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2025 BEST Application

BEST Awards application process and qualifications

ATD BEST AWARDS

BEST Awards 

2025 BEST Awards Application

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BEST Awards

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About ATD BEST Awards

Award winners must demonstrate that they are excellent in many aspects of talent development:

Awards - BEST - Information

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Why BEST

Benefits of Applying

Recognition for Winners

Congratulations to the 2024 BEST Award Winners!

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ATD BEST Awards: Why Apply + Tips for Your Application Webinar

Why Apply and Tips for Your Application

The ATD SELL conference focuses on bringing together the best practices and strategies across sales training, tools and technology, and processes needed to drive incremental sales performance. 

ATD SELL Registration

ATD OrgDev will provide you with the skills needed to develop employee programs at all levels and throughout their employment lifecycle. You’ll learn innovative methods at all levels to manage the ever-increasing rate of change in today’s workplace.

ATD OrgDev Registration

This three-day event features sessions from our best and most popular speakers on the most essential topics for all learning and development professionals: Instructional Design, Training Delivery, Measurement & Evaluation, and Learning Technologies.

ATD Core4 Registration

Transition from K-12 teaching to instructional design with hands-on guidance, skill mapping, and career planning to build your brand and start applying with confidence. 

Teacher to Instructional Designer Workshop

Get the A to Z Resource on Training Evaluation Fully revised and updated, ATD’s Handbook for Measuring and Evaluating Training is the comprehensive go-to reference for talent development professionals in need of immediate measurement and evaluation (M&E) guidance. Edited by M&E powerhouse Patti Phillips, with contributions from 30 expert practitioners, this handbook provides an essential roadmap to developing effective processes to prove the value and impact of your learning and development programs.Training measurement and evaluation is one of the top frustrations of a talent development professional's job. At first glance, it appears to be a drain on precious time and resources, yet it is a critical function for understanding the results and proving the value of L&D programs. If not conducted properly, it can yield questionable results, lack of accountability, and stakeholder skepticism. All to say, TD professionals must have a solid foundation in measurement and evaluation to do their jobs effectively.With this handbook, you’ll feel confident each time you face an M&E challenge, from planning the evaluation and collecting and analyzing data to optimizing results and making evaluation efforts work in your organization. You will use the data to improve your training programs and meet the standards your organization strives for.The updated edition includes new chapters on how to tell the evaluation story to business leaders, visualize data in reports, and leverage artificial intelligence smartly as well as refreshed chapters on all the M&E fundamentals. Rich in real-life application, it offers practitioner tips, knowledge checks, and support resources and references. Your advisors along the way are an impressive array of experts from the field, each chosen for their knowledge, experience, and actual results in specific areas.Whether you’re a trainer, manager, professor, or student of training evaluation, this handbook has been designed to meet your needs. 

ATD’s Handbook for Measuring and Evaluating Training, 2nd Edition

Use Marketing Strategies to Captivate and Persuade Your Audience At first glance, marketing and L&D may seem like an unlikely combination. But upon closer inspection, both fields share two core goals: getting people’s attention and influencing their behavior. Marketing involves captivating, persuading, and creating value—all of which are key to learning design. When done well, learning design grabs participants’ attention like a great marketing campaign and engages them emotionally and intellectually to make learning stick. In this innovative volume, marketing and L&D experts Bianca Baumann and Mike Taylor ask: How can L&D pros make learning programs more effective by thinking like expert marketers?To answer that question, Baumann and Taylor explore the potential of marketing-inspired L&D, diving into essential marketing principles, strategies, and techniques and applying them to learning experience design to improve learning transfer. With a learner-centric perspective, the authors explain the science of marketing, how to use personas, and how to craft a successful learner journey. They cover effective writing, the use of powerful graphics, how to plan and execute a winning learning campaign, how to harness technology, and the all-important activities of evaluation and learning analytics.L&D pros will learn new ways to capture their target audience’s attention and influence their behavior. Each chapter includes engaging stories from Baumann and Taylor’s work in the field, case studies, and definitions of essential marketing concepts and how they apply directly in the L&D environment, plus activities and tools instructional designers can apply immediately to transform their learning programs.

Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro

ALC brings together ATD chapter leaders from across the country. Current and upcoming board members will network with fellow chapter leaders and share best practices for running an ATD chapter.

ATD Chapter Leaders Conference Registration

Apply the ABCs for your L&D career successThere has never been a better time to invest in your own L&D career.No matter where you are in your learning and development career—whether you are just beginning, ready to advance in it, or in need of a change—expert career coach and L&D luminary Sarah Cannistra delivers tactical and industry-specific advice for how to conduct and succeed in your next job search.With the perspective that there is no “one size fits all” strategy to career success, Sarah walks you through four L&D Career Success Codes, her ABCDs, that will help you achieve Alignment and get clarity on your career goals and your L&D Niche; create your personal and professional Brand; network intentionally and build your L&D Community around your L&D niche; and, identify your interests, skills, and belief systems, all key to building a Development plan for achieving your career goals.In this volume, Sarah dissects job application, resume and cover letter writing, and interview processes. She covers the hard-felt topics of rejection and job searches after layoffs and explores the mindset shifts and self-awareness needed to be successful to land a stable and fulfilling position. Follow along with stories of how Sarah has helped clients to secure their dream role. Take the next step on your own with more than 40 activities, reflection questions, and worksheets.A cover-to-cover resource for landing your next role while choosing your own path, this is a book you will turn to again and again throughout your career.

Land Your Next L&D Role

Gain the skills and knowledge needed to measure the return on investment of your training programs and make data-driven decisions. Enroll today to take your talent development career to the next level.

Measuring Return on Investment Certificate

Gain a systematic approach for developing and administering tests that will meet your organization's needs and follow professional standards. Learn more!

Award winners must demonstrate that they are excellent in many aspects of talent development:

Talent development has an enterprise-wide role: involved in the executive team, creating solutions to business issues, and setting organizational strategy.

Learning has value in the organization's culture: learning opportunities for employees, C-level involvement, learning for growth of the organization, and innovation.

Learning links to individual and organizational performance: alignment with the business, efficiency, measurement of the effectiveness of learning, and success with non-training solutions for business needs.

Investment is made in talent development and performance initiatives.

Learn From the BEST - Webinar Series

BEST Awards