With the year careening to its end, many of us have an eye on the holidays. Sometimes that means some well-earned downtime. Sometimes it means working twice as hard so you can justify a couple of days by the fire in your Rudolph onesie. And some of us end up playing catch-up well into January! If you’d like some hints about how to manage productivity—not to mention all the latest in learning and development—take a peek under the festive free-webinar tree. The list is a bit shorter for December, but there are some goodies!

Monday, December 3, 2018, 10AM –1AM PT: Taking charge of your professional development (Free to ATD members)

As a learning professional, do you spend so much time developing others that you don't make time to develop yourself? Are you concerned your career might be stuck, or that you won't be able to stay relevant in the digital work environment? When choosing among professional development options, how can you increase the chances that your time and money will be well spent? Join Bob Collins about practical steps you can take to make sure your time spent in personal professional development helps you to achieve your career goals. As the author of our November TD at Work “Develop Your Career With a Professional Certification,” Bob will talk about ways to grow your skills and enhance your career. When you register, be sure to submit a question that you hope the presenter will answer during the webcast. 

Tuesday, December 4, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: 5 easy ways to improve sales team training using video

Are your sales reps operating in a crowded marketplace where prospects are more rapidly becoming more knowledgeable and competitors more aggressive?  In environments like these, it's easier than ever for your sales team and product messages to get lost in the noise. Training your reps on the latest selling strategies and arming them with ongoing information is a proven means to help your sales reps excel and company/product stand out. Doing so, however, is often easier said than done. 

Join the webcast to explore 5 ways organizations are tapping the flexibility, scale, and convenience of video to better impart the urgent knowledge and skills reps need so they can win more accounts. 

Tuesday, December 4, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: Threaded learning instructional design for maximum results

Threaded Learning is a talent development strategy that is designed for maximum long-term impact. By sending out your learning materials, lessons, and modules in a coordinated way across different channels and using different types of media your training program can encourage learner memory, practice, and mastery. In this webinar, Mike Montague, VP of Online Learning at Sandler Training, will guide you through a process for designing high-impact training. He will share the best practices collected from over 300 classrooms and 1,000 instructors to help you make the most of your training dollars. 

Tuesday, December 4, 2018, 11AM – 12PM PT: Creating an employee-centric culture of learning (Free to ATD members)

Employee turnover is a growing challenge for companies: It’s costly, and with the current tight job market, employers can’t afford to lose their employees to competitors. How do organizations improve the employee experience and keep their people engaged? Join Jarron Cozad, vice president of Talent Development at Mountain America Credit Union, and Steve Arntz, senior product manager from Instructure, as they discuss how high-performing organizations motivate and engage employees through strong employee-manager relationships, ongoing employee development, and cultures of learning. 

Wednesday, December 5, 2018, 8AM – 9M PT: Building scenario-based e-learning using templates in Adobe Captivate (2019 release) (Free to ATD members)

Scenario-based learning is a proven effective method for learning using complex, real-life situations. However, the effort and technology to develop scenarios has often appeared to be too complicated, expensive, and time-consuming. Today, authoring tools have advanced to make designing and developing robust scenarios easier and more efficient than ever. Join Pooja Jaisingh to learn how to build and use templates for scenario-based learning courses that will increase learner engagement while drastically cutting development time. You will learn how to modify a scenario-based learning template, saving time, money, and frustration. You will also learn how to use and modify the advanced actions and variables, object states, and effects for building a custom decision-based branching scenario. 

Thursday, December 6, 2018, 10AM – 11:30AM PT: Excellence in Technology Awards 2018 Announcements

Join Brandon Hall Group executives as they announce the winners of the coveted 2018 Excellence in Technology Awards in a live web event. These winners make up the most innovative and effective technologies that improve the human capital management space allowing organizations to measurably impact the business. 

Friday, December 7, 2018, 11AM – 12PM PT: Learning while working: structured on-the-job training made simple (Free to ATD members)

Increasingly job roles require more “on-the-job” learning than classroom-based learning in order to successfully fulfill job duties in a time-driven environment. Yet as important as experiential learning is, too often “on-the-job” training is not treated with the same attention shown to classroom-based learning. Instead, we revert to a sink or swim approach, with very little guidance, minimal uniformity, and even less tracking of measurable learning. Instead of continuing on an unproductive path, consider throwing status quo approaches out the window, ignoring the training clichés, and investing in your own Structured On-the-Job Training (SOJT) program.   

Monday, December 10, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: Hit the ground running: 5 often overlooked strategies to ensure career success in 2019 (Free to ATD members)

What kind of year will 2019 be for your career? Will you make progress, mark time, or fall behind?

Do you feel stuck in a dead-end job with limited opportunities to advance? Are you waiting for your boss or HR to manage your career? Have you interviewed for a promotion a few times, but haven’t gotten selected? Do you love your job, but know it’s time to move on? Are you already on the high-potential track, but need to stand out in the pile? Vivian Blade has seen many professionals get caught up in being so busy with their work that they don’t give much attention to their careers. Then, months pass, and they’re not making the progress they’d hoped and are frustrated by the lack of career opportunities. You have more control than you think over the outcomes in your career. Don’t look back with disappointment. Make the most of 2019, starting now. The right focus and a shift in mindset can give you the power to make change happen. 

Tuesday, December 11, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: Jolly Holly Webinar Party

Join Lou Russell and her friends for a different kind of webinar.  We’ll be having a party, playing games, building treats, celebrating all holidays of December and spreading peace and love. If you’d like to push the envelope on your webinars or if you just like holidays, you’ll love this sleigh ride of new ways to use webinar technology. 

Tuesday, December 11, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: The impact of extending strategic onboarding beyond new hires

Organizations are flocking to improve their onboarding practices because they see the benefits – reduced new-hire attrition and improved new-hire engagement. Brandon Hall Group’s research also shows a big jump in the percentage of organizations in which onboarding is enabled with technology and aligned with business goals, talent management strategies, and linked with many learning and development opportunities. The research also shows additional benefits from extending onboarding throughout the employee lifecycle, such as managing employee transitions, beginning the career development process, and improving employee retention levels. Join Daria Friedman, Principal Analyst Talent Acquisition for Brandon Hall Group, and Lilith Christiansen, VP of Onboarding Solutions for SilkRoad, as they discuss how onboarding can help organizations manage all types of employee transitions, even mergers and acquisitions. 

Tuesday, December 11, 2018, 11AM – 12PM PT: ATD research: 2018 State of the Industry (Free to ATD members)

The State of the Industry report is ATD's annual review of talent development trends, spending, and activities. In this webcast, Mario Ho, Associate Director of ATD will discuss key benchmarks from the 2018 report, including:

• Direct learning expenditure

• The average number of training hours used by employees

• What delivery methods companies are using

• What content areas organizations are focusing on what on-the-job learning opportunities employers are providing.

The 2018 report will be available at www.td.org/research in December. However, you do not need to have read the report to follow the webcast. 

Wednesday, December 12, 2018, 11AM – 12PM PT: 3 ways role-based training can close skill gaps (Free to ATD members)

A survey conducted last year by CareerBuilder showed that "more than two-thirds of employers (67%) are worried about growing skills gaps.” Many are looking externally and trying to hire for those gaps, but what if we could close the gaps by better preparing current employees? Join Brett Andersen, Director of Client Success at Degreed for a deep dive into role-based coaching.  Experience how you can determine and develop the skills and competencies for each role within your team or organization. 

Wednesday, December 12, 2018, 12PM – 1PM PT: Duct-Tape, WD-40, Wrench, Flashlight – How to use the power of metaphors in learning

We use dozens of metaphors daily to communicate with others. Metaphors are powerful in imparting information and knowledge. But how do we use metaphors in learning design, systems and solutions? In this session you will:

• Learn the technique of designing metaphors

• Discover how to convert technical and boring content into provocative and engaging lessons

• Learn where to find and how to collect great metaphors that impacts learners

• Obtain a step-by-step process in presenting metaphors in many learning formats

• Explore how to apply metaphors in manufacturing, sales, leadership, and other types of lessons

• Acquire links to sources of metaphors

Thursday, December 13, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: How USA Today Network creates personalized learning journeys

When your workforce is spread across 100+ locations across the country and beyond, effectively delivering impactful learning experiences can seem like a daunting challenge. That’s why it was critical for USA Today Network to implement a world-class talent development solution that would help the organization achieve four key business goals:

• Provide an Asynchronous-learning experience to new hires and existing employees

• Offer custom learning journeys based on the needs of different sales channels

• Improve direct reporting capabilities for both administrators and leadership

• Migrate content from multiple systems into one easy-to-use system

Join us for this webinar to see how USA Today Network customized learning journeys to meet the needs of individual learners and the business. 

Friday, December 14, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: Leading the brains of your people to higher-level performance (Free to ATD members)

What’s the value of having employees who care passionately about your business? Stated more bluntly, what is the cost if they don’t care? Based on your past experience and common sense, you can guess that employees who are committed and engaged are also more positive, productive, and profitable. But can you measure the value of engagement empirically? Recent research is doing just that, and the evidence is startling. In this webcast you’ll learn the four key elements to creating a committed workforce that will get results and sustain a high level of performance for your organization. 

Tuesday, December 18, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: Engagement upgrade: social learning, user generated content and LMS gamification (Free to ATD members)

Engagement is one of the most common demands for L&D professionals struggling to get more buy-in from an ever-busier workforce. There are hundreds of tactics and strategies credited with enhancing engagement, but which of them really have the potential to work? In this webcast, Katrina Baker, Adobe Senior Learning Evangelist, will explore three engagement enhancement options and discuss their potential to drive engagement and learning culture in your organization. You’ve probably heard about the benefits of learner engagement. This webcast goes beyond theory and focuses on what gamification, user-generated content, and social learning LMS features can do for your training program. This webcast includes examples of engagement features found within Adobe Captivate Prime. 

Tuesday, December 18, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: Advanced visualization process to create dynamic & effective presentations

There’s much research that shows people remember more from training when visuals are used. Yet you, and everyone else, always experience bullet point hell in most courses.

This session looks at three ways to improve your slides visually and get away from Death by PowerPoint and click-through eLearning, so that your content can become more visual, using the right diagram to illustrate and bring your points to life. That means your audience start paying attention, and understand what you want to tell them, even when it’s pretty complicated. Which means that your training is more effective.

There’s also a handy guide to help you create great visuals every time you need to. Plus, once you’ve got your visual ideas, you can also get a free PowerPoint toolkit to kick start your efforts and a series of PowerPoint tutorial videos to bring all your visuals to life.

Tuesday, December 18, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: There is no I in Team: corporate learning’s digital future

In this webinar David Wentworth, Principal Learning Analyst for Brandon Hall Group will be joined by Chris Pirie, former General Manager, Microsoft Global Sales Readiness and Learning, and CEO of The Learning Futures Group, as he share his insights into the team-driven nature of work today, and the possibilities for utilizing digital learning to enhance, replicate, and reinforce team-based learning. After all, cohort-based learning has been around for millennia, and online learning now offers organizations the option of team-based, human-based interactive learning at scale and quality. They’ll discuss online learning options that align with how business gets done.