Training Industry Blog

I’ve been fortunate enough to share some valuable information with you in these blog pages, but I’m really excited to share this: I come bearing gifts, in other words. Specifically, the gift of education.

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Chances are you may not get too much time with the C-level to discuss certification and when you do they don’t want to hear the details that program folks live day-to-day, that’s why they hired you.

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The phrase “short-termism” was coined to describe the financial markets’ focus on quarterly reports and quick profits at the expense of long-term value and sustainability. In organizational change initiatives, we often see something similar: quick fixes applied to urgent problems—or problem symptoms— that ultimately undermine the initiative. Last July, I wrote about applying systems thinking to break the cycle of short-termism. Recall that systems thinking is a tool to help clarify the underlying interactions and interrelationships that cause the everyday events that we experience. Seeing and understanding this causal structure improves decision making by demonstrating both the short-term and long-term effects that can result from any decision.

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It’s a presidential election year in the U.S. and yet again politicians are positioning outsourcing as a bad economic policy for America. Every day there are ads on television of one candidate attacking the other for their position on outsourcing. The media loves the controversy and feeds the frenzy by representing outsourcing as an economic peril. But is the problem really outsourcing? Or is it really offshoring? And is outsourcing really such a bad thing? Most people would say yes, but it could be argued that our economy and many of the jobs in our society depends on outsourcing for sustainability. Yes, I know that’s a controversial statement to many. But the only reason it’s controversial is because we don’t understand what outsourcing really is.

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With your analysis done and your Virtual Instruction Planning Form and current curriculum assets in hand, you can now begin modifying your face-to-face instructional materials to support virtual training. Here are a few strategies that will make your virtual classes resonate. While these strategies are particularly critical when you convert classroom training into a virtual instruction, they are also useful in preparing and enhancing any training class.

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Keeping abreast of all the latest developments and progress (or lack thereof) in the community college sector is a fairly daunting task. There are numerous issues and trends that are couched inside a seemingly massive community college reform movement happening in our time, right now. On the workforce development side, the so-called “skills gap” is one of those issues, in my opinion, that is not easy to fully understand. The notion of employers having great difficulty with hiring qualified, high-skilled workers for a wide variety of decent jobs, primarily because there aren’t enough educated job candidates available, seems illogical in this period of high unemployment.

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This week, we lost a friend. By now you’ve no doubt heard that training and business guru Stephen R. Covey passed away on Monday at age 79. Needless to say, our hearts go out to his family, his friends, his colleagues and his clients.

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Just as an observer alters behavior by the fact that the behavior is being observed, whenever you enter or leave a room, your presence affects the thoughts and behaviors of those in the room. Even if no one seemed to notice, their brains selected to ignore you, minimizing your impact.

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Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutional validity of the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare is here to stay and it's time to begin "Doing The ACA." So, get up off the couch, grab your partners and strut on up to the dance floor. But before you do, make sure you have vetted your partners’ capabilities to do the steps to this dance. In this blog, we will discuss what qualities physicians should look for in a partner. In subsequent blogs, we will discuss the steps of the ACA dance.

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I recently started to conduct interviews with lots of professionals in the community college sector for an in-depth report I am working on about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Success Strategy, whose mission is “to dramatically increase the number of young adults who complete their postsecondary education, setting them up for success in the workplace and in life.” I have a tentative deadline to publish this report sometime during the summer inside the library section of The SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends and Strategies.

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