David Wilson, Founder and CEO at Fosway Group, Europe’s #1 HR industry analyst, joins us to share his thoughts on how learning contributes directly to your customers’ experience – and ultimately your organisation’s bottom line results. ~~~ If you break it down, learning should be a key foundation of any organisation’s success. Hitting sales targets, […]

How important is customer satisfaction and experience, and what does it have to do with learning and development? There is the old adage, “The customer is always right,” and countless books and papers outlining business strategies that put customers at the forefront of everything. Brandon Hall Group research says that the number one business priority […]

Do you know how your learners feel about their learning experiences? The more we learn about emotions, the more we realize they influence everything we think and do.   1.Emotions drive decisions for learners and customers alike. Emotions are driving our decisions, and usually more than we believe they are. According to Harvard Professor, Gerald […]

It’s St Patrick's Day weekend and millions of people around the globe are about to get their green on and go “Irish for a Day,” even if they don’t have a drop of Irish blood. Not an issue! That’s part of the fun. St Patrick’s Day is celebrated in more countries around the world than […]

The Gig Economy is a thing. What I mean here is that there are an increasing number of companies using independent contractors instead of employees. And, there are complex and limiting constraints about how you can work with these folks. Most importantly, you can’t require them to take training! So, what can you do? In […]

The aviation industry is facing a major personnel shortage. According to Boeing’s 2018 Pilot and Technician report, airlines will need 790,000 commercial pilots and 890,000 new cabin crew members in the next 20 years. This is a concern for several reasons, including the fact that airline positions require a lot of training. Commercial pilots, for […]

Learners are inching closer to the center of learning but still have a way to go. For the better part of a decade, learning professionals talked about making learning more learner-centric and it’s only increased with the renewed focus on the learner experience. But in terms of actual results, the shift has been much slower […]

Are you offering your customer service team the resources they need to keep your customers loyal? In this article, I highlight eight skills that are often overlooked in customer service online training. Customer Service Online Training: 8 Overlooked Skills To Consider Your customer service staff deals with any number of challenges every day, ranging from […]

Training is more than we often think it is. It’s a way to teach standards, procedures, processes. It’s also a way to lead by example to show what sort of experience you want your customers to have. It is in fact "setting the stage" for how you expect your people to perform in order to deliver […]

How to make learners fall in love with training Sometimes, L&D people may feel that they're forcing people to learn. After all, the company does have regulatory commitments, specific skills needs, and cultural or internal processes, policies, and programs that must be upheld. You'll find yourself telling learners: "It's required for compliance." "It's mandatory for […]

Transformations are everywhere lately. We’re talking about and hearing about digital transformation, business transformation, transformation acceleration and cultural transformation in just about every other business article or conversation. Cultural transformation is essentially aligning your people, processes and business tactics with a new “north star” for your organization. I would argue everyone should be putting customer […]

You’re a sales manager, and your sales team needs training on a specific aspect of their jobs. Your organization intends for this training to be just-in-time learning — if they need a little help, they take a learning module in your LMS, and then they return to what they were doing in the CRM, and perform […]

Even with the many changes to the learning-technology space in 2018, I do believe that 2019 is the year the lens will focus, and companies truly begin to understand the possibilities in front of them — just in time for all those 2020 predictions to come to fruition. This will be the year organizations realize […]

Before reading this post, please take a few minutes to read Part 1 for important context and info on why emotion is so important to learning and why Emotional Intelligence needs to be considered in learning design. Enjoy, and then meet me back here! ~~~ Emotion in Learning (Part 2) Lead a horse to water.  Here's […]

The secret behind learning design? Emotion. You know the old saying:"leave the emotion out of it." I'm here to advise you to leave the emotion in, at least in regard to creating your training programs. Training at its core, is a change management effort, with any training program something needs to change. A skill needs to […]

As do most articles in the L&D space, I frequently talk about what we should do. And, it occurred to me, that I could (and should) also talk about what we shouldn’t do. So here’s my list of things to avoid. There’s no claim that this list is comprehensive, but it is grounded in a […]

We perceive time subjectively. The past year simultaneously crept along at a snail’s pace and flew by, and here we are in 2019! Things that happened in January 2018 feel like last week but events from a month ago seem like ancient history. This annual paradox makes me want to look back to try to […]

It’s that time of year again, when we get to give and receive gifts. How festive and how fun, regardless if you’re four or forty! We love tearing those ribbons and wrapping paper off and enjoying the surprise of what lies beneath. Of course, we usually just share these experiences with our loved ones, but […]

The best customer experiences are outcomes of the best employee experiences. Employees can only deliver on great experiences by feeling confident and knowledgeable about the processes, systems and outcomes used to deliver on those experiences. So the best employee experiences demand accessible, relevant and personalized learning. Learners today are demanding better education in less time, […]

I’ve a personal mantra that you have to generate a lot of ideas to get a collection of good ones. It’s somewhat of a joke, as I like to believe I have lots of good ideas, but it’s also true. Since systematic creativity isn’t an oxymoron, there are practices we can use to increase the […]

Of late, I find a number of my posts are about taking down silly articles. And, I find that the claims are increasingly irritating. Now this probably isn’t new, I’m just more ‘sensitized’, but I see some recurrent themes, and I think it’s worth thinking about what they’re doing and what you should watch out […]

This holiday season, the trends around gifts for adults can be classified by one word – comfort. Adults are asking for comfy blankets, super soft socks, cozy pajamas, etc. You get the idea. Some trend trackers will say this has to do with the overall world we live in. As a rule, adults are seeking […]

Once again, it's time to start worrying about a new generation coming into the workforce.  In fact, the worrying has already begun. A recent study showed that managers are not excited to welcome Generation Z, which has already begun to enter the workforce. They're voicing concerns familiar to anyone who has ever read a think […]

Happy Halloween! And Feliz Día de los Muertos to our friends in Mexico and Latin America! Before you get decked out in full zombie costume to take the kids trick or treating, or to take yourself to a super spooky party, please take a few bone-chilling minutes to make sure you’re not scaring your learners […]