I love ballet. So much so that I take ballet class three to four times a week. Because I live in San Francisco, the school I attend is able to attract top-tier teachers. This means that I often find myself dancing side-by-side with principal ballerinas from San Francisco Ballet. This is a little like finding yourself singing with Lady Gaga or acting alongside Meryl Streep.
Here’s the thing that I’ve … Read More
If your company’s fiscal year-end is in synch with the calendar year, then you are probably starting the process of creating a talent development plan for next year. Hopefully, you’ve got meetings with key executives scheduled to find out what the business priorities are for the coming year so you can plan learning initiatives to support them.
Executives are generally concerned with either solving business problems or achieving business goals. … Read More
I recently had a conversation with a prospect that rocked me back on my heels. He was looking for helping putting together product knowledge training for his sales team. As is often the case, serious budget constraints were in play.
On the one hand, he had a lowball bid from a vendor he had worked with before. He knew this vendor would create a poorly designed page-turner e-learning course. But, … Read More
I was driving down Market Street in San Francisco the other day when I spotted a young woman, clad in shorts and a tank top, riding her bicycle with her dog in tow. I winced. This practice of towing a dog alongside a moving bicycle always seemed cruel to me. Regardless of whether the dog is tired, sore, thirsty, hungry, out of breath, sick, or even injured, it has to … Read More
“I had no choice,” I told my client, Beth. “I am not good at work-life balance because I wanted to be or because I somehow got lucky. I literally had no choice.”
I’d called Beth to catch up after she’d been out of the office on medical leave for several months. We’d worked closely for many years on a variety of projects and I wanted to find out how she … Read More
I recently reviewed a subject matter expert (SME) designed course for customers of a software vendor and noticed something absolutely critical missing.
The course was for casual coders; in other words, people who know how to code, but don’t do it all day every day. Not surprisingly, the course started with a lesson on remedial coding to ensure that everyone knew the basics to actually use the software. The course … Read More
What do quests, boss battles, levels, and points all have in common? They are all game mechanics that can be used to gamify training. In this approach to Instructional Design, you structure the training around achieving an overarching quest. You can find examples of overarching quests in the game world that might include conquering the world, defeating the dark side, or saving a damsel … Read More
Sometimes it sucks to be my husband. Let me explain. Alex is from a country that was part of the former Soviet Union. Apparently, manual transmissions work differently over there. We discovered this when I needed to hop out to shift my car into reverse before we slowly slid into a parked car while he was driving. Admittedly, it didn’t help that some not-too-helpful mechanic had gorilla-glued the knob on … Read More
If you believe the hype you read on the Internet and in professional journals, most organizations have successfully embedded technology into their training offerings. Employees making their way through branching scenarios in 3-D virtual worlds, participating in MOOCs, and clicking open custom apps to quickly access information is completely commonplace, right? Maybe not so much.
Of course, early adopters exist. But, in my experience, the vast majority of my clients … Read More
