If only we could gobble up information as easily as Easter chocolate. Unfortunately that’s not always the case, but if you’re looking for some quick-hit training that’ll give you some great productivity ideas (instead of a sugar rush), check out the list of free webinars being offered for April.

Monday, April 2, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: Straight Talk: Communication and Connection Skills to Increase Influence (Free for ATD members)

Learn effective communication techniques to improve your communication skills, and learn to connect effectively to leverage those communication skills. Apply these key principles to accelerate your career, increase your influence, and enhance your personal and professional relationships.

In this webcast, you’ll learn:

• The foundational communication principle to increase influence with others.

• Three connection and communication principles to leverage relationships.

• Eight tips for remembering—and using—names.

Tuesday, April 3, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: Create Your First eLearning Course with Captivate

Are you just getting started with Adobe Captivate? Looking for some solid foundations to build your eLearning content?

Join Dr. Pooja Jaisingh for this fun and easy introduction to Adobe Captivate for first-time eLearning developers. You'll get a simple introduction to the software—aimed at helping you get started making great eLearning content. Dr. Jaisingh will walk you through a simple eLearning project, and you'll have a chance to chat with her and other new eLearning creators, exploring similar projects.

Tuesday, April 3, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: 5 Problems with Sharing Training Videos on YouTube

You wouldn’t trust YouTube with a video that held your personal credit card information. But right now, a quick YouTube search turns up 815,000 videos for “internal meeting,” 310,000 more for “product roadmap,” and 168,000 for “confidential training.” Hopefully none of those are yours.

For organizations of all sizes, video is fast becoming a preferred medium for delivering employee training, live corporate events, new hire onboarding, internal communications, and more. But every video your business creates will need to be stored somewhere—where exactly you choose to share your recordings will make a big difference to what your team can do with those videos and how your business may leverage them in the future.

Training teams share company videos on public sites like YouTube and Vimeo because they don’t have a better option. In this webcast, we’ll examine five serious pitfalls that make YouTube a poor choice for hosting your company’s training videos, then look at the pros and cons of six alternatives to find smarter places for your business to keep its video safe.

Tuesday, April 3, 2018, 11AM – 12PM PT: Learners are from Mars, L&D Leaders Are from Venus: Understanding What Everyone Wants from Corporate Learning (free for ATD members)

Your company needs talent with the latest skills to take advantage of emerging technologies and stay competitive. Investing in corporate learning and development not only helps companies grow talent from within and maintain a competitive edge; it’s also a boon for employees who feel more engaged at work and committed to their company. While everyone agrees that L&D in companies is a good thing, learners and L&D leaders don’t always see eye to eye on the details—preventing both sides from maximizing the ROI of corporate learning.

In this webcast, you’ll learn:

• The truth behind what employers and employees each want and expect from a corporate learning program.

• What employees and employers agree is the biggest challenge when it comes to corporate learning tools and solutions.

• How companies can implement programs that bring together the best of what employers and employees want and need from corporate learning.

Wednesday, April 4, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: SERIOUSLY??? Dealing with Disruptive Participants

You’ve worked endless hours (including nights and weekends) prepping for this training session. You’ve set up the room (physical or virtual), welcomed participants, and successfully started your session. Then it happens. The dreaded “problem children” start to emerge.

In a classroom setting, they’re sitting to the side or in the back of the room texting, chatting, talking on the phone, or just being obnoxious. Virtually, they’re monopolizing the chat box or having their own private conversation with another participant, not turning off their mic and providing the rest of the virtual learners with lovely office background noise or making bold (inappropriate) comments that you know they would not have the guts to make face to face! These folks are clearly disrupting the learning process of those around them, not to mention irritating you.

In this session you’ll learn to:

• Discern whether the behaviour is training or non-training in origin.

• Decide whether the behaviour should be addressed or ignored.

• Examine various approaches to help you stay calm, grounded, and in control while addressing this disruptive behaviour.

Learn how to handle disruptive behaviour before it rears its ugly head!

Wednesday, April 4, 2018, 11AM – 12PM PT: The Down-and-Dirty Realities of Modern Learning: Beyond Buzzwords (free for ATD members)

You know the buzz—from “embedded” to “micro” to “agile.” There’s no shortage of trendy terms to describe workplace training today. However, no amount of new terminology can convey the true and lasting importance of building a modern learning culture. Doing that requires strategy and action, and maybe even some street smarts to earn the attention and respect of the organization. It may seem daunting, but fear not! With the right tools and techniques, you can prove the value of training and garner the broad corporate buy-in your programs deserve. Please join Litmos CLO, Mike Martin, for this one-hour webcast for new insights on:

• Earning executive support to champion the criticality of training.

• Getting doubters on board by connecting training to performance.

• The platforms and processes required to power modern learning.

• How to learn even more if you’re attending ATD 2018 on May 6-9.

Thursday, April 5, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: Creating a Culture of Personal Development at West Marine

West Marine believes that the soul of adventure is in the willingness to face challenges, even when the outcomes can't be guaranteed. When West Marine looked at its business performance data, senior leaders knew the company had to change so it could thrive in a new retail environment. The company made a business decision to create a culture that supports continuous learning, growth, and development—for every single person at all levels of the company. But how would the people navigate through these waters?

Join Emily Manley, Saba Product Expert, and Helen Rossiter, Learning & Talent Development leader, as they outline a step-by-step process for launching a company-wide personal development program that is employee-driven and designed to put people in the best position for success.

You’ll gain insights into:

• The critical steps in nurturing a culture where each employee creates a vision for their own future.

• Practical advice on how to grow a succession pool of high potential talent at all levels of the organization, aligned to business goals.

• How to communicate a roadmap for future talent and skills to business leaders.

• How technology can provide a foundation for personalizing the experience at scale.

Friday, April 6, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: Getting over Your Fear of Giving Feedback (free for ATD members)

Feedback: No one wants it, no one wants to give it. It’s a loaded word, and one that has the capacity to strike fear in the heart of both the recipient and the deliverer. But it’s more than the interplay of minds, language, and egos. The ability of leaders to foster organizational environments conducive to regular feedback isn’t easily cultivated. But failure to do so threatens our ability to achieve organizational objectives. In a time of leading amidst more complexity than ever, leaders and managers must uncover the secrets to making feedback work at all levels.

In this webcast, you’ll:

• Review the neurological and biological factors that contribute to fear of feedback.

• Address the organizational barriers that impact our ability to provide and receive feedback.

• Uncover the organizational and personal costs of avoiding feedback.

• Identify specific skills required to engage in the feedback loop.

Monday, April 9, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: Delivering Care of the Future: Creating a Workforce Innovation Engine (free for ATD members)

Innovation in healthcare is more important than ever. Talent development executives are under the gun to help employees find new ways to improve quality, increase access, reduce errors, and navigate regulatory changes—all while improving efficiency. But between organizational silos, overwhelmed clinical teams, and resource constraints, it has become harder than ever to develop and implement innovative practices. But what if those innovations already exist, and it’s just a matter of finding them?

For one health system, the solution to capture and disseminate innovative practices is their workforce collaboration platform—a digital hub that’s more than 100,000 employees strong. Attend this webcast and learn how the health system was able to use the platform to create an “innovation engine” resulting in more than 300 new practices implemented across 100 facilities nationwide.

In this webcast, you’ll learn to:

• Understand how health systems are leveraging today’s digital collaboration platforms to go beyond learning and drive cultural change.

• Capture innovative, employee-sourced clinical practices.

• Successfully replicate practices across a health system to create a more innovative workforce.

Tuesday, April 10, 2018, 11AM – 12PM PT: Three Sales Coaching Strategies for Underperforming Teams

An overall goal does not dictate that a team's performance is improving. This webcast will teach three specific sales coaching strategies for underperforming teams.

Attendees of this webcast will learn the following coaching strategies that are designed to drive performance and bottom-line results:

• How to use peer-to-peer coaching to accelerate performance.

• How to use group coaching leveraging high-performance sales talent.

• How to use learning projects as a way of building performance and personal sales accountability.

Tuesday, April 10, 2018, 11AM – 12PM: 5 Reasons Your Training Videos Don’t Belong on YouTube (free for ATD members)

You wouldn’t trust YouTube to keep a video that held your personal credit card information. But right now, a quick YouTube search turns up 815,000 videos for “internal meeting,” 310,000 for “product road map,” and 168,000 for “confidential training.” Hopefully none of those are yours.

In this webcast, we’ll examine five pitfalls that make YouTube a poor choice for hosting your company’s training videos, then consider the pros and cons of six alternatives to find smarter places to keep your videos safe. You’ll learn:

• What problems can arise from sharing business video on free, consumer-oriented websites.

• What alternative solutions exist for sharing business video, and the pros and cons of each.

• How policymakers can choose the video sharing option that will best meet their business needs.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: Clark Quinn Debunks Learning Myths and Legends

Our profession requires us to be practising in alignment with what science tells us about learning and more. What we don’t need is to be continually in the sway of myths, urban legends, and misconceptions about how our brains think, work, and learn.

This webinar will look at:

• Ills that plague our industry.

• How you rebut these problematic tendencies.

• How to be better prepared going forward.

Pre-order Clark's newest book Millennials, Goldfish & Other Training Misconceptions: Debunking Learning Myths and Superstitions for more insight into ideas covered in this webinar.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: A Little Change Goes a Long Way: Organizational Learning as a Resource for Change Management

Sooner or later, we all need to change. The march of progress is inevitable, and nowhere more so than in today's light-speed business environments. Nonetheless, organizations are often change-resistant, and figuring out methods to incite and inspire change can be an enormous challenge for business leaders. Many of those leaders are now turning to their training departments with expectations that managing change can come from learning leaders. How do we address those needs? And how do we deal with the inevitable resistance?

Join Adobe's Dr. Allen Partridge, Head of Digital Learning Evangelism, for this engaging exploration of practical strategies to encourage innovation one little step at a time.

The session will cover:

• Developing and implementing a change-management strategy aligned to your organizational training needs.

• Change-management overview.

• Strategies.

• Learning programs as change management.

• Building strategic partnerships with organizational managers.

• Approaching program implementation one division or unit at a time.

• Building alliances by delivering results.

• Prototypical alignment to divisions (for example, sales).

• Leveraging past victories to create an evidence-based foundation for your enterprise learning programs.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018, 11AM – 12PM: What If Everything You Know About Personality Styles Training Is Wrong? (free for ATD members)

Even though DISC assessments are commonly used around the world, they regularly fail to have a lasting impact. While people are fascinated by their results, awareness doesn’t often translate into sustained behavioural change. Learn how to reinvent DISC training to make it more engaging and sticky. Discover that DISC is not about graphs and reports, but rather about application. You’ll learn how to place the styles into long-term memory, rather than treating them as little more than a fleeting fascination.

In this webcast, you’ll:

• Gain insight about how to turn classroom-based DISC training into a fun and engaging experience.

• Discover why most DISC training is designed for short-term memory, not long-term retention and application.

• Find out how to turn DISC training into a process, not an event, by reinforcing the learning throughout the year.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018, 12PM – 1PM PT: High Impact Evaluation – An Overview (free for IPL members)

High Impact Evaluation™ is a game-changing evaluation approach that was created not just to measure training outcomes but to drive performance and business impact. It infuses the traditional instructional design process (ADDIE) with business and organizational results-based thinking.

High Impact Evaluation has been described by workshop participants as “rigorous but simple.” In this high-level overview, participants will learn how this model can be used to:

• Ensure training is aligned and locked to desired performance and business outcomes (Impact Mapping).

• Assess critical risks to impact and fix them—before program launch.

• Standardize evaluation tools, assess progress, and benchmark results.

• Select the right metrics (leading indicators) to forecast learning transfer, business impact, and ROI.

• Exploit evaluation feedback to make mid-course corrections to ensure learning drives impact.

• Use compelling visual reports for senior stakeholders—“results-at-a-glance.”

Who this workshop is for:

• Course Designers & Developers/Senior Relationship/Business Managers/Facilitators.

• Measurement & Evaluation Specialists/Training & Development Managers, Senior Managers.

Wednesday, April 11, 2018, 12PM – 1PM PT: Surviving the New Skills Economy

The world has changed and the next industrial revolution has arrived. According to the World Economic Forum, we have entered the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which technology has been and will continue to be embedded into society in ways that involve and require entirely new capabilities for people and machines. Technology has also destroyed the staying power of traditional companies, reducing their average lifespan by two-thirds since 1950, and moving the majority of their assets from tangible products to intangible assets, comprising people and intellectual property. In short, this means that in this new digital age, skills have become the new currency, and data is the oil that fuels our transactions.

Join Brett Wilson, Cornerstone’s Director of Thought Leadership and Strategy, as he discusses the implications of the global skills crisis and how we manage talent over the next five years, as it will be completely different from the last twenty years. This crisis will force a new set of expectations for a modern workforce. A subsequent issue suggests that every job is changing, requiring the best companies to reinvent themselves to meet the challenge.

Given all of these challenges, Mr. Wilson will put forth a four-pronged strategy that will consist of the following principles:

• Create lifelong learning experiences.

• Make recruiting a competitive advantage.

• Personalize talent management processes.

• Bring context and intelligence to HR decisions.

Thursday, April 12, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: Create Better Blended Learning Faster with Perpetual Learning Design

Members of the training community are bombarded with messages about the latest trends: microlearning, video, virtual classrooms, and social collaborative learning, just to name a few.

How do you effectively organize these elements of modern learning design into a cohesive curriculum that supports learners both in the formal learning process and well after the LMS indicates the course is complete?

This session explores Perpetual Learning Design TM, which incorporates learning campaigns, campaign maps, and campaign blueprints to help you to quickly decide what learners need to do, in what order, and using what technology. And you might find a way to really take advantage of your LMS while you’re at it!

Leave with a toolkit to help you implement Perpetual Learning Design in your organization.

Thursday, April 12, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: Best of DemoFest 2018: Award-Winning eLearning in Action

This year at Learning Solutions Conference & Expo, dozens of conference participants will show off their unique learning projects at DemoFest, offering their fellow attendees the opportunity to see a wide variety of solutions to common learning challenges, and sharing information about the tools, technologies, and processes used to build them.

Meet several of this year’s winners in the complimentary Best of DemoFest Webinar on Thursday, April 12 at 10:00 AM PT. Register below to learn about the award-winning projects in the following categories and get some great ideas to apply to your work!

See projects from the following categories:

• Alternative

• Blended Learning

• Business Process

• Game-Based

• Immersive/Simulation

• Onboarding/Employee Orientation

• Performance Support

• Sales Training

• Social Collaboration

• Best of Show Vendor

• Best of Show Non-Vendor

Thursday, April 12, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: Ask an APTD! (Free for ATD members)

The industry’s newest credential, Associate Professional in Talent Development (APTD), was designed and developed by the Certification Institute team to meet the needs expressed by professionals like you.

The APTD is designed for talent development professionals with at least three years of experience whose primary responsibilities are in instructional design, training delivery, or learning technology. Want to know what the exam was like? How many hours it took to prepare? Study tips? What each credential holder would have done differently? Or, are you curious to find out what compelled each of these APTDs to invest their time and energy into the credential? Join in, and ask an APTD! If you’re new to the TD field or an informal trainer looking to pursue growth opportunities in the field, then the APTD could be for you. Be sure to submit a specific question or two for the panelists when you register to attend. 

Monday, April 16, 2018, 8AM – 9AM PT: Coaching for Accountability and Motivation: Rewriting the Harmful Stories We Tell Ourselves About Work (free for ATD members)

Accountability and motivation are essential for long-term business success; leaders often struggle with the challenge of both instilling these characteristics within individual staff members and ensuring they are part of the broader company culture. Accountability is necessary to ensure quality, promote safety, maintain positive work environments, and deliver results to customers. Motivation is key to retention and maximizing employee performance. This webcast will explore how coaching centred around questioning and addressing the powerful and sometimes harmful narratives we carry around inside our own heads is a crucial element of building internal accountability and motivation and driving these attributes throughout your culture. 

Monday, April 16, 2018, 11AM – 12PM PT: How High-Performing Companies Approach Performance Management (free for ATD members)

Instead of just hating on performance management processes, why don't we do something about them? New insights uncovered by Lighthouse Research reveal a clear distinction between the performance management and engagement practices used at high-performing firms versus their lower-performing peers. And yes, performance in this case means business KPIs such as revenue, engagement, and retention. The top-performing companies leverage a mixture of recognition, regular conversations, and other practices to create more engaging workplace experiences for their employees, ultimately driving engagement and performance to new heights.

This webcast will look at the research and what it can teach us about how to improve our approach to performance management. More practically, it will examine some case studies and stories of companies that have modified their approach to performance management, reaping a variety of rewards. You’ll learn:

• The deep links between engagement, performance management, and business results.

• How to adapt performance management practices to improve outcomes.

• How other firms have made the transition, including lessons learned.

Tuesday, April 17, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: Moments that Matter: Making Sense of the Modern Learner

As our learning cultures transform to better meet the needs of the Modern Learner, technology is no doubt going to play a significant role. But as the world of digital learning becomes increasingly saturated with apps, games, courses, microlearning, learning platforms and more, how do we ensure we still provide learning experiences that are meaningful? personal? powerful?

In this session, Josh Cardoz, Principal Learning Strategist at SwissVBS, and David Wentworth, Principal Learning Analyst at Brandon Hall Group will deconstruct the world of the Modern Learner and offer a practical guide for how to optimize your digital content strategy, a strategy that is driven by learner needs and business results.

Topics:

• The Modern Learner

• Learning Brand

• Microlearning

• Continuous Learning

• Content Strategy

Tuesday, April 17, 2018, 11AM – 12PM PT: When Humans Crave Coaching, Manager Mindsets Matter (free for ATD members)

Millennials, Boomers, Gen Xers—it doesn’t matter who you are, human beings crave coaching at work. We want our managers to have a vested interest in our growth and development, very often above all else. Yet, even for managers with the best intentions, coaching can be a constant fail. Join us for a powerful hour of keeping it real as we tell coaching stories from the trenches and share the best ways you can change manager mindsets to create the culture of coaching people crave.

In this webcast, you’ll learn:

• Why now is the time for managers to double down on coaching.

• Which manager mindsets inhibit effective coaching.

• Tips to change manager mindsets and create a culture of coaching.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: A Little Change Goes a Long Way; Organizational Learning as a Resource for Change Management

Sooner or later, we all have to change. The march of progress is inevitable and nowhere more so than in today's light-speed business environments. Nonetheless, organizations are often change-resistant, and figuring out methods to incite and inspire change can be an enormous challenge for business leaders. Many of those leaders are now turning to their training departments with expectations that managing change can come from learning leaders. How do we address those needs? And how do we deal with the inevitable resistance?

Join Adobe's Dr. Allen Partridge, Head of Digital Learning Evangelism for this engaging exploration of practical strategies to encourage innovation, one little step at a time.

In this session, attendees will:

• Develop and implement a change management strategy aligned to your organizational training needs.

• Change management overview.

• Strategies.

• Learning programs as change management.

• Learn how to build strategic partnerships with organizational managers.

• Approach program implementation one division or unit at a time.

• Build alliances by delivering results.

• Prototypical alignment to divisions—e.g., sales.

• Leverage past victories to create an evidence-based foundation for your enterprise learning programs.

Wednesday, April 18, 2018, 11AM – 12PM PT: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges, We Are Here to Learn (free for ATD members)

Adult learning and technology can be a messy mix. This isn’t to suggest that adults can’t “use the Google” or load an app. It suggests that adult learning theories must be taken into consideration when choosing the appropriate learning technology tools. There’s hype around badges, but do they drive learning and behavioural changes? We flock to microlearning because of short memory, and mobile learning to meet on-the-go lifestyles...but where’s the hype about andragogy and experiential learning?

In this webcast, you’ll:

• Explore adult learning theories.

• Consider how to apply the theories when choosing the right tools for adults.

• Compare a few tools to see how they meet adult learners’ needs.

Thursday, April 19, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: Say Hello to Advanced Actions and Variables in Adobe Captivate (2017 Release)!

Advanced actions and variables in Captivate allow you to customize your courses to provide personalized and best possible experiences to the learners. You can take your eLearning course-creation skills to the next level with advanced actions, which will help you execute multiple actions at a time and build conditional logic. This will further help you in building custom slides and interactions for your eLearning courses.

Join Dr. Pooja Jaisingh, Senior Adobe Learning Evangelist, to learn about the building blocks for using advanced actions and variables in Adobe Captivate to create simple custom interactions, and see some complex example interactions.

During this session, you will learn how to:

• Create and use the user-generated variables.

• Use the system variables to display information on the slides and build conditional logic.

• Create standard and conditional actions.

• Convert advanced actions to shared actions.

• Execute advanced and shared actions.

• Create simple custom interactions using advanced actions and variables.

• View examples of complex eLearning interactions.

Thursday, April 19, 2018, 11:30AM – 12:30PM PT: Solve the Puzzle: Customize Your Talent Development Framework to Fit Your Organization’s Culture (Free for ATD members)

Effectively developing skilled talent means having a learning and talent development function that is structured to meet both the needs of the workforce and the goals of the business. In this webcast, you’ll learn about the central components of the ATD talent development framework and understand how to build your own talent development structure using the framework's online puzzle tool.

With best practices from other organizations that have used the framework, this webcast will review how to introduce the concepts in your organization and how to build an action plan to engage your team, peers, and senior executives in using the framework.

Friday, April 20, 2018, 8:30AM – 9:30AM PT: Keynote Session to the Masters Series – Tools to Engage the Modern Learner: The “Let’s Do It and Must Do It” Learners

Whether new, experienced, young or old, there are new workers and learners in our modern workplaces. They are the let's do it and must do it learners. Their mindsets are set for constant learning, rapid speed, and net-connected with their tools. Their work environment is modern, driven by newer, better, and faster tools that encourage collaboration, sharing knowledge, and contributions to problem-solving. For learning and training professionals, this is our new playing field. How well are you prepared or coping or surviving with this environment?

How do you not only keep your training, learning solutions, and initiatives relevant but also have them anticipate and promote modern ways of learning? In this session, Ray Jimenez will explore audience trends in technologies and modern worker mindsets. 

Friday, April 20, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: Augmented Reality in L&D (Free for ATD members)

How can you encourage self-directed learning even in an instructor-led training? Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that embeds multimedia web elements and graphics into real objects. It might seem intimating, but there are some quick, cheap, and really easy ways to implement it. You don’t need to be a technology guru to incorporate some fun AR into your training!

During this webcast, Nelson Santiago will show you how you can make your hard-copy presentation materials more memorable to successfully meet learning objectives while learners interact with the real world—all without breaking the bank or stressing yourself out.

Monday, April 23, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: Deliver Extraordinary Results Through Transformative Training! (Free for ATD members)

Knowing what to do makes no difference unless you’re doing what you know. In an age when an abundance of knowledge is always available at the touch of a button, what sets extraordinary trainers apart is that they go beyond merely informing their audience, to also equip them with the tools, skills, and motivation to act on what they already know. This webcast will go over simple approaches that you can immediately incorporate into your training efforts to wow your audience, empower them to use the knowledge they have gained, and keep them coming back for more.

In this webcast, you’ll learn how to:

• Understand the distinction between informative learning and transformative learning and how they can effectively work hand in hand when applied to training efforts.

• Discover the seven hidden barriers that prevent people from doing what they know they should do, and learn how to neutralize those barriers whenever they show up.

• Explore how you can be a trainer who inspires the audience to take action and make the most of what they learn.

Tuesday, April 24, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: How to Turn Your Training Presentations into Videos Using Only PowerPoint and Free Apps

Ellen Finkelstein is a recognized expert, speaker, trainer, and best-selling author on PowerPoint presentation skills. One of only 37 Microsoft-appointed PowerPoint MVPs (Most Valuable Professional) in the world, Ellen has been a thought leader in the field of presenting for more than 10 years. In her books and webinars, she addresses the full range of issues associated with creating effective presentations, including Using PowerPoint for Best Educational Outcomes, PowerPoint for Low-Cost Training, Presenting to Teach and Inform, Effective Presenting in the 21st Century, and more. She's a lively, confident speaker who freely shares her substantial experience in order to help others become more effective speakers and trainers.

Tuesday, April 24, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: Keep Your Career from Derailing (Free for ATD members)

Take a look within yourself in this one-of-a-kind webcast with Carter Cast, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management professor and former Walmart.com CEO. In this webcast, you’ll learn how to identify your inter- and intra-personal vulnerabilities and which of the five archetypes you fall under. From there, you’ll gain insightful advice and tips on how to examine those behaviours and create stronger career momentum.

Tuesday, April 24, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: Put Me In, Coach! Mobile Coaching Applications in L&D (Free for ATD members)

Our industry is evolving and bringing us new ways to reach employees beyond the classroom and into the workflow. But how can we do that in a way that is relevant and contextual? How can we increase retention, refocus learners, and create additional opportunities to learn on the job? One promising approach is by using mobile coaching apps and platforms. These technologies offer several ways for learners to do things such as role-play outside the classroom environment, receive push notifications throughout a learning experience, and even ask questions and get immediate answers. And it’s not just for learners; managers can use coaching apps to track their coaching sessions, which can help them follow up more frequently and stay accountable.

This webcast will examine ideal use cases, share a few examples in practice today, discuss considerations, and talk about how to gain sponsor support to burst out of the classroom and into your learners' hands—right where they’re doing the work.

During this interactive webcast, Ann Rollins and Britney Cole will provide easy-to-understand insights on:

• What types of mobile coaching apps and platforms are available.

• When mobile coaching can be used to increase retention, engage, and drive results.

• How organizations are using mobile coaching apps and platforms as training reinforcement and as performance support.

• Planning and design considerations for incorporating a mobile coaching element in your learning plans.

Tuesday, April 24, 2018, 12PM – 1PM PT: Why Story and Experience Sharing Accelerate Learning

Research shows that around 80 per cent of our knowledge comes from our experiences and that of others. And we learn this by sharing experiences and stories. In spite of this, there is a strong bias—most training and learning programs focus on the 20 per cent content handed down by instructions and lessons. Why is this bias so strong? How do you make a shift to take advantage of rich experiences to accelerate the learning of your workers and team members?

This session will cover:

• What are causes and challenges in adding story and experience sharing in most training programs?

• Where and how does story and experience sharing help in accelerating learning?

• What are the key steps in incorporating experience sharing in your courses?

• What are proofs that this approach works?

Wednesday, April 25, 2018, 11AM – 12PM PT: ATD Research: Personalized and Adaptive Learning (free for ATD members)

Recently, the Association for Talent Development (ATD) partnered with the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) to explore current practices and trends in personalized and adaptive learning.

It’s commonly accepted that everyone learns differently, and we all have different skill levels and experiences, making personalized and adaptive learning especially appealing. Personalized learning is any instruction tailored to an individual based on the learner's interests, experience, preferred learning methods, learning pace, job role, or other factors. Adaptive learning is a specific type of personalized learning that uses computer-based technology to modify content to a learner's needs. Applying algorithms or artificial intelligence, the technology modifies content in real time based on learner behaviours and interactions.

The research found that the use of both personalized and adaptive learning is expected to grow rapidly in the near future. Adaptive learning in particular holds great promise for many kinds of training, including compliance, sales, and leadership training, and can drive greater employee engagement in learning.

Discover what the research reveals about the practices top companies are using to realize the full benefits of personalized and adaptive learning. Attendees will learn about successful applications of personalized and adaptive learning, as well as common barriers and challenges and how to overcome them.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018, 12PM – 1PM PT: Getting Started with Interactive 360 Video for Learning

It can be argued that Virtual Reality (VR) is a fad and many learning professionals are suffering from “shiny object syndrome.” VR has been around a long time, mostly in the entertainment and gaming industries. Only recently have the hardware and software costs come down to where the barrier to entry is not much of a concern. Unfortunately, L&D professionals often discard the idea of using VR for learning as it is still an emerging technology.

With the costs low enough so just about anyone can begin exploring learning applications with VR, the next step is what to do now? There’s more to getting started with VR than acquiring hardware and software, and this session will look at instructional design approaches for immersive learning and other applications.

At the end of this session, learners will:

• Learn the difference between 360-degree photos and video and 3D spatial environments.

• Learn about available hardware and software to produce virtual reality experiences.

• Understand the differences between headsets from full immersive experiences to smartphone-ready headsets.

• Learn about instructional design approaches for immersive learning applications.

Thursday, April 26, 2018, 9AM – 10AM PT: Own Your Career: Secrets of Female Leaders (free for ATD members)

Men and women work side by side, tackling the same business problems, sitting through the same meetings and walking the same hallways—but the common ground ends there. Men and women experience very different workplaces. The 2016 Women in the Workplace study shows that the disparity begins at entry level, where men are 30 per cent more likely than women to be promoted to management roles. A significant share of women say that gender has been a factor in missed raises and promotions.

During this webcast, Shavon Lindley, award-winning career development and mentorship expert and CEO of Mentoring Method, will reveal three secrets to asking for a raise or promotion that will resonate across all genders. You’ll gain insight into:

• Determining what you want and why.

• Strategies for building your case for a raise or promotion.

• How to guarantee you ask for what you want.

Thursday, April 26, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: How to Prepare and Succeed in the Future of Workplace Learning

Training Magazine reports two of every three learning and development (L&D) leaders are looking for new solutions to transform their people and their organizations.

But empowering and facilitating versus mandating learning requires thinking (and doing) things differently, including new tools.

It’s easy to be confused about which technologies to use, and how they’re all supposed to fit together when there are over 1,000 learning systems in the market.

Cut through the confusion with David Wentworth, Principal Learning Analyst at Brandon Hall Group and Degreed as they share:

• Research from Brandon Hall Group on why, how and where L&D is evolving.

• How the most innovative companies are augmenting their old learning systems with new and different technologies.

• What the future of learning looks like.

Thursday, April 26, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: Master Class Series: How to Be a Data Viz Whiz – Finding the View for You

Have you experienced being overwhelmed by the shapes, colours, and variety of flavours when in a candy shop? Reports are similar. They can be presented in many creative ways, but identifying the data pieces that are most important can be a tough challenge. How do you even accomplish the task of figuring out how to display that data most effectively?

Register to learn the applications of a framework behind creating your own reports, displaying them in the most effective way, and integrating your company’s branding. You’ll home in on the right data with laser focus so you can seamlessly take the next step in displaying that data.

This session is ideal for those who have little to no data visualization experience, but want to learn more about the ways you can take your data from the LMS and transform it into useful charts and tables. LMS administrators and instructional designers will gain valuable skills by learning how to make their data more meaningful.

Thursday, April 26, 2018, 11AM – 12PM PT: Great Leaders Are Great Coaches (free for ATD members)

This webcast is perfect for leaders and trainers who really want to step up their coaching game. Conducted in interview style, the content will focus on equipping you with core coaching skills, perspectives, and behaviours to leverage the most important asset inside any organization: the people. This webcast will be beneficial for anyone who wants to sharpen their coaching skills to empower members of their organization to reach both personal and organizational goals.

In this webcast, you’ll:

• Understand your role and your responsibilities as a coach.

• Absorb key counterintuitive perspectives on developing and leveraging the strengths of employees and teams.

• Learn five fundamental coaching steps that are practical and implementable immediately.

• Avoid common traps that coaches fall into.

• Create a coaching relationship critical for accelerated growth.

Monday, April 30, 2018, 10AM – 11AM PT: Communicating Strategically by Reading Others Effectively (free for ATD members)

As a healthcare professional,

• Do others regularly misinterpret what you say?

• Do you struggle to ensure you’re selecting the right words so others don’t get irritated or offended?

• Are you frustrated because it’s difficult for others to understand simple concepts?

If you answered “yes” to just one of those questions, this presentation is for you! Liz Weber will help you identify why it’s often difficult to communicate across various personalities. Liz will share how you, as a healthcare professional, can build credibility, enhance your communications, and have more productive work relationships by simply reading others more intentionally and strategically.

In this webcast, you’ll learn about:

• The power of effective communication over technical ability.

• Key communication style preferences to model to enhance the impact and effectiveness of your communications.

• Simple techniques to ensure others understand what you communicate.