The Houston Food Bank delivered 79 million meals in 2016 and had a goal to deliver 100 million meals in 2018. With this massive expansion, training was required in a number of areas, from leadership development to food safety and compliance. Delivering this training while keeping operating expenses low, however, seemed difficult—that is, until they got support from the Houston L&D community.

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 evolving technology and consumer preferences? The secret is their strategy. How can L&D professionals apply these strategies to change learner behavior and engage participants?

Many professionals struggle with providing clear recommendations to their organizations on what approach to take with courses. Simply putting things online because it is the trend does not seem like a very educated way forward. This often leads to disappointing results that are costly and do not deliver the expected outcomes. Many learning professionals remain unsure of how to formulate an answer to the question they are asked.

Scrum has quickly become a preferred methodology for developing educational content in a fast-paced world. But how do you take those agile concepts and apply them to an existing development team deeply rooted in linear processes? MedStar Health had a patient education video production team that was buried under projects. They needed to implement Scrum, and fast, but quickly found that the out-of-the-box process needed some customization.

Sales. Complaints. Stocking. Theft. These issues dominate the retail day-to-day, leaving little time for development. Distributed stores, varying experience levels, and the growing complexity of omnichannel are making it more difficult for L&D to support retail employees. Although this audience is underserved by L&D, they are at great risk for injury, they interact with customers, and they have the power to make or break your business—one decision at a time.

Is your L&D program short on dollars but big on expectations? Most learning and development professionals feel under-resourced given the learning needs they face, the vast number of tools and approaches available, and their overall ambition to do great work. Today’s L&D professionals need to do more with less, but how?

Is your organization interested in moving beyond course delivery to a broader, more comprehensive and strategic approach that focuses not just on learning, but on performance and productivity? How do you justify your L&D budget? What metrics do you track, and how compelling are they to your funders? Are your sponsors asking you to give them courses or improve the productivity of the organization?

eLearning teams are consistently tasked with completing large projects under impossibly tight deadlines. Often, this feels like eating an elephant. How do you map out the project? How do you hold SMEs, designers, and developers accountable? How do you display progress to stakeholders? The eLearning team at Karmak struggled with these questions and consistently failed to meet deadlines. They wondered: Could borrowing an internal development model be the answer?

Many organizations see virtual reality as too expensive to create and implement. However, cost barriers to VR entry can actually be fairly low, and introducing VR into organizations can be more cost-effective than you imagined.

Rolling out new training is rarely easy, but it can be even more tricky when that training needs to be designed for and delivered to a global audience. This was the case when the Sherwin-Williams Company needed to create and share a new global code of conduct training. With the CEO and board of directors as stakeholders, this high-profile rollout had to go smoothly.

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.

L&D professionals are rarely able to build their ideal learning ecosystem; they often inherit legacy systems and approaches. With so many technologies designed to support specific parts of your ecosystem, it can be difficult to organize them into a comprehensive learning strategy with the flexibility to meet the future needs of your rapidly evolving business and the mobile, social, and global engagement necessary for a generationally diverse workforce.

In 2011, one company had the lowest productivity in its industry in the Asia Pacific, was not making cost of capital, and had a toxic culture. By 2016, the company had the highest productivity in the Asia Pacific, it made record profits, and unions were working happily with management. The organization achieved this by addressing its leadership vacuum and investing in management development that spanned the 70:20:10 in often creative ways.

We are facing a knowledge tsunami—the sheer amount of content available is increasing at an exponential rate, while the shelf life of that content is shrinking dramatically. It can be overwhelming, not just to learners, but to us as well. As we look at the content we develop and publish, we have to ask some very important questions. Is it good content? Is it the right content for the right purpose? Is it up-to-date? Is it understandable? And even when we are confident in our content, we have to make sure it gets to the right people, at just the right time.

Today’s learning ecosystems are evolving. Technology continues to advance, people’s learning needs and preferences are changing, and business needs emerge and expand. In 2016, Choice University embarked on the challenge of evolving the franchisee learning management system and tying it more closely to the business objectives of the company and the hotels it serves. This change required a transformation of the learning ecosystem to maximize business results.

People who are working to strengthen and diversify their learning and performance ecosystem are often interested in figuring out how to amplify social learning in the organization. L&D professionals may find, however, that promoting social learning is not as easy as enabling communication technologies and assigning roles. Learning leaders are sometimes surprised by inactive enterprise social networks and weak peer-to-peer support for learning.

Businesses understand that the faster customers see value from a product or service, the more satisfied they’ll be, and the more likely they are to renew a subscription or return to buy more. Despite this, many don’t understand how to properly train their customers at the start and ensure that they are giving them the right information at the right time. Furthermore, they struggle to implement processes that scale to support growth.

AR and VR present unique challenges in the eLearning space, and because these technologies are so new, many people (both instructors and learners) do not have extensive experience with them. From spatial planning to emotional needs, there is a wide range of factors to consider.

Many training teams end up spinning their wheels because of too many subject matter experts, too much feedback from stakeholders, or too much time trying to figure out the “perfect” solution; all these can lead to drawn-out development that doesn’t create a better product in the end. Spectrum Health University suffered from all of these issues. They needed a way to get training developed more quickly and efficiently.