learn about the workflow and toolset that you may use in your role as designer, developer, or training manager to identify potential vulnerabilities. You will also learn about mitigation strategies you can use today that can reduce your vulnerabilities.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the potential vulnerabilities that you have in your workflow
• What those vulnerabilities can mean for you and your organization
• What you can do to mitigate potential vulnerabilities
• The questions to ask of your vendors to ensure that your organization is protected and not the next big news headline

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A

The subject matter expert (SME) and instructional designer often speak different languages and have different objectives. How do you wrangle the SME to help you work together to produce a final product on time and within budget?

In this session, you will learn to identify those who make the best type of SME and how to define your role in contrast to the role of the SME in your projects. Learn the best practices in working with SMEs during both the design and development process and create a good working relationship throughout the project. You will see how to create a balance between SMEs and instructional designers and identify the right tools and techniques to address issues that may arise.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to identify the SME type
• How to describe your role in the process to the SME
• Best practices for working with SMEs during the design process
• Best practices for working with SMEs during the development process
• Collaboration tools to use in the process

Audience:
Novice designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A

So often, in our day-to-day professional existence, we are bombarded with problems, tasks, and situations that require our attention, all the while neglecting the problem solver—that’s you and me. We seldom recharge our professional batteries and, as such, burn out or become uninspired. We’ve become professional hermits, to an extent, and need an outlet to help us maintain our spark, drive, and creativity.

Through a personal account you will learn the true meaning, nature, and purpose of professional affiliation. This story will illustrate the rich benefits of being a member of a professional organization. In the session you will collaborate in small groups to discuss a personal story from a previous conference, or goal from this one, that relates back to one of the five main benefits. This session will reinvigorate you in professional affiliation, you’ll learn the true upsides to taking time out of your schedule to attend and share, and you’ll realize you are not the only ones experiencing the roadblocks.

In this session, you will learn:

• The common misconceptions centered around professional affiliation, conferences, etc.
• The true nature of professional organizations and how they can benefit you
• The central role networking can play, both personally and professionally, for you as a member of a professional organization
• The role personal development plays in professional growth

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

How can creating storyboards online change your writing and review process? What online spreadsheets can help you track open issues? Can you track project time online to help you better estimate projects in the future? What scheduling tools are available? These are just some of the questions we’ll address in this hands-on session. You’ll get to try out a number of online tools (some free, some fee-based) to help you better manage your eLearning development projects. You’ll walk away not only with valuable perspective on what these specific tools can do, but also with an understanding of key features you can look for and use in other tools. 

Whether you have project management experience or not, this session will help you to better manage the information you need to run your eLearning production effectively.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to use Google Docs for storyboard editing
• How to use Google Sheets for creating issues tracking lists
• How to use MyHours for tracking time
• How to use SmartSheet for creating Gantt charts

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
Google Drive, MyHours, SmartSheet.

Every organization relies on the Internet these days for many things: a public web presence, sales, marketing, customer service, document sharing, research, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and much more. Every time a member of the organization uses the Internet, there is potential for a security breach. As an employer, an employee, and a private individual, nothing that you do on the internet is truly private, and all of your activities can be linked together by observers.

In this session, you will learn the various ways that organizations and their employees utilize the Internet and look at how each might open the door to various types of cyber-attack. You will learn how to inject reasonable paranoia into official and unofficial Internet activities in order to limit the window for attack and will better understand the potential damage that these attacks can wreak.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the various tools that you and your company use, and how each can be used to access your company’s secrets
• How hackers can leverage the vulnerabilities and the information that they find freely available online or in your accounts after breaking in
• How reasonable paranoia and some simple changes in process, behavior, and habit can reduce the risk of vulnerabilities being used to do harm to you and your employer

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A

Subject matter experts (SMEs) are the lifeline of our work as instructional designers, trainers, and facilitators of learning. They bring the content to life and provide both relevance and context. Our goal should be to ensure the working relationship is the best that it can be. However, we are often speaking different languages to each other, causing the instructional design process—and, more importantly, communication—to break down. 

In this session, you will learn methods for improving communication between you and your SMEs and ways to change up the questions you ask to improve the responses you receive. You will explore seven SME archetypes and the challenges of working with each type, as well as the importance of speaking their language and losing the instructional design lingo and jargon you’ve become accustomed to.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to identify the various SME archetypes and ways of managing through the challenges each type presents
• How to discern methods for improving communication between you and your SMEs
• How to change the types of questions you ask your SMEs to respond to
• How to replace instructional design lingo and jargon for clarity and SME understanding

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A

Technology is constantly evolving and changing the ways we live, work, and learn. The ways we approach learning are very different than they were even a decade ago. In order to keep our practices current, we must stay ahead of this technological evolution, and that starts with getting the most out of today’s technology.

In this session you will learn how to use systems you already have to provide on-the-job support for learning, examine the impact of cloud technologies on learning platforms, and discuss how learning platforms can integrate with other enterprise systems. You will examine the increasing role of social media as a means of enhancing informal and social learning and learn how and when to use social and informal learning tools to assist in learning and knowledge transfer. Finally, you will explore how to use today’s cutting-edge technologies to paint a picture of how technology will shape how we learn tomorrow.

In this session, you will learn:

• How and when to use social and informal learning tools to assist in learning and knowledge transfer
• The differences between cloud-based platforms and traditional internally hosted systems
• How learning programs have evolved in tandem with technology
• How to prepare yourself for continued technological evolution

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced designers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
MOOCs, crowd sourcing, TED, and EDex.

Anyone still struggling with learning projects or courses that exceed schedule, budget, or that do not meet audience objectives needs to understand project-scope management. This project management key knowledge area is often overlooked. However the planning, monitoring, and controlling processes involved are critical to ensuring your projects deliver the required results, on time, and on budget.

In this session you will learn the processes, tools, and techniques available to quickly and accurately collect stakeholder requirements. You will learn how to reach agreement on the scope of a learning project, and how to deconstruct the project work for the transparency and visibility required to develop reliable project time and cost estimates.

In this session, you will learn:

• The components of a good scope-management plan
• How to adequately identify requirements and document objectives and agreements
• How to decompose projects into manageable work packages
• Techniques to monitoring and validating projects and prevent scope creep
• Techniques for estimating project time and costs

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Work breakdown structure (WBS) templates.

Your organization has a mature learning program facilitated through the use of a learning management system (LMS). But now the technology powering the current system constrains your organization’s evolving strategic needs for business growth. Your team may have begun looking for technology solutions or started drafting a wish list, but what are your next steps?

Through the lens of two case studies, you will learn the best practices and lessons learned by two nonprofit associations. The first one gives an overview of the American Physical Therapy Association’s efforts to migrate 1,400 courses and 100,000+ users to a new LMS. The second highlights the Society of Human Resource Management’s efforts to select an LMS vendor dependent on a larger technology initiative to build a unified shopping cart and change pricing models for the eLearning product. You will take away practical and scalable solutions to migrate data from your current LMS to a new system and learn strategies for facilitating organizational change and managing the expectations of your team, vendors, and stakeholders.

In this session, you will learn:

• What criteria to consider when selecting a new LMS for your organization
• How to effectively lead the organizational change
• Project management techniques and communication strategies for stakeholders, vendors, and your team
• How to develop a transition plan for both internal and external stakeholders
• Common pitfalls to avoid when you are in the trenches of data migration

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Learning management systems.