Train Like You Listen Podcast

The Train Like You Listen Podcast is focused on small nuggets that trainers, instructional designers, part-time trainers, and jack’s of all trades can use to improve their presentations and training sessions.

Talking Games and Gamification (for Learning) with Karl Kapp

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On Thursday, I wrote about a way that BINGO could be used as an engagement tool during learning programs (and shared this free, cool BINGO card generator).

As part of that post, I shared a downloadable BINGO card you can use to follow along with today’s podcast (or just skim the transcript below) and play along at home. The first five folks who send me a completed BINGO card, marking off the 5 concepts that Karl and I actually spoke about in the podcast, will earn themselves a $10 Starbucks card (my email address is brian@endurancelearning.com).

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Time To Develop Learning Programs

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Anyone who has been tasked with building a training program has struggled with the question of “how long will this take?” I’m delighted to share my conversation with Robyn Defelice who has been studying this question. My conversation with Robyn digs into the value of these numbers and what they say (or don’t say) about the quality of training.

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Organizational Learning Strategies

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Like any other department in a company, Learning and Development teams have the biggest impact when their efforts are tightly aligned with the strategic goals of the organization. Gus Curran and Rachel Gathagu from Humentum and co-authors of a new ebook on organizational learning strategies (which is free and can be downloaded here) joined Brian to discuss their observations about how L&D teams can best contribute to the overall health and success of organizations. [Editor’s Note: Check out Successfully Working in a Remote Office with Gus Curran]

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Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace

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We’ve talked on the Train Like a Champion blog about the need for diversity and inclusion in the learning and development field and have talked about the impact that learning and development professionals can have through their training initiatives. As we celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it feels like a good time to share the conversation Brian had with Natalie Mazzie from F5 about the realities of doing the work of promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

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Technical Presentations

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If you follow TED talks on instructional design, you likely have watched or heard Melissa Marshall’s TED talk “Talk Nerdy to Me.” During her compelling talk (with over 2.6 million views!), she discusses making technical presentations accessible to anyone in the audience without compromising the integrity or talking down to the more technical audience members.

Melissa took some time this week, with the Train Like You Listen podcast, to elaborate on her technical presentation approach. During this short conversation, she dives a bit deeper into some thoughts she has about good instruction when working with technical content. If podcasts aren’t your jam or you prefer to read instead of listen, you can read the transcript of this entire conversation below the podcast link.

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Training Measurement Demystified

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How do you measure the success of your training programs? Yeah, that is a pretty complicated question for many learning professionals. However, we all know that it is critical to our programs that we show how and why they are working. The big gaps seem to be the mystery around how exactly we get that information.

On the first Train Like You Listen podcast of 2021, Brian talks to David Vance and Peggy Parskey from the Center for Talent Reporting and authors of Measurement Demystified, Creating Your L&D Measurement, Analytics and Reporting Strategy to find out more about how to measure training programs.

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Virtual Training Lessons Learned

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I have been trying to get my family to do a Zoom meeting for holidays for years now. Every year prior to this one, I have seen a lot of resistance to holiday gatherings via a webcam. Many arguing that if we weren’t actually together, why should we sit in front of a computer and stare at each other. Fast forward to 2020, and I have regular Zoom happy hours with friends, I met my sister’s new puppy last week via Zoom, and I have helped my in-laws pick out a webcam so they can see their granddaughters more often.

Many of us who have worked remotely had little to get used to with the new virtual meeting culture. Fast adapters are common with any technology, and those adapters will sing the praises, and even write books on the application of these tools before they are heavily used by everyone. Kassy LaBorie is one of the early adopters for virtual tools like Zoom, Teams, etc… as a remote training tool. On this week’s Train Like You Listen podcast, Kassy joins us to share some insights on virtual instructor-led training after a year where many of us were unexpectedly thrust into adopting these tools.

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GIFs as a Training Tool

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Now that my children do a fair amount of communicating on Microsoft Teams, they have discovered the little GIF button in the chat section. Using built-in short videos or animations, they can communicate with their classmates quickly, and in an interesting way.

GIFs are more than just funny reactions to a group chat or a clever way to say it is Friday. These short, looped videos can be used to communicate information quickly, in an accessible way. On this week’s podcast, George Hanshaw, Director of eLearning Operations at Los Angeles Pacific University, sits down with us to talk about the application of GIFs in training.

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Finding Gratitude in 2020

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2020 has been one for the books. Very few people have been entirely unaffected by the events in our world over recent months. Notwithstanding, there have been some lessons learned this year, and just like any training, it is important to debrief what we can take away from this year.

This week on the Train Like You Listen podcast, the entire Endurance Learning team calls in for a special Thanksgiving podcast. We all take some time to reflect on how this year has affected us, what we have learned, and find some gratitude in what we have.

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