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John Redding

Hardwiring the learning organization

Three Strategic Training Roles

Facing the challenge of a screen-centric world where reading has taken a backseat, this session will address the urgent need to rekindle a love for reading within organizations. We will delve into why people are reading less and how we can reverse this trend by promoting books that resonate with your company’s culture and values. Learn innovative strategies to encourage your team to embrace reading, not just as a pastime but as a tool for personal and professional growth. Join this webinar to discover how to foster a reading-friendly environment that aligns with your organizational goals and reawakens the joy of reading.
During this event, you will:

Learn techniques to motivate your team to engage with books regularly.
Discover how to select books that align with and enrich your organization’s values and goals.
Gain insights on establishing and nurturing a lasting culture of reading within your workplace.

Primary Capability Covered: Organization Development & Culture
Participation in this event, either live or recorded, can be reported for one (1) professional development point toward initial certification eligibility or recertification of the APTD or CPTD credential. 
 

Reading Renaissance: Proven Techniques to Activate Your Team with Books that Matter

Lifelong learning is an ongoing journey that evolves with us, shaping our growth, adaptability, and potential at every stage of life. Whether you’re just beginning your career, navigating mid-life challenges, or enjoying the rewards of retirement, each decade offers unique opportunities to expand your horizons. Understanding how to approach learning in every phase can make this journey more structured, fulfilling, and rewarding.Below is a decade-by-decade guide filled with actionable tips to help you chart your lifelong learning path:In Your 20s: Laying the FoundationYour 20s are a time of discovery, where the choices you make can set the trajectory for your future. It’s a decade filled with opportunities to explore different paths and establish a strong base for personal and professional growth. Focus on:Explore Various Interests: Try out different fields to discover what excites you. Attend workshops, join industry groups, and take online courses in diverse subjects.Develop Core Skills: Sharpen essential skills like communication and project management through platforms like Coursera or Udemy.Expand Your Network: Networking is crucial. Attend events, join professional organizations, and seek out mentors for guidance.In Your 30s: Advancing and SpecializingDeeper career commitments and the pursuit of specialization often define the 30s. This is the time to solidify your expertise, climb the career ladder, and refine your focus on what truly matters to you. Maximize this decade by:Pursuing Certifications: Enhance your qualifications with advanced certifications in your field.Developing Leadership: Build leadership and management skills with targeted courses in team management and strategic planning.Balancing Work and Learning: Integrate learning into your routine. Set aside weekly time for professional development and apply new skills at work.In Your 40s: Expanding Horizons By your 40s, you’re likely well-established in your career, but that doesn’t mean growth should slow down. This decade is an ideal time to broaden your knowledge, explore new passions, and continue evolving both personally and professionally:Learn New Technologies: Stay ahead by enrolling in tech workshops or online classes that keep you competitive.Start a Personal Project: Launch a side business or personal project that aligns with your passions and enhances your skills.Mentor Others: Share your expertise by mentoring. It reinforces your learning and positively impacts the next generation.In Your 50s: Reinventing and ReflectingYour 50s offer a unique blend of reflection and reinvention. It’s a period where you can take stock of your achievements and consider new directions, whether in your career or personal life. Embrace this time by:Exploring New Interests: Dive into fields or hobbies you’ve always been curious about. Take courses that spark new passions.Prioritizing Health: Incorporate wellness education into your life through seminars on nutrition, fitness, and mental health.Planning for Retirement Learning: Prepare for continued learning in retirement by exploring volunteer opportunities, part-time work, or educational programs.In Your 60s and Beyond: Lifelong EngagementAs you enter your 60s and beyond, the focus shifts toward sustaining engagement and continuing personal enrichment. This is a time to fully embrace the pursuits that bring you joy and keep your mind active. Stay engaged by:Pursue Passions: Dedicate time to hobbies, art, writing, or volunteering—whatever brings you joy.Keep Mentally Active: Challenge your mind with puzzles, reading, or learning new languages to maintain mental sharpness.Stay Connected: Join clubs or communities that share your interests. Social connections and shared learning experiences enrich life.Tips for All DecadesSet Learning Goals: Specific, achievable goals keep you motivated across all stages.Leverage Technology: Access learning anytime, anywhere with online resources and apps.Stay Curious: Maintain a mindset of curiosity and openness to new experiences, keeping your lifelong learning journey vibrant and ongoing.Mapping your lifelong learning journey means recognizing each decade’s unique opportunities and challenges. You can make the most of every stage of life with clear goals, a willingness to embrace new technologies, and an engaged approach. Remember, learning is a continuous, evolving process—approach it with enthusiasm and an open mind.

Mapping the Lifelong Learning Journey: Tips for Each Decade of Life

Let’s face it, leaders aren’t getting more time in the day, and skill gaps are growing—fast. The solution isn’t giving up control or hiring externally. Instead, optimize workforce learning to make quick and thorough skill building an inevitable outcome.
How? Daily micro-learning content alone isn’t enough to combat the rapid pace of widening skill gaps. People don’t become marathon runners by reading about it, and the same is true for any skill. Your employees need deeper opportunities to learn beyond content consumption and to build skills on your schedule. And this upskilling method doesn’t have to be time consuming or burdensome for administrators. That’s where technology comes into play—learning solutions like academies can help.
Join Christine Crouch, director of the future of work at BMO, and Jen Collins, senior director of client experience – Academies at Degreed, to uncover the ins and outs of this innovative solution.

You’ll explore how academies can:
• Simplify and elevate learning experiences
• Engage employees
• Reduce the burden on administrators
• Efficiently close skill gaps
 
Primary Capability Covered: Technology Application
Participation in this event can be reported for one (1) professional development point toward initial eligibility or recertification of the APTD and/or CPTD credential. 

Leveraging Academies as Your New Go-to Skill-Building Tool

Sally is the chief learning officer for a large well-known bank. She was recently brought in by her CEO to “professionalize” the Learning and Performance function within the company. Sally inherited a very extensive learning measurement system that rigorously cataloged the results of each training course using Likert-Like questions and numerical averaging.As Sally sifts through the data, she notices something curious. Instructors whose smile sheet ratings were consistently low were still teaching, even after several years of poor results. Sally, of course, is thrilled! She’s been mandated to professionalize the learning function and already she’s found a problem she can fix. She makes a plan. She’ll bring her team together to improve—or fire—the low-performing trainers.Brilliant, right? Maybe! It depends on whether Sally’s assumptions are accurate:Instructors who get the best smile sheet ratings will help their learners achieve the best learning results and the best on-the-job performance. Instructors who get the worst smile sheet ratings will produce learners who achieve the worst learning results and the worst on-the-job performance.Interestingly, Sally’s predecessors never thought to correlate their smile sheet ratings with learning results or on-the-job performance. Sally, like most L&D professionals, doesn’t think of doing this either. She just assumes that smile sheet results are related to learning outcomes. Indeed, as an industry, we tend to assume that smile sheets are telling us something important about the successes and failures of our training efforts. Are we right? Is Sally right? And does it really matter, anyway?In 2013, ATD and i4cp teamed up to examine how organizations measure the effectiveness of the learning programs. The research, reported in The Value of Learning: Gauging the Business Impact of Organizational Learning Programs, found that Level 1 smile sheets were by far the most common method of measuring our learning solutions. One implication from these findings is that we, as workplace learning professionals, get most of our feedback from smile sheet data.Consequently, because feedback enables improvement, the validity of smile sheet data is critical. In other words, if we’re not getting good data from our smile sheets, we’re not going to be able to create maximally effective learning.Research on Smile SheetsSo, what does the research say? Are smile sheets effective in giving good feedback? The short answer is No. Two meta-analyses in the scientific literature covering more than 150 research studies found that smile sheets are virtually uncorrelated with learning results (see Further Reading below). Specifically, both meta-analyses found that smile sheets were correlated with learning results with a correlation of r = .09.Statisticians tell us that correlations below r = .30 should be considered weak correlations. Therefore, a correlation of r = .09 is practically no correlation at all! It would be like correlating smartphone usage with hair color.Bottom line: Sally’s assumptions were faulty. Our assumptions, as an industry, have been faulty for decades. We’re all caught in the delusion that smile sheets tell us something important, when in fact they may regularly mislead us.A Smarter Smile SheetWow! What should we do then? Should we throw out our smile sheets? Should we collect data to be polite and then ignore the data? I don’t think so. After thinking about the smile sheet problem for a decade or so, I’ve come to the conclusion that if L&D professionals redesign smile sheets from the ground up—based on the science of learning and guidelines from the measurement field—we can build effective smile sheets.In Performance-Focused Smile Sheets: A Radical Rethinking of a Dangerous Art Form, (more info available at www.SmileSheets.com), I describe how to build a much more effective smile sheet. There are two critical aspects.First, questions should be based on the science of learning. Because we’re asking that our smile sheets tell us about learning, it makes sense to base our smile sheet designs on learning science. Second, we have to do a better job of designing our smile sheet questions. Most of us use Likert-like scales or numerical items, both of which are fundamentally inappropriate for smile sheet use. We also have to help our learners make good smile sheet decisions. According to research from Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel (2014), as well as Kirschner and van Merriënboer (2013), learners don’t always know their own learning. Because of this, asking them questions about their learning may give us faulty information—unless we design our questions to support their smile-sheet decision making. Too many of our questions ask learners to answer questions they are not prepared to answer.Here are some of the major areas that smile sheet questions should target:ability of learners to successfully apply what they learned to their work learners’ full comprehension of what was presented to them learners’ capability to remember what they’ve learned level of motivation that learners will bring to implement what they’ve learned post-training resource that will guide and enable learners to persevere in putting their learning into practice.Most smile sheets do a poor job of targeting these issues, which is unfortunate because it is through these types of research-inspired factors that learning effectiveness can be discerned.Bottom LineMost of our smile sheets are ineffective and provide poor feedback. Fortunately, we can build better ones. Of course, smile sheets will never give us all the information we need. It’s critical that we also measure learning by focusing on learner comprehension, decision making, and memory, as well as measure application by examining the factors and results produced in the way of on-the-job performance.While smile sheets are never enough, most organizations will continue to use them, so we ought to make them as effective as possible. Scientific research makes it clear that our current smile sheet efforts are ineffective. Fortunately, the science of learning and wisdom from the measurement field give us hope for better smile sheets.Like what you read? Join us at the ATD 2016 International Conference & Exposition in Denver, CO, May 22-25 to hear Will Thalheimer speak.Further ReadingAlliger, G. M., Tannenbaum, S. I., Bennett, W., Jr., Traver, H., & Shotland, A. (1997). A meta-analysis of the relations among training criteria. Personnel Psychology, 50(2), 341-358.Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L. III, & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Kirschner, P. A., & van Merriënboer, J. J. G. (2013). Do learners really know best? Urban legends in education. Educational Psychologist, 48(3), 169-183.Sitzmann, T., Brown, K. G., Casper, W. J., Ely, K., & Zimmerman, R. D. (2008). A review and meta-analysis of the nomological network of trainee reactions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 280-295.

Are Smile Sheets Supported by Research?

Cammy Bean accidentally became an instructional designer in 1996 and has since collaborated with hundreds of organizations to design and deliver training programs. She’s worked at small startups, mid-sized training companies, boutique e-learning shops, and as a freelance instructional designer. An English and German studies major in college, Cammy found an affinity for writing and making complex ideas and concepts clear to an audience.In 2009, she helped start up US operations for Kineo, a global provider of learning solutions. Originally Kineo’s VP of learning design, Cammy is currently a senior solutions consultant. In this role she leads the North American sales team, supports clients through the initial discovery process, and manages custom client accounts to help organizations meet their strategic business objectives through better learning solutions. So yeah, not only is Cammy an accidental instructional designer, she’s now also an accidental salesperson.An acclaimed public speaker, Cammy gets fired up about instructional design, avoiding the trap of clicky-clicky bling-bling, and ways to use technology to support lasting behavioral change. You can connect with her on social media in all the usual places—there aren’t many other Cammy Beans around.Cammy is into hiking, kayaking, trail running, swimming, the occasion[1]al triathlon, cooking, eating, reading, and photography. She’s also been a potter, a licensed massage therapist, a quilter, and more. Cammy lives in Massachusetts with her husband, Jon, and their three teenagers, Nate, Eliza, and Kiki. The Beans all agree that their favorite family member is their dog, Mona

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