Onboarding shouldn’t be an impersonal and disconnected experience. But today’s workforce is diverse and often dispersed globally, making it difficult for new employees to feel connected. At HDR, an engineering firm, new employees felt isolated and unable to make meaningful connections during onboarding. The result was a lack of engagement and motivation to complete required training. HDR needed a way to build connectivity and accountability into learning and onboarding.

You’ve built great content, but your learners don’t seem to care. They’re not engaging with your learning. Why? Companies spend billions of dollars trying to understand consumer behavior, resulting in marketing strategies aimed at getting consumers to buy their products. In those same organizations, there are L&D groups that may not be leveraging the same insights and strategies to reach their learners. Treat your content like a product, and eliminate the friction between your solutions and your learners.

Today’s L&D teams are democratizing learning through social learning platforms: the “un-LMSs.” Yet, you still need to drive formal learning agendas for the organization. The paradox becomes how to both push and pull learning. Capital One’s Tech College team set a goal to drive an organizational learning agenda by tapping into the “maker” energy of Tech College learners. To achieve this, they implemented a social learning platform that gave any learner the ability to contribute content. While they saw learners endorse and create content, the system didn’t offer a way to align creators with Tech College’s learning agenda. To remedy this, the team built an app to connect experts to Tech College content creation, teaching, mentoring, and speaking opportunities.

While onboarding involves different activities and programs depending on your organization,  some aspects are universal. Typically it involves a limited period during which new hires are expected to read company policies and procedures, get settled into their work spaces, and learn about do's, don'ts, and how-to's. If your onboarding isn’t working, you might struggle with retaining employees, accelerating learning, improving performance and team engagement, and making your staff happy and proud to join in. We must turn staff onboarding into a transformational experience.

Conventional wisdom says that people can self-provision their learning and professional development through internet-enabled access to resources and social networks. But studies indicate that employees are not necessarily skilled at managing their own professional development and leveraging digital tools for learning. With an abundance of resources available, people may become paralyzed by too much information and too many choices. And they may not have the time or savvy to find what they need and use it to develop their knowledge bases and skill sets. Nonetheless, you don’t want to resort to structured training programs as the only path for learning.

Though there’s been great interest in learning personalization in recent years, the truth is that we have been trying to use systems to adapt teaching to individual learners for decades. The key to successful implementation of learning personalization is not through the use of the best learning management system or latest technological trend. 

As adoption of xAPI begins to take hold, it allows for more robust and interesting tracking of the learning process. As actual performance and results data are integrated with learning metrics, L&D professionals will have the data they need to tailor the learning process to individual needs at the same time that they can draw more useful conclusions about the learning as a whole across a wider population.

The eLearning development requests keep rolling in, and everyone wants their projects completed as of yesterday. Working on a busy team can get tough when you’re managing various SMEs, reviewers, demos, feedback, and LMS configurations. This is especially true when you have multiple projects and you play many roles—or every role—on each of them. How do you keep your creative flame burning from project to project without being bogged down by all the project management work that goes along with each one?

Do you ever worry about hiring independent contractors to support your learning projects? Are you realizing that the typical interview process needs to change a bit to ensure you make great selections quickly? Are you considering how you can market yourself as an independent contractor and increase your chances of being hired? Learn some insider tips on how to identify great learning support contractors or become one yourself.

There is a lot of subjectivity when it comes to interpreting 508 compliance for eLearning. Although the law, originally amended to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, was enacted in 1998, the interpretation and implementation varies widely across organizations. This can cause much confusion and distress among developers and project managers as they zigzag across what can be an accessibility landmine hoping to come out whole on the other side.  

Learning is an intrinsically human activity that happens in many places and in many ways. It doesn’t matter how great or feature-rich any one learning system is; learning will never happen in just one place. The modern learning ecosystem not only recognizes this reality but also embraces it to support learners wherever and however they learn best.

Developing great mobile content from an existing course is a lot more than shrinking font sizes and stacking everything into a portrait layout. Unlike traditional learning platforms, effective mobile content provides bite-sized, relevant information at the right time. So, how do you design customized mobile content that makes your users actually want to learn? What skills do you need to develop mobile content? How should the design workflow differ from traditional eLearning? What do mobile learning design documents actually look like, and how do you use them in development?

Experiential learning provides rising leaders in your organization the critical practice in real world environments they need to be successful. As organizations shift to a blended approach to learning, simulations can bridge the gap between virtual and classroom experiences. It is crucial that the integration of simulation-based learning takes into account the objections of the program and leverages the unique environment that this kind of practice provides.

Nobody seems to like compliance training—neither people at work nor L&D professionals. But at the same time, everyone wants the people and organizations that serve them to be compliant. Learn how to handle this compliance training paradox and find professional ways to make the best of it.

How do you reinvigorate a legacy, but lagging, training program and get stakeholders to believe in the potential of training? Many in L&D experience the challenges of a rapidly growing company: loss of focus as training needs expand, distrust and fatigue from SMEs and internal stakeholders, pressure from sales and go-to-market teams. Come learn about how one team experimented with core DevOps concepts to address these challenges, and find out how to reinvigorate your team, your content, and your audience.

Agile is a decentralized strategy in deeply centralized organizations. This conflict is made worse when the people in agile can’t adjust to the mindset. Transforming skills, culture, leadership, talent, and perception of quality, ambiguity, bias, and skills creates struggle in new agile practitioners.

From classroom to CMS, LMS, mobile, LXP, VR, AR, AI and beyond, the delivery mechanisms for training content have never been so varied. To what extent should the ultimate distribution channel guide content development principles? In a culture of instant gratification, does learner convenience come at the expense of content quality?

Learning experiences are born from content, and your organization invests heavily in building that content. This material is developed by different departments that often aren’t communicating, decreasing its impact and potential. Without an enterprise-wide content ecosystem that connects multipurpose content, these assets get locked up into learning, marketing, and support content “pickle jars,” unable to electrify your connected customer and learner journeys. Today, there’s so much inefficiency, waste, and copy/paste in content creation. But the landscape is evolving! In the near future, all of your content may be united by a content ecosystem. What can you do today to prepare for this?

Why do organizations train, and why do they train so much? Simple questions; complex answers. Despite all the L&D industry knows about performance improvement, people still tend to throw training at problems, or accept client requests for courses even before they know why. And, too often, the courseware doesn’t even work. This isn’t because the training is necessarily bad, but because people shouldn’t have done as much of it in the first place. Organizations train to compensate for bad documentation or teach workarounds to bad processes. They train to fix culture and morale problems. They train to meet compliance requirements and then report attendance over competency. They train repeatedly to be sure everyone “gets it.” They train to “CYA.”

Software training lacks variety, and offering only ILT and outdated HTML tutorials didn’t help Shoptech Software’s case. Training was boring, lengthy, and costly to attend. Participation was stagnant, and customers were utilizing phone support more than training. Shoptech needed a better solution for their manufacturing clients. They needed a learning system with a combination of technologies and resources designed to solve clients’ immediate problems.

As tools and strategies emerge that enable us to better support learning in the flow of work, more and more organizations are looking to focus on workflow learning solutions. But like any new approach, it’s important that we don’t just assume that something is effective because we believe it will be, or that it feels right. Measuring the effectiveness of our efforts is key to understanding our work and to reporting the benefits of our programs, and that includes workflow learning programs.

Recent job numbers show that unemployment is moving toward all-time lows, which means the talent wars are getting increasingly competitive among businesses fighting to attract and retain top workers. Even flashy perks like ping-pong, free food, and wine o’clocks are not enough to gain a true talent advantage. New research proves the most coveted benefits are those with substance, that aid professional growth and personal well-being. Not only do development perks provide a competitive hiring edge, but employees given the opportunity to learn at work are also more engaged and interested in their jobs.

Successful onboarding for remote employees requires a lot of managerial time, team time, and resources. New team members can feel isolated and unsupported, especially if they are inexperienced with remote work. Remote employees may not receive information necessary to their job due to lack of consistency in the process, or the absence of support that office-based employees typically receive. Stakeholders may express concern at the length of time required for new employees to become independent and productive. This often results in new employees impatiently pushing through onboarding material to become active in the field quickly, without proper assessment of performance gaps and future developmental needs. Managers, who are also often field-based, can miss signs of employee distress or disengagement until it’s too late.

Your company does not pay for the rest of your team to attend conferences, courses, or outside development. Reports show that employees leave due to lack of training and development opportunities. What will you do? Your people are great! You don’t want to lose them. Without any budget dollars, how can you provide learning experiences for your team so their skills grow instead of getting stale?

Designing a learning ecosystem can be daunting. Selecting the right technologies for your business is crucial for long-term success. Attend this session to learn how various technologies, strategies, and partnerships work together to form a comprehensive learning ecosystem. Hear how a global company, Yum! Brands, utilizes an LMS, LCMS, CMS, LRS, and various other tools (including AI) to provide training to over 850,000 learners in 135 countries with 41 different languages. This session will describe the struggles related to system constraints, cultural differences, business strategy, and the constant battle of keeping up with emerging technologies. Discover tips and tricks for creating a comprehensive learning ecosystem!

The stakes were high, and the learning challenge was tough. A major hospital system was building a new hospital. Nurses, physicians, and hospital staff had to prepare to work effectively, confidently, and safely to provide an excellent patient experience on day one. They had to navigate new spaces; implement new workflows and policies; use new equipment, a new electronic medical records system, and a new communications system; and employ new safety and security procedures. How do you enable busy employees to learn a large and complex set of critical skills in a limited time?

Your company is growing, and you need to scale your training delivery but with a similar cost structure. This was the issue facing Tricentis. They increased their annual training completions from 58 in 2008 to over 18,000 in the first six months of 2018. A traditional instructor-led training model could no longer support this growth. They needed a new eLearning- and technology-led approach.

The eLearning Guild’s director of research, Jane Bozarth, along with contributors to recent research, reviews the Guild’s recent reports on learning styles, evaluating learning, and creating eLearning with limited resources. We’ll look at what’s happening—or not happening—industry-wide, with an emphasis on what works; such as what factors support success, how to counter myths and misperceptions, and what content lends itself best to particular approaches.

To hire a vendor to assist with an eLearning project, your organization may require you to issue an RFP (request for proposals) and obtain multiple quotes. When you get the quotes back, they may vary significantly. How do you know which one to choose? But the better question starts at the beginning of the process: How do you obtain accurate, apples-to-apples quotes from quality eLearning vendors? To receive good quotes, you need to issue an RFP that provides appropriate and clear information for the vendor to accurately price and schedule your project. Once you have accurate quotes, then you can decide which vendor is best for the project using a criteria-based, methodical approach.

If you hire the wrong instructional designer, you risk wasting time and money and losing credibility in the eyes of your stakeholders. It’s important to first understand your needs and then look for an instructional designer with the right design experience, level of creativity, and communication skills to make your projects successful. Join this session to discover a recruitment process that can help you identify the skills you need and source the candidates who possess them.

Most L&D teams are keenly interested in exploring ways to combine their macrolearning needs—traditional ILT classes and VILT sessions, tracked online learning, and structured compliance programs—with microlearning initiatives leveraging mobile, game mechanics, and social interactions. While most legacy LMS platforms have yet to include compelling microlearning features, there are ways to design and integrate legacy macrolearning platforms with modern microlearning solutions to achieve tech-enhanced learning success.