Professional Education

Lately, we’ve had the opportunity to partner with ASTD on several occasions to discuss trends and best practices in sales training. The first was a webinar hosted with ASTD’s Christina Mandzuk to discuss our joint report, State of Sales Training 2012. The report looks at various aspects of sales training, including obstacles, metrics, and expenditures, with the goal of giving those in sales training community valuable data to help them improve their sales training strategies.

Here are just a few of my top takeaways from this report:

• Time is of the essence, so provide flexible training methods whenever possible
• Develop training based on audience and to maximize learning
• Sales managers need to be strong leaders and a model for their team
• Provide opportunities for sales tram members to connect and share experience

You can watch the entire presentation in the video below or by clicking here:

 

 

A few weeks later, we built upon our sales training research with two presentations at ASTD’s annual conference. The first presentation focused on one of the key opportunities that sales teams have for training: the onboarding process. Our experience has shown that while the profession of selling has increased in complexity with the influence of the Internet, companies have decreased their investments in effective onboarding.

During our presentation, we discussed how the process of continual, bite-sized learning can help new employees best prepare for the new position by spreading training out over longer period of time, instead of a few days of “data dumping” information they are unlikely to remember. This continuous learning strategy can help employees retain more information and better apply training to their day-to-day work, which leads to real results on sales. If you’re interested in seeing our full onboarding presentation, click here.

Just because your company has a successful onboarding process, however, doesn’t mean that your training stops there. Our second presentation at the ASTD conference focused on best practices for measuring sales training metrics in your CRM. When sales training and the CRM are linked, sales managers can see what impact training is having on sales, what kinds of training individuals reps need to improve, and can even measure the ROI of your training program.

We were lucky to have team members from ShoreTel Sky and LivingSocial with us for this presentation, and they shared their experiences with leveraging sales training in the CRM through our Blackboard Learn for Salesforce platform.  To learn more about ShoreTel Sky and Living Social’s case studies or to read the rest of our presentation, click here.

Did you have the chance to see any of our presentations at the ASTD conference? What else would you add to the thoughts above? I’d be interested in hearing from you in the comments section below or on Twitter at @lperlis and @Blackboard ProEd!

Blackboard recently partnered with GovLoop to host “Generation Switch: How to Transfer Boomer Brilliance to Tech-Savvy New Hires,” a webinar on the importance of knowledge sharing within government agencies.  The presentation was led by Jeffrey Vargas, the Chief Learning Officer of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The topic of knowledge transfer has been of particular interest within government (and on our blog) largely due to the convergence of the multigenerational workforce and the increasing use of technology in government.  Vargas began his presentation by discussing how these new technologies, if properly used, can bring the various generations together so they can better understand and learn from one another.

Vargas went on to explain that knowledge transfer has become particularly relevant due to the upcoming retirement of the Baby Boomers, who represent the largest population in government. Before the Boomers retire, it will be critical for new employees learn what takes to fill in Boomers’ leadership roles and areas of expertise. However, several notable challenges prevent knowledge transfer between Boomers and younger generations, namely:

• Little infrastructure to support it

Later this month, ASTD will be hosting their annual conference in Dallas,
Texas. This conference is a great opportunity to meet with learning and training experts across industries to see what technologies and innovations are improving the way we learn at work.

Whether you will be attending the conference in-person or will be following along online, there are plenty of ways you can engage with Blackboard during ASTD 2013. Here are a few of our favorites:

1. Attend informative sessions on “On-Boarding Best Practices: Ramp Up, Report Out” on Monday, May 20^th and “Your Missing Link: Measuring Sales Training ROI Through CRM” on Tuesday, May 21^st to learn key strategies and technologies that can help your company align business goals with training.

2. Learn from training technology experts at the Blackboard booth 227, who will be on-hand to discuss your professional learning needs and to demonstrate some of our latest training solutions.

3. Put your social media skills into practice by following @BlackboardProEd and #ASTD2013 throughout the conference, including updates from our sessions and the keynote presentations.

See you in Dallas!

Those of us who have influential mentors in our lives understand the importance of wisdom passed down from those who share their personal or professional experiences. The importance of mentorship is particularly relevant to today’s government employees. Especially as the Baby Boomer generation prepares to retire, agencies must help capture their decades of institutional and subject matter expertise while passing it on to the upcoming generation of government leaders.

This practice of knowledge transfer, where a group’s knowledge is captured and shared with future users, sounds easy enough to do. But with the increasing use of technology by younger employees and other divides in today’s multi-generational workforce, agencies have a unique opportunity to find creative ways to foster a culture of knowledge sharing.

Here are three strategies that government agencies of all sizes can use to help facilitate knowledge transfer:

1.)  Provide opportunities for observation: Many of today’s new government employees are used to an interactive, hand-on learning experience. By providing opportunities for intra-agency internships and shadowing, they can learn by observing and working with more experienced employees. These opportunities can also show new employees the larger mission of their agency, which is a proven method to retain future leaders.

One of the greatest challenges for today’s military is maintaining high levels of cybersecurity while also leveraging the latest online technologies. With the release of Federal Cloud Computing Initiative, for example, all government organizations—including the military—were tasked with adopting cloud computing strategies to reduce costs and increase internal collaboration without sacrificing security.

At Blackboard, we are excited to be playing an active role in helping the U.S. Army reach these cloud computing goals. As discussed in a recent DefenseNews article by Joe Gould, Blackboard is managing a pilot program to take some of the Army’s nonsensitive educational material to the cloud through this safe, mobile-friendly platform.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Blackboard’s role this pilot program has been making Army learning more accessible, as the article states:

“You’re seeing more students bringing their own mobile devices to class, and they are used to accessing their class materials wherever they’re at, whether it’s a soccer game, the library or waiting for the bus,” said Lt. Col. Ben Ring, who leads the program at CGSC. “But when students came here, we were restricting them.”

The Army Distributed Learning Program is considering plans to place nonsensitive educational material for noncommissioned officers in a dot-com environment. It may also duplicate the CGSC effort at other institutions, like the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., and the Army Sergeants Major Academy at Fort Bliss, Texas, said Helen Remily, the ADLP capability manager.

“The bottom line is the Army’s training and education is no longer episodic at brick and mortar institutions. It’s a continuum of learning that occurs throughout an individual’s Army career, leveraging distributed learning technology,” Remily said.

Leading the way as an early-adopter into the cloud, the Army can spend less time with technical oversight of their server hardware and more valuable time on their “24/7 mission” from anywhere anytime. You can read the rest of Gould’s article “Army’s learning cloud means accessible class materials” by clicking here, and visit our website learn more about Blackboard’s military learning solutions.