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ATD's Senior Leader Level Offerings

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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.

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Get the Toolbox You Need to Design for All LearnersDesign for All Learners empowers instructional designers, trainers, and all talent development professionals to create learning experiences that are accessible to and inclusive of all people. Learn from practitioners’ vulnerable lived experiences, moving stories, and practical advice. Written with accessibility, inclusion, and L&D experts and edited by Sarah Mercier, this book will help you ensure that individuals can fully participate in the talent development and training programs you offer.Adopt a progress-over-perfection approach, and take steps to build momentum toward accessible, inclusive design. Start with shifting your mindset to consider that all learners are people who have unique experiences, perspectives, backgrounds, and abilities—and that learning design should be built for people, not just to compliance standards. Find what you need to know about designing for the modality you’re using to reach learners—from e-learning and job aids to training in the physical and virtual classroom. Gain a clearer understanding of requirements and standards, and then explore strategic tactics to foster an inclusive mindset throughout your organization.Anyone involved with the practice of design in the learning and development will benefit from the wide range of perspectives and techniques offered, whether you’re a team of one or work in an organization with a variety of resources. If your goal is to become a better designer, developer, teacher, and leader, this book presents a packed toolbox to do so. It will change everything you think you know. Use it as a guide in your journey to accessible, inclusive design for all.

Design for All Learners

Core4 is the premier foundational training and development conference where you’ll learn the fundamentals of instructional design, training delivery and facilitation, evaluating impact, and learning technologies.

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Measure Learning Impact Despite Limited ResourcesYear after year, talent development professionals report that lack of time, lack of support or partnership from stakeholders, and limited budgets are key barriers to measuring and evaluating their learning programs. Measurement and Evaluation on a Shoestring offers TD professionals a process to measure what matters to the organization with the tools and resources they have available. M&E pro Alaina Szlachta applies the Build-Borrow-Buy approach to provide guidance, quick tips, and shortcuts for making measurement easier while still demonstrating the value and impact of organizational learning.With this book, you will learn to ask the right questions, brainstorm metrics to evaluate learning, and build a measurement strategy that fits your needs. It also guides you on integrating measurement and evaluation into your instructional design approach from the beginning as well as using and analyzing data sources you might already have. You’ll discover how to build stakeholder relationships to secure buy-in and when to look beyond your expertise for external support and technology.The Association for Talent Development’s On a Shoestring series helps professionals successfully execute core topics in training and talent development when facing limitations of time, money, staff, and other resources. Using the Build-Borrow-Buy approach to problem solving, this series is designed for practitioners who work as a department of one; for new or “accidental” trainers, instructional designers, and learning managers who need fast, inexpensive access to practical strategies that work; and for those who work for small organizations or in industries that have limited training and development resources.

Measurement and Evaluation on a Shoestring

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. 

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In today’s world, leadership ideas are shifting, challenging long-standing practices. The traditional “command and control” style, where leaders make all the decisions, is being replaced by trust and collaboration. Leaders are now moving away from micromanagement and embracing team autonomy. If you’re responsible for leadership training, it’s important to understand how adopting these new approaches early can have a big impact.Let’s break it down.A Lesson From Science: Big Ideas That Change EverythingTo understand the impact of big ideas in leadership, consider how major scientific breakthroughs transformed the world. For example:Galileo and Newton described how objects move through space and time.Maxwell and Lorentz built on their work, showing that the speed of light is constant regardless of how an observer moves.Einstein then developed his famous theory of relativity, leading to the discovery that a small amount of mass could be turned into enormous energy—this led to nuclear energy.These ideas didn’t come overnight, but their impact has been profound. Nuclear energy, for example, reshaped international politics and power dynamics, with countries that control nuclear energy gaining major advantages.How This Applies to LeadershipJust like those big scientific ideas, leadership is undergoing a transformation. For years, leaders have managed teams through strict top-down control. Leaders gave orders, and teams followed them. But this old way of leading is giving way to something new.The emerging leadership model is based on:Trust and Interdependence: Instead of controlling everything, leaders are learning to trust their teams to make decisions at the right levels.Clear Goals: Teams and leaders agree on measurable goals, and everyone is accountable for achieving them.Collaboration: Leaders work with their teams to make decisions, rather than just giving orders.A “Speak-Up” Culture: Leaders encourage open communication, knowing the best ideas can come from anywhere.Belonging Over Conformity: Leaders focus on building a sense of belonging within the team, instead of forcing everyone to fit a mold.This shift allows teams to make decisions faster, avoid micromanagement, and reduce internal politics. As a result, teams led by transformational leaders are far more productive.Why Leaders Should Adopt These New IdeasJim Collins, in his book Good to Great, describes transformational leaders as “Level 5” leaders. These leaders drive extraordinary results by empowering their teams through trust and accountability. The benefits of adopting these new leadership approaches are clear:Faster Decision Making: Routine decisions happen quickly because they’re made by the people closest to the situation.Less Bureaucracy: Reducing administrative overhead means less time wasted on politics or approval processes.Increased Productivity: Teams thrive when they have autonomy and a clear vision to guide them.Creating a Transformational Leadership Training ProgramTransformational leadership training involves more than just teaching concepts. It requires a strategic approach that encourages new behaviors and practices. There are four pillars to an effective training program:Set Goals
Teach leaders to understand the big-picture qualitative outcomes they’re after—and the metrics they will use to define progress transparently. Leaders must learn how to set team goals collaboratively and ensure individual goals are deeply aligned.Identify Barriers
Barriers can be external factors like market trends and technological disruption—or internal factors like team dynamics and individual habits. Leaders must learn how to create an environment for honest, sometimes difficult, conversations.Change Behavior 
Teach leaders to treat every change as an experiment and encourage teams to change together—creating an environment that nurtures progress patterns. Lasting team momentum requires individual understanding and consent. It can be inspired, but not coerced.Evaluate Results
Show leaders how to guide their teams in continually comparing performance against metrics, updating goals and experiments based on clear evidence.By implementing these pillars, you can help your leaders transition from traditional command-and-control styles to transformational leadership, significantly enhancing your organization’s productivity.

New Rules in Leadership: Overcoming Toxic Command and Control

What makes this world so complex? Is it globalization with all the information we are bombarded with daily? Or is it the sheer number of interconnected relationships across the world? In many ways, it’s both and so much more.Not only are leaders constantly pressured to make decisions with incomplete information, but they also have to face the flow of information from their teams to the global world. Nothing is secret anymore and customers and shareholders make judgements based on information, hearsay, and more.How can leaders navigate this minefield?The Both/And MindsetAs this newspaper article on how today’s complexity is different explains, we no longer have a focal point in today’s decisions. Moreover, no one can fully understand the multiple interrelations in our complex system. Naturally, this makes most leaders nervous, and a normal reaction is to try to hold onto the familiar. So, many try to break problems down into parts and solve them in isolation.In fact, as this HBR article on How Successful Leaders Think says, a wiser approach is to look at a problem holistically. That means getting as many of the parts together to see how they all fit.Wisdom then lies in the ability to step back and see connecting patterns that can drive innovative solutions.A useful way to think of this is by adopting a both/and mindset.A both/and mindset instead of an either/or approach allows for innovative solutions:Complex systems often hold conflicting demands. Linear thinking can push us to, for example, prioritize individuals over teams or cost over quality. Alternatively, analyze the bigger picture and reflect on all possible cause and effect loops.Let go of either/or thinking. Sometimes it’s tempting to choose cost over quality, but instead, shift your mindset to leverage the benefits of both sides.Practice observing multiple truths. As people, we are all different, but deep down, we are the same. So, practice finding the common ground in all viewpoints.Nurture Empathy As we explained in our blog on how to stop failing at leadership development, leadership isn’t about just building competencies in one person.Today’s leadership development needs to cover both relational and individual aspects. That means giving current and future leaders stretch experiences—new ways of making sense of them and strong diverse networks, as explained in this paper on vertical development.As leaders then mature and evolve away from black and white thinking, they understand themselves better, which leads to greater empathy. Gradually, they gain the ability to hold conflicting stakeholder views more easily.They therefore become more intuitive in leveraging the minds and abilities of those around them to transform conflict and uncertainty into beneficial solutions for all.Nurture empathy and deep understanding to create interdependent teams that drive decisions:Balance emotions and thoughts. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio demonstrated, the best decisions come from combining both logic and emotions. Leaders need to connect and listen to both.Connect with diverse networks—the more backgrounds we interact with, the more our empathy grows as we gain a wider understanding of the human condition.Explore the ego’s impact. Book clubs, the new corporate classroom, are a powerful way to explore both the ego and decision making for the greater good. Read this paper on transforming organizations through books to learn more.Final Thoughts on Supporting Leaders in Decision MakingAs the world becomes more systemic, we too must operate more systemically. Wise leaders know they don’t know everything, so they tap into the collective wisdom to gather all the parts. From there, they look for the big picture and potential solutions.Together, we can all let go of either/or thinking and move into both/and thinking, where we explore the gray of the world.As such, we need to connect with diverse people whilst deeply exploring the ego’s needs and how it affects our decisions. Let’s also remember to tune into empathy and our sense of playfulness.Or as Carl Jung would say, “the creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.” And after all, decisions create something new.

How Leaders Can Better Deal With Increasing Complexity 

GenAI’s Impact on Learning Experiences Since the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) has permeated many of our everyday lives in ways we wouldn’t have imagined 10 years ago. For one, we have now grown accustomed to receiving plain-language answers to our questions instead of digging into a list of references to extract answers. This shift is driven by the availability of Generative AI (GenAI), which enables systems to provide direct, concise, and tailored answers to user queries. As technology and society move forward, our content ecosystems must adapt to this new reality.Look at every major search engine and notice that the first result typically is an AI-generated summary of results, or a direct answer to your query. This is true even for privacy-focused search engines like DuckDuckGo. This means that we are growing increasingly accustomed to receiving direct and relevant responses to our searches rather than needing to sift through a list of potential resources. In the learning ecosystem, we are responsible for providing accessibility, quality, and convenience for our learners.So, how do we make GenAI answers a reality when managing a wealth of secured, proprietary content, while major LLMs are trained on publicly available content? There are two primary ways to allow GenAI to leverage our proprietary content:Training a model directly, which can often be out of reach or simply impracticalLeveraging Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)Let’s take a look at what a RAG system entails:What Is RAG? RAG combines the strengths of GenAI with content curation to allow for LLMs to create a seamless user experience that provides accurate and relevant answers based on your organization’s proprietary content. Here’s a simple diagram of what a RAG workflow looks like:User Query -> Semantic Breakdown of Query -> Semantic Content Search/Retrieval -> LLM Response Generation With Additional Context of Retrieved ContentThe Importance of High-Quality, Proprietary Content To make the most of GenAI, the technology will need access to well-maintained, well-defined, and preferably well-structured content, and having a central content management system as the source of truth for your content facilitates these things with very little overhead. Xyleme’s Intelligent Learning Content Management System (iLCMS) allows you to single source your proprietary content in a well-defined, well-structured manner while providing standardized, structured content analytics. A platform that offers these things as a foundation is crucial for building effective RAG systems that can provide well-informed, accurate GenAI responses sourced from your proprietary content and intellectual property.Provide the Rocket Fuel for Your AI Systems As we’ve said, quality content helps GenAI create quality answers, but to get the most out of that quality content, it should be well-structured, well-defined, well-described, and accessible. Platforms like Xyleme give you the foundation to build upon for your propriety content and use it as the rocket fuel for your AI-powered tools and solutions. Content in the Xyleme platform is well-structured XML with a well-defined schema and is well-described with deep metadata layers that give your content a wealth of semantic context beyond just what the words say. Using this platform allows you to unlock the full potential of using GenAI to create a seamless learning experience for your users, even when those answers must be informed by secured, proprietary content.How Xyleme Facilitates AI-Powered Systems In addition to providing the foundational content requirements for high-quality GenAI systems, Xyleme also facilitates the technical requirements needed to build and fuel powerful AI solutions in your content ecosystem. Xyleme Syndicate’s cutting-edge AI Search feature provides Syndicate users with semantic search capabilities but has also been specially designed with RAG enablement in mind. Xyleme Syndicate AI Search allows for RAG systems to do semantic, vector queries against your inventory of proprietary content (or a subset of it; you’re in control) to create context-enhanced user prompts with your RAG retriever, an essential piece of functionality to any RAG-capable GenAI tool.To summarize, many signs point to the future of learning being more tailored, substantive, and, crucially, more rapid. The wealth of knowledge in your proprietary content need not be locked into single-modality experiences, because you can free it with the power of GenAI, RAG, and the Xyleme Platform. Together, these will unlock a new era of accessibility for learners.