Whether you’re looking to showcase your work internally, seeking employment, or prospecting for clients, developing and maintaining an up-to-date portfolio will help you articulate what you do well. With a little forethought and planning, your portfolio can become one of your most valuable tools, opening up conversations and possibilities beyond your expectations.

Traditional eLearning can be dull and demotivating, a reality that runs counter to human nature. People eagerly consume and comprehend new ideas whenever they find the content engaging. They want eLearning that leverages learners’ innate desire for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Are your virtual classes stagnant? Do you find you’re using the same tools—polling, whiteboards, chat—that you've used for years? Are your participants multitasking, despite your efforts to draw them in? Do you want to find new ways to engage your audience? If you need to shake up your approach to virtual classrooms, then why not look to the future and consider how new technologies and new mindsets will influence your virtual training's effectiveness?

Many professionals in eLearning are attempting to use gamification and serious games to spark employee engagement and drive learning retention. Everyone is working to make the best serious game that will enhance the learning objectives and retain learning.

Your access to learning-related data has grown dramatically over recent years. But just because you have a large volume of data doesn’t mean it necessarily provides value. While tools like xAPI make it increasingly easy to acquire data about learners’ activities, this information provides little benefit if you don’t know how to design to acquire meaningful data, interpret that data, or improve your learning design based on what you’ve discovered.

Implementing a video strategy is always tricky when juggling budget line items. There’s the risk of throwing too much money at equipment, and the risk of not making the right choices that will produce the level of quality your team expects.

Do you know how to create an effective diagram? Can you create a graph that tells a story? Because visualizing abstractions can improve comprehension and facilitate learning, an important skill in L&D is the ability to convey abstract concepts and statistics in a meaningful way. But if you don’t know how to design the best type of graphic to meet your learning goal, how will your explanation be a success?

On time. Within budget. What they need (even if that changes!). These are moving targets, and yet you’re expected to deliver all three. The software development industry is embracing agile methods to address these issues, and there is much that the eLearning development world can learn from it. Agile provides a framework for adapting to change as it happens and working with the client to deliver content that learners need most.

Education and training departments work under tight budgets and deadlines. In this environment, the temptation to use images and media from the web increases, especially in light of the plethora of social spaces that are used to share such objects. But what can you use? Under what circumstances? And how do we give credit where credit is due?

Video can be a powerful tool in training, but many of the quality video tools are expensive and difficult to master. The average developer just does not have the budget, the skills, or (most importantly) the time to become proficient in a high-end video editing tool.

The Americans with Disability Act (ADA) requires that employers provide “reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants and employees.” But many instructional designers worry that accessible content will be less interactive and thus less effective. Others want to do more but don’t know where to begin. In the end, many often just create a printable text version of the content and call it good enough. You can and should do better than that for your learners.

For years, the learning and development field universally agreed on the value of a learning culture. L&D professionals believe that a learning culture will help people grow, develop, and support the transformational needs of the organization. However, people have traditionally spoken about learning culture in very binary terms: Either an organization has a learning culture or it has nothing at all. This is incorrect. Every organization has a learning culture at a varying level of maturity. Your responsibility is to identify where your organization is and where it needs to be, and to help evolve the culture to support the pace and direction of the business.