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Training 2009 Wrap-Up: It's a Small World
April 16, 2009
By Training Editors
Whether they're in Atlanta or Athens, training professionals face many of the same challenges, from figuring out how to engage learners to measuring training ROI and securing CEO buy-in. Held February 9 to 11 in Atlanta, the Training 2009 Conference & Expo aimed to help meet some of those challenges through seminars, training labs, networking sessions, and exchanging best practices.
Global camaraderie and sharing continued Monday night, February 9, at the "It's a Small World" flag-studded black-tie gala that honored the 2009 Training Top 125 winners and the newest inductee into the Top 10 Hall of Fame, Deloitte LLP. Beatles tribute band The Return provided a UK touch for the 550 attendees, many of whom danced to Fab Four hits such as "I Want to Hold Your Hand." (To see the 2009 Training Top 125 rankings, visit www.trainingmag.com).
Despite the flagging economy, Training 2009 drew 1,800-plus attendees to learn from 96 session speakers and to visit with nearly 100 exhibitors. Pre-conference events included the Kirkpatrick Evaluation and Learning in Virtual Environments summits. Training also partnered with The Bob Pike Group to offer The Creative Training Techniques conference-within-a-conference. Training editors strolled the expo floor and sat in on keynote and conference sessions. Some highlights:
• Many in the U.S. view manga as the domain of teenagers and geeks, but it's a very different story in the art form's birthplace of Japan: Some 22 percent of all written material in that country comes in comic format. Hence the inspiration for the first-ever American manga business book—keynoter Daniel Pink's "The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need." As Pink explained, this was no mere gimmick—manga sales are skyrocketing in the U.S., bucking the readership decline of traditional print. "We're teaching in a nontraditional way," he said. "What can books do better than online things can? Strategic, big-picture information." He offered six strategic career lessons
1. There is no plan.
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses.
3. It's not about you, Gen Y.
4. Persistence trumps talent.
5. Make excellent mistakes
6. Leave an inprint
• Stuffed carrots flew from the stage to audience members who answered questions correctly during Chester Elton's keynote on employee recognition. The author of "The Carrot Principle," Elton stressed, "General praise has no impact on people. It must be frequent, specific, and timely. There's a big difference between praise and rewards. You praise effort. You reward results. The more encouragement you give, the more superior the results."
• Keynoter Jeffrey Zaslow related insights he learned from computer science professor Randy Pausch, who was diagnosed with fatal pancreatic cancer and gave his last lecture, advice on "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, at Carnegie Mellon University: "It's more important to teach people to judge themselves than to learn how to learn." And "Find your passion and follow it. You won't find it in things or money. That passion will be grounded in people and in your relationships with people."
• In "Make New Employee Orientation a Success," Jean Barbazette, president of The Training Clinic, made the case for a systematic approach to onboarding. "If you don't have new employee orientation, I have news for you—you do have one," she said, explaining that in the absence of a formal program for new hires, an informal one you won't like may arise. "Planned welcomes," she said, "reduce turnover" and get workers "independently productive sooner."
• Stephen Lundin, author of "CATS: The Nine Lives of Innovation," offered tips for spurring creativity. He said companies should look to the individual rather than corporate group think for the seeds of inspiration. "Organizations don't innovate; people do," he said. Encourage employees to "provoke" themselves to more innovative thinking patterns by, for instance, asking them to try a task they've never done before that changes up their daily routine such as asking management to spend a day on the plant floor.
• Using movie clips is a powerful way to grab learners' attention—provided you go about it intelligently. Pick an inapplicable or inappropriate clip, and those same viewers may end up yawning, snickering, or scratching their heads in befuddlement. "Each person views something so differently," noted Becky Pluth, senior consultant of The Bob Pike Group, in "Teaching from Tinsel Town." In addition to discussing technical and legal considerations, Pluth provided these simple criteria for selecting and utilizing the perfect clip: 1. Evoke emotion 2. Involve room participants in the clip 3. Discuss the movie 4. Provide a call to action.
• "We're already listening to podcasts, so why not tap into that?" asked Anders Gronstedt, author of "Training in Virtual Worlds and Basics of Podcasting." And as he made abundantly clear in "Transforming Front-Line Performance with Podcasting and Vodcasting," with no end to the iPod/MP3 player boom in sight, the real question isn't whether your own organization should be embracing on-the-go learning via podcasting…but rather, how to go about it. Among the guidelines Gronstedt set forth for producing engaging, effective audio podcasts, regardless of budget: Make sure yours features a dialog between two or more speakers; and keep the length to around 15 minutes (the duration of the average car ride).
• In "3rd Generation Leadership Development," Mary Lippitt, founder of Enterprise Management, Ltd., pointed out the transition of leadership styles from the teamwork-oriented Information Age in which leaders strived to be visionaries and win workers' confidence to what she calls the current "Age of Turbulence," in which there is high turnover in the C-suite. Now more than ever, she says, leadership is results-driven, with CEOs judged not so much by their "vision" as on their ability to increase profit, productivity, ROI, and market share, and to improve the quality of the organization's goods and services.
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