3 job seeking tips from an L&D hiring manager

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Several weeks ago I wrote some observations for job seekers after reviewing 50 L&D manager job descriptions. In today’s post, Mary Cropp, Director of Training and Development at Bluetooth SIG, writes this guest post to share some very blunt advice for anyone looking to land their next role on an L&D team.

Job-seeking advice from an L&D Director

Mary Cropp - Head ShotAs the hiring manager and in-house consultant for all things L&D within my organization, I am choosy about who will be on my team and who will be providing contract work for the organization. Choosy? Make that very choosy. If I lift the veil for a moment on hiring practices within the L&D realm, I want to prepare all you facilitators, trainers, and instructional designers out there with a bit of what a hiring manager looks for in a candidate.   Continue reading →

Leveraging Pinterest as a Learning and Design Tool

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People have their opinions about social media. Believe me, I have my own. I do, however, play on Pinterest every so often and I have found a few useful things when searching for ideas for my kid’s school project or gardening tips. As a site that is geared toward the DIY mom type, there is a surprising amount of teaching resources. Continue reading →

5 Out of Office Reply Ideas for Trainers

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This morning as my blog post is sent out, I will receive hundreds of automatically-generated Out Of Office responses from people who are traveling. Most of them contain standard language about how long someone will be away from the office and who to contact in their absence. Every once in a while, I’ll stumble across an Out Of Office notification that makes me want to read the whole message.

Out Of Office messages are currently the “lecture” of the email world – lots of people send them out, but few people pay attention to them. With summer vacation season around the corner, why not use your Out Of Office message to bring a smile to others’ faces, give them some fun facts or even equip people with new ideas or knowledge?

Following are five ideas for training professionals to use for their Out Of Office messages: Continue reading →

A Presentation Is Not…

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A friend recently asked for some help giving a presentation to a board. She was doing this outside of work, and I love a good pet project. We started by working through her objectives, studied slide design, and I sent her off with what I thought was an excellent concept for her team. The group she was working with had a very different idea of what a presentation means and when she came in with her concepts, to put it bluntly, ripped them apart. Continue reading →

Today’s new blog post. Observations on training. Written as Haiku.

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I’ve written in the past about how Haiku (a form of poetry written in three lines, the first having five syllables, the second having seven, the third having five) can serve as a fun, effective icebreaker. You can have people introduce themselves or write about the topic at hand using this structure.

In today’s blog post, I offer some general observations about training, all written in Haiku. Continue reading →

Periodic Table of eLearning

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A few weeks ago, Brian introduced the periodic table of learning. In his post, he discussed this table from an instructor-led training perspective. Training isn’t isolated to instructor-led training (ILT) programs and I thought it might be fun to look at the application of the Elements of Amazing Learning Experiences from an eLearning perspective. Continue reading →

Is it possible to design an engaging, effective training session (and accompanying slides) in 5 minutes? Yep.

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How much time do you typically spend putting together a good presentation?

Beginning with thinking through your learning outcomes, mapping an outline of activities, putting together the slides and handouts you’ll use – how much time does that typically take? Half a day? Two days? A week?

There’s a new online tool that will soon be available that can get you 80% of the way to a well-designed, engaging presentation in about five minutes.

Soapbox is a tool that the Endurance Learning team has been developing for several years. This Thursday at a Seattle-based conference called Learnapalooza, the world will get the first glimpse of Soapbox in action. Today on Train Like A Champion, you’ll get a sneak peek. If you’re intrigued to learn more, we’re looking for a limited pool of beta users who can help us identify bugs and find gaps in the content.

What is Soapbox?

Soapbox is a job aid that takes several key factors of your next presentation into consideration and instantly designs a training presentation for you that includes:

  • an outline of activities,
  • detailed instructions,
  • a slide deck, and
  • a template for any suggested handouts

How does Soapbox work?

You tell Soapbox a few details about your presentation:

Initial Details

You decide what should happen as a result of your presentation:

Outcomes

Then Soapbox offers you a lesson plan with a series of activities (that you can re-order if you’d like), slides, a materials list and handout templates.

Initial Outline

Don’t like an activity? Swap it out.

Swap Activities

Want to customize your content? All text and PowerPoint slides are completely editable.

Editing

Want to help with our limited beta?

We’re looking for a handful of people who might have a training presentation coming up and who would like to test Soapbox and give us some feedback. If you fit the profile, sign up here and we’ll get in touch with you in the next few weeks.

Coming to Learnapalooza? Hope to see you in our session where we’ll see just how fast you can put together a presentation!

Heather’s Top 10 Tools for Learning (2019 Edition)

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On Monday, Brian shared with you his top 10 technology-based tools for the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (C4LPT). In no particular order, here are my top 10 tools for 2019.

Grammarly

I receive weekly reports from Grammarly, and it is pretty cool to see that I am averaging over 10,000 words per week. I write a lot and with that many hours spent at a keyboard I make a lot of mistakes, even the free version of Grammarly catches most of them. Continue reading →

Top 10 Tools for Learning (2019 Edition)

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Each year, Jane Hart and the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (C4LPT) compile a list of the top 200 (technology-based) tools for learning. This list is compiled by submissions that come in from learning professionals from around the world.

If you’d like to submit your votes for the top learning tools of 2019, you can do so by filling out this form.

Here is the list of the top 10 technology-based tools (listed in no particular order) that I’ve been using for learning and development throughout this year:  Continue reading →

Leveraging Resources

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The moment of need is an interesting concept to me. When we are evaluating our learner’s level of training, many of our instincts tell us to train them on every step and every term because we don’t want to turn them loose untrained for goodness sake! But training isn’t isolated to what happen in the classroom or virtual course and we need to consider to what degree information should or rather will be retained when people exit.

I am working on a few projects right now that require different levels of performance support. What is interesting about them is how much digging it is taking to understand enough about our learner’s moment of need to support their training/performance support balance. As I work through these projects, I find myself setting a couple of common rules on implementing performance support. Here is what I have come up with so far.

Use performance support when there…

are a lot of steps participant won’t or can’t memorize.

If you find yourself writing steps of a process that your participant will not do on a regular basis, consider turning it into a resource. Instead of spending time in the training teaching them the steps of the process, turn it into an activity where they learn how to access and use the resource.

is a lot of new technology or terminology to digest

A good example of this is new hire training when people want to acclimate staff as quickly as possible. Acronyms, company jargon, and technical lingo fly around, and eyes glaze over like a donut. Taking the time to develop solid resources and teach people how to use those resources to amplif the learning experience for everyone involved.

How do you use performance support in your training? Let’s talk about more ways to use it in the comments below.