T + D

Many cite the struggling world economy, the head-warp that younger generations of employees bring to the workplace, and globalization down to the microlevel of organizations. These change-makers often are invoked -- and while they are certainly prime movers of change, they don't explain everything. The force driving the most radical change in organizations today is knowledge gained and shared through social media, the great amplifier of the time. A counterpart to information exchange through ...

An Enduring Legacy

In an interview, Alan Malinchak, chief learning officer of Homeland Security Solutions Inc, talked about his career. While in boot camp for the US Navy in the fall of 1969 after having flunked out of his freshman year of college, Malinchak experienced an epiphany: He learned the value of education and the impact that learning did and would have on his life. On his experiences leading the learning function in the private and public sectors, Malinchak said that in both sectors there are trade-o...

Are You Building Strong Career Relationships?

Networking is really about building and maintaining ongoing relationships and asking for advice and leads. When you ask for advice, you make the other person feel like an expert. A key to building relationships is showing interest in others. You want to learn as much as you can about other people. This is your first step to connecting with others. People love to talk about themselves, so let them. Networking and building relationships applies online as well as offline or face-to-face. Yes, so...

Astd.Org

Back to Basics

Executives can propose all the lofty goals imaginable, but if team leaders lack the skills to translate goals into reality, your organization's highest values can deteriorate into meaningless wishes on paper. Gaining traction on upper management's goals is the special calling of team leaders. If team leaders are weak in their ability to execute against goals through their frontline employees, the company scorecard is at risk. All the categories that matter most -- profitability, continuous tr...

Brain-Based Learning for Leaders

Applying the principles of neuroscience -- the study of the brain -- to leadership development programs enables leaders to behave in harmony with how the brain works, improving the way they motivate and communicate with their employees. Launched in September, BrainBox is the culmination of UK management consultancy Orion Partners's recent research on the neuroscience of learning, personal change, and memory, and its subsequent curriculum development. Orion identifies six characteristics of ef...

Close Skills Gaps Through Personalized Learning

Many organizations miss business targets because they are unable to effectively link the skills that employees have to corporate strategy. Edutainment Media believes this can be overcome by providing them with personalized, self-directed learning that results from empowering employees to self-assess against the skills defined by the company as necessary to efficiently perform their respective role. The guidelines for creating personalized learning that links skills to corporate strategy are: ...

Effective Global Learning Requires Cultural Intelligence

Global business leaders know that cultural intelligence is a critical competency, yet a surprising number of organizations do not study the cultures of the regions for which they are designing and delivering learning. The recent ASTD and Institute for Corporate Productivity study sponsored by the International Coach Federation, The Global Workplace: Learning Beyond Borders, is a follow-up to a 2008 collaborative study on global learning and development practices. This new study found that som...

Embrace Change

Editor

Exciting Times for Government

The American Society for Training & Development's Government Community of Practice is a resource for government employees and collaborators -- whether federal, state, local, municipality, or tribal-- working across all functions within the learning and development and human capital fields. It is an exciting time to be working in the public sector, wrought with challenges and opportunities to help develop the future of our government workforce. By paying special attention to the talent nee...

Executive Education That Works

Harvard Pilgrim Health Care is a Massachusetts-based, 1,200-person health benefits organization with a network of more than 135 hospitals and 28,000 doctors and clinicians. It sought a partner that would provide highly relevant and actionable educational content focused on real business needs. Faced with the industry challenges driven by healthcare reform the evolving demands of its employer and provider networks, and competitive pressures in the healthcare industry, Harvard Pilgrim identifie...

Fired Up and Ready to Serve

The Democratic National Convention Committee wanted to ensure exceptional customer service for the anticipated 90,000 attendees of the presidential nomination acceptance event, planned to take place at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, NC, on September 6. The committee contacted the ASTD Charlotte Area Chapter for help with this effort. Led by Charlotte Area Chapter president Keith Vincent, the chapter recruited training professionals who designed, developed, and delivered a training expe...

Growth by Shedding

Helpful Tips for Interpreting the Numbers

Strategic human capital professionals understand the language of business and how to "speak profitability", writes Clare Novak in the December Infoline, "Performance Improvement: Making the Financial Case." Part of this skill is being comfortable with reading and interpreting financial statements. Financial knowledge is virtually synonymous with business acumen. Three tips on reading the financials for trends and insights are: 1. Read the footnotes. 2. Don't skip the Management's Discussion a...

Improve Formal Learning with Social Media

The future of learning is social -- people want to learn together. The tools exist, and the potential is huge. Anyone can publish, share, find, and comment on content. Reactions in the learning world vary from the fear of the expert-trainer to the excitement of the cost-cutting manager, to the control issues of internal practitioners. Among all of the conjecture about what social media could accomplish, some learning and development professionals already have taken action, testing how differe...

Leadership Evolution

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Meeting Business Needs Leads to an E-Learning Culture

Kleinfelder is an international company that provides engineering, architecture, and science consulting services for energy, transportation, facilities, government, and water infrastructure projects. As the business expanded through organic growth and acquisitions, it became increasingly difficult to provide timely, consistent training across more than 70 locations in varying countries and time zones. Kleinfelder's learning and development (L&D) efforts had focused on project management, ...

Multi-Generational Job Search Stats

Preparing Today's Youths for Tomorrow's Workplace

ASTD's 2012 skills gap whitepaper, Help Wanted, Skills Lacking: Why the Mismatch in Today's Economy? defines a skills gap as a "significant gap between an organizations current abilities and the skills it needs to achieve its goals. It is the point at which an organization can no longer grow or remain competitive because it cannot fill critical jobs with employees who have the right knowledge, skills, and abilities. In an August 2012 ASTD member survey, 84% of respondents indicate that there ...

Shifting Leadership Capability

A recent study by SHL, a talent measurement solutions firm, reveals the top 25 countries with the greatest supply of leadership talent, according to information gathered from the company's talent analytics database. The US currently ranks fifth in the world, but experts at SHL predict the nation may slide further down the totem pole if US companies don't show more aggression and precision in recruiting, developing, and retaining future talent. Mexico, Turkey, Egypt, Switzerland, and Brazil ha...

Strategic Alignment Model

Billions of dollars are invested into sales training every year. With more informed customers, fiercer competition, and the rate of new products introduced to the marketplace higher than ever, the need for effective sales training never has been more important. Yet people continue to see a desire to cut training expenses and the cry to reduce the time that salespeople are "out in the field." There is a continual need to defend sales training investments since the return from such investments ...

Technology + Learning = Inspiration

The rapid pace of innovation in technology has had a sometimes disruptive -- and sometimes liberating -- impact on many fundamental areas of human interaction. The process by which people teach and learn is no exception. Recent developments in technology are having an increasingly profound influence on their discipline. For example, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put one of its popular electronics classes online for free earlier this year, it saw enrollment figures reach above...

The Long View: Dianna Booher

In an interview, Dianna Booher, an expert in the field of business communication and productivity, talked about her career. Her first job was in high school when she worked at Six Flags. There she learned the importance of proper image -- how you look and dress, friendliness, and customer service. She always liked to write papers in school. In early adulthood, she had several older friends who happened to be executives at major oil companies in Houston, where she lived. They were continually ...

The New Talent Agenda

On June 11 and 12, 21 learning and HR thought leaders and practitioners convened at Deloitte University in Westlake, TX, to answer the question, "What's really different about the talent landscape today?" The roundtable-style discussion, called ON Talent, broached three major topics: the changing employer-employee contract, technology's impact on the way people work and the nature of work itself, and talent analytics. During the two-day collaborative event, participants attempted to answer th...

There Is an I in Team: What Elite Athletes and Coaches Really Know About High Performance

To-Do Lists for the Digital Age

Many professionals find their to-do lists ever growing with no way to control them. Lauren Hockenson of Mashable.com has uncovered some cures to every worker's task overload. In a recent article on the site, Hockenson focuses on a handful of organization apps designed to manage one's to-do List. With Toodledo, you can seamlessly create a shared "workspace" with others and monitor and manage tasks while striving toward similar goals. For the to-do list novice, Astrid is an idea! tool for get- ...

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