Nearly 48 percent of employees believe they are ready right now for a career change according to a survey by global talent-mobility consulting firm Lee Hecht Harrison. The hiring market is getting tighter as the economy improves. To attract and keep the technical talent required for your organization is a strategic project, and it will not be successful if you treat it like a “hope and a prayer.” Your competitors are trying right now to steal your top technical staff. To retain and grow your valuable technical talent requires three key accountabilities: hire the right person, onboard and grow the person, and manage him or her through career and succession plans.

Accelerated change, moving technologies, globally diverse audiences, increasing demand. We’ve been talking about these and other pressures that senior L&D leaders face for decades. The trouble is that the pressures are not going away. Today’s L&D leaders must align learning to needs, move quickly to improve performance, and add value. They are increasingly looking to technology to help.

Learning professionals commonly build online content, using both off-the-shelf and custom tools. These tools may create web content, be destination sites, or be content repositories of some sort, like an LMS or CMS. What do you know about the security vulnerabilities of these tools? One of the core principles of security is that you can never be 100 percent guaranteed safe from attackers. However, if you know and understand the potential vulnerabilities of your toolset, you can work proactively to reduce the risk that your work becomes the vector for a breach.

So often, in our day-to-day professional existence, we are bombarded with problems, tasks, and situations that require our attention, all the while neglecting the problem solver—that’s you and me. We seldom recharge our professional batteries and, as such, burn out or become uninspired. We’ve become professional hermits, to an extent, and need an outlet to help us maintain our spark, drive, and creativity.

How can creating storyboards online change your writing and review process? What online spreadsheets can help you track open issues? Can you track project time online to help you better estimate projects in the future? What scheduling tools are available? These are just some of the questions we’ll address in this hands-on session. You’ll get to try out a number of online tools (some free, some fee-based) to help you better manage your eLearning development projects. You’ll walk away not only with valuable perspective on what these specific tools can do, but also with an understanding of key features you can look for and use in other tools. 

Every organization relies on the Internet these days for many things: a public web presence, sales, marketing, customer service, document sharing, research, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and much more. Every time a member of the organization uses the Internet, there is potential for a security breach. As an employer, an employee, and a private individual, nothing that you do on the internet is truly private, and all of your activities can be linked together by observers.

Subject matter experts (SMEs) are the lifeline of our work as instructional designers, trainers, and facilitators of learning. They bring the content to life and provide both relevance and context. Our goal should be to ensure the working relationship is the best that it can be. However, we are often speaking different languages to each other, causing the instructional design process—and, more importantly, communication—to break down. 

Technology is constantly evolving and changing the ways we live, work, and learn. The ways we approach learning are very different than they were even a decade ago. In order to keep our practices current, we must stay ahead of this technological evolution, and that starts with getting the most out of today’s technology.

Anyone still struggling with learning projects or courses that exceed schedule, budget, or that do not meet audience objectives needs to understand project-scope management. This project management key knowledge area is often overlooked. However the planning, monitoring, and controlling processes involved are critical to ensuring your projects deliver the required results, on time, and on budget.

Your organization has a mature learning program facilitated through the use of a learning management system (LMS). But now the technology powering the current system constrains your organization’s evolving strategic needs for business growth. Your team may have begun looking for technology solutions or started drafting a wish list, but what are your next steps?