Train Like You Listen

As learning and development professionals, we are always looking for new ways to deliver content to our learners. An approach to this is to consider how you like to have content delivered to you.

We face monsters every day as training professionals. They cannot be tackled the same ways the stories of our past have taught us to tame mysterious beasts. They lurk right in front of us; on our computer screen, on our social media accounts, in our books. Staying home cannot protect us from these monsters! This week on the Train Like You Listen podcast, Mad Scientist Clark Quinn, Ph. D, Executive...

The more we can access our learners, the more likely we are to be successful in our training outcomes. This week on the Train Like you Listen podcast, Amy Lou Abernethy, President, Co-Founder and Chief Learning Strategist at Amp Creative, stops by to talk to us about how we can use learning campaigns to increase learner engagement and promote a learning culture.

As trainers, we often talk about wearing more that one hat at work. But how do you know how to navigate all of the challenges that you face when you don’t have a big team? Emily Wood, author of ELearning Department of One, joins us on the Train Like You Listen podcast this week to share some resources and tips for small eLearning departments.

Do you walk into every training development project knowing exactly what needs to happen to make it a success? If you are like me, probably not. As a junior trainer, a lot of my lessons were learned from failure and feedback. While those are wonderful ways to learn, it isn’t always ideal to put yourself or your team at risk for failure if it can be avoided. Is there a way to be proactive about tro...

Facilitating and training people, young or adult, to be curious is important, but is it really an outcome that can be trained and measured? On this week’s podcast, we talk to Bethany Kline from www. Rover.com about her approach to training learners how to be curious and how she applies her methods to scale innovation across an organization. Endurance Learning is a full-service training development...

When it comes to engaging learners, finding the magical formula can seem like catching a mythical creature. In theory, it is absolutely attainable, however, in practice, unexpected obstacles abound. Speaking of rare encounters, on this week's podcast, Brian meets Cara North for the first time to talk about her approach to unlocking learner engagement. During this episode, she talks about the three...

Most trainers have a love/hate relationship with PowerPoint. Why is that? There are probably a lot of reasons, but one reason I see over and over is that many trainers are taking the wrong approach to creating PowerPoint slides. Mike Parkinson is not only the founder of Billion Dollar Graphics and author of A Trainer's Guide to PowerPoint, he is also one of only 36 Microsoft PowerPoint MVPs in the...

This week on the Train Like You Listen podcast, Marci Morford, manager of onboarding, culture, and innovation programs at Salesforce stops by to talk about how to properly apply gamification to training. Marci and Brian worked together to build an on-boarding game that took new-hires through a days-long game to acclimate to their new roles. She takes some time to cover a few examples of game that...

If you have been in training for more than a few years, it is likely you are familiar with the Ken Blanchard Companies. The Ken Blanchard Companies have more than 40 years of in-person training experience and are a power-house of instructor-led training. Like many other companies, this group of individuals is looking forward to more agile approach to training development as our world shifts to new...

Voice-activated digital assistants are household items for many of us. Smartphones, speakers, even watches can be voice-activated to help us with any number of things. My mom and her 81-year-old neighbor spent the weekend setting up and activating skills for several smart speakers in her house. They set up entertainment, reminders, asked questions, and set up some safety features. What else can we...

Conference season is coming up! What do conferences look like during the time of Covid-19? One of our favorite conferences, Learnapalooza, is taking things virtual this year and we sat down with Chief Innovator Erin Peterschick to hear what her and her team are planning. This conference is typically set in the Seattle area, and offers an affordable and engaging conference experience. Facing the di...

Recessions and economic downturns happen. Many of us have worked - or tried to work - through more than one economic downturn. As training departments tend to be small compared to other departments, how do we stay relevant in tough economic times? Chris Pirie from the Learning Futures Group sits down with the Train Like You Listen team this week to give us a little history on his experiences in tr...

Training isn't created in a vacuum. Many learning professionals spend hours reading about and looking for inspiration and the latest trends in design and development. There are a few key people in our industry who are interested in helping all of us move forward and push the limits of engaging and creative training. Award winning eLearning developer Ashley Chiasson is one of those people. On Train...

Nobody knows what the world will look like in a few weeks, months, or years. One thing is for sure, there is a drastic increase in virtual tools to facilitate meetings, and we need to be successful working with them. This time has shown many of us that virtual meetings may well be a working for many more of us than we ever anticipated. Now that we have the tools to do it, we somewhat expect our co...

The Learning and Development community is not always easy to break into. Even in an office setting with a relatively large training team, finding one's connection into the community can be a herculean purist. In this week's podcast, we talk to someone who works hard to solve this problem. Bianca Woods of the Learning Guild discusses how to leverage free tools like Twitter to connect with like-mind...

How did you get into training and development? Did you study for this job in school? Or, like many of us, did you find your way here unexpectedly? No matter how you wound up in your role, you started the same way we all did, green and looking for resources and a community to help you along this path. This week, we take a deep dive into getting started as an eLearning developer on the Train Like Yo...

The first day on a new job can be daunting. People are walking into a group who have already established relationships with each other and found their place a company. Like being the new kid at school, new employees may feel lost and out of place before even walking through the doors of the organization; virtually or physically. This week on the Train Like You Listen podcast, Marci Morford, manage...

What value can learning and development folks get from being more active on social media? Well one opportunity is to talk with people like Mike Taylor from Mike-Taylor.org about all of the cool things he finds on the internet. You can also geek out with Brian Washburn about all things training and development, or Heather Snyder about eLearning design and development. You can virtually talk to anyo...

How do you move forward when a project challenges you and you don't see a clear way to move forward? On the podcast this week, Brian sits down with his colleague and Director of Instructional Design at Endurance Learning, Heather Snyder to dig into this topic. During this chat, they discuss some challenges they encounter during the training development process and how they can be addressed. Heathe...

What does training look like in a COVID-19 or even post-COVID-19 world?  A lot of people are talking about how their jobs are changing. Whether it be working from home, adapting to new norms, or changing their skill set as an essential worker, these changes are impacting the way we work and how we approach and embrace technology. In this week's podcast, we sit down with Brent Schlenker of the Inst...

Do you ever find yourself putting on your marketing hat and trying to "sell" a new process or implementation in your training? In this week's podcast, we sit down with Mike Taylor of MikeTaylor.org and discuss what instructional designers can learn from the advertising and marketing approach and apply it to training. Endurance Learning is a full-service training development partner, specializing i...

Good instructional design is universal, but are there considerations we need to take when training an international audience? This week on the podcast Mary Cropp, Director of Learning and Development at Bluetooth Sig,  joins us again to talk about her experiences with international audiences and how that can change the approach to instructional design. Mary has spent the past several years present...

How many people does it take to put  on a successful webinar? Facilitators are obviously necessary to engage participants and facilitate activities not matter how the training is delivered. Engaging webinars, however, require a lot of tools and technology which are difficult, if not impossible, to manage while facilitating the course.   In this week's podcast, we talk to Lauren Wescott of Enduranc...

Things have changed for many of us very quickly. Many of us are at home, but we haven't stopped working. As we get used to a new way to interact with one another, the dynamics of our interactions need to change. As many people have probably experienced, an online meeting or training is a different experience than in-person and it takes a lot of creativity to engage participants. In this week's pod...