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The COVID pandemic and rise of the Omicron variant has necessitated shifting what had been classroom instruction to an online format. That has created opportunities for more effective approaches, for example, breaking previously “dense-pack” day-long instruction into...

Learning professionals often complain that they don’t get the respect and credit they deserve for the value they create.  We agree, for a number of reasons: We don’t do a good enough job of documenting our results and we don’t manage training’s brand as effectively as...

Everything has a brand. You have a personal brand and training has a brand, whether you manage them or leave them to chance. A brand is simply what people think of when they hear the name of a product or service; it is a capsule summary of their perception of a...

  Many learning organizations rate “evaluating the impact of training” as their greatest challenge.  The implication is that if they could just measure the results of training, they would finally get “a seat at the table” and all would be well. But is that true? What...

I first heard this catchy aphorism from Elmar Kronz of DDI at the ATD Conference in Taipei. I used it as one of the “Four Things You Must Do to Earn a Seat at The Table” in my keynote speech at the recent Center for Talent Reporting Conference in Dallas,...

In Gary Larson’s famous cartoon, a student asks his teacher if he can be excused because his brain is full. It’s funny as a cartoon, but it is tragic, wasteful, and all-too-common in corporate training. Most training programs try to jam too much content into people’s...

Recent articles have once again raised the question of how much corporate training actually adds value, and how much just goes to waste—something for which we coined the term “learning scrap” to draw the analogy to manufacturing scrap.  Both kinds of scrap waste time,...

Direct-to-consumer advertising is intended to encourage patients to ask their physicians about a particular drug when they think it might help them. But we don’t expect — or want — physicians to simply dispense a drug without first establishing that it is the right...

Most training and development professionals are motivated by a genuine desire to help people, teams, and businesses succeed. So, when we get the call that says, “I need a training program …” our natural tendency is to say, “Great, we will get right on it.” As it turns...