Confirming organizations commitment to learning, the average number of formal learning hours used per employee also grew, reaching 34.1 hours in 2016, up from 33.5 hours in 2015. In fact, this is the fourth year in a row that has seen an increase in both the direct learning expenditure and the number of learning hours per employee.

Paul Butler interviews Bracken Darrell, Chief Executive Officer and President of Logitech Inc.

Use the Greiner Curve to assess and anticipate business needs and create a talent development strategy to address them.

Video gaming and talent development take off in tandem.

The argument: Traditional performance appraisals don’t improve performance. Two thought leaders share their contrasting viewpoints on the topic.

Technology providers constantly update their products. Asurion offers mobile protection, extended warranties, and other technical support and services to their clients.Asurion aims to help people get the most out of their connected lives.

With no formal training program in place for new technologists, Ultimate Softwares employee learning team needed to find a way to quickly onboard new technologists and give them the knowledge needed to be productive in their role. In 2014, Ultimate Softwares employee learning team set out to create individual learning paths for new technologists.

How do you keep a workforce engaged and educated in a business that offers more than 40,000 in-store items, and hundreds of thousands more online? Home Depot: Home Improvement Meets Performance Improvement features interviews, photos, and details about talent development solutions Home Depot has initiated, such as a just-in-time performance support that associates can access from mobile devices while assisting customers.

Greenheck is a leading manufacturer of air-movement and control equipment, providing ventilation products to customers around the world. Seeing a need to fill the companys leadership bench with emerging talent, Greenhecks talent management team, along with Floyd Carlson, director of talent management and acquisition, established the LEAD program in 2015.The LEAD program was unique for its combination of mentoring and rotational training.

Every day, 10,000 Baby Boomers retire from the workforce. And for too many businesses, when those employees walk out the door, they take with them a career’s  worth of institutional knowledge. The value of that knowledge is hard to overstate. When a veteran sales rep exits, how do you measure the value he provided customers through a deep understanding of each account’s history and issues? When a long-time manager leaves, how do you quantify the loss of her insights into her business, competitors, and employees? 

ATD and i4cp found that four in five organizations have a designated talent development leader or leaders. The bad news is that only 20 percent of organizations have formal succession plans in place for those talent leaders. Clearly, as talent leaders’ roles become greater and the organization becomes more dependent on their work, the need for a succession plan for this position becomes more pertinent, especially to avoid organizational culture deterioration and the loss of institutional knowledge. But where can talent development professionals look to fill their...

Business acumen is the ability to link keen insights about and a thorough assessment of the business landscape with an awareness of how money is made and then executing a strategy that delivers results. Sounds complicated, right? Well, it is. But you can break it down into simpler terms. At its core, having business acumen means understanding how your business operates, competes against other organizations, and makes money. 

Cynthiann King leads the design, development, implementation, management, and maintenance of company-wide employee training initiatives and programs for Toll Brothers, a national, luxury homebuilder firm with more than 5,000 associates.

Organizations that crave a community that comes with an aspirational culture should create opportunities for employees to opt into an ethos of higher purpose. And that expression can be a unifying and inspiring experience for everyone at the company. Optimizely, which has a strong existing culture of caring about its community and employees, recently doubled down in this area. By launching with the software-as-a-service  volunteer solutions provider Causecast, it experienced unparalleled results.

Talent development doesn’t belong under the HR umbrella. Or does it? Org charts worldwide differ regarding whether talent development is a separate entity from HR, reporting directly to the CEO, or falls under HR, reporting to a CHRO. Although it’s clear that talent development and HR must work collaboratively, which structure is best?

Organizations of all sizes continuously reorganize and realign themselves to keep up with rapidly evolving business environments. Chances are, you’ve been through at least one reorganizational restructuring or realignment in your career. A reorganization means that roles change and power dynamics shift in an organization, creating challenges to figure out how to get work done, and offering new opportunities that didn’t previously exist. A recent reorganization at the World Bank affected my team, the operations learning team, in profound ways.

Ann Parker describes what you can look forward to in the Fall 2017 issue of CTDO magazine.

Training is a success if the trainees achieve the expected levels of performance. It generates a positive return on investment when the value of the performance gains exceeds the cost of achieving them. Training is a failure when the performance goals are not met, regardless of how much employees liked the training or think they learned. Newly acquired knowledge and skills must be applied to the work of the individual and firm for training to have value. 

Unemployment numbers are hitting new lows after years of recovery from the 2008 recession, which means organizations must work harder to appear attractive to new and current talent. The Association for Talent Development’s recent research report, How Does Your Pay Stack Up? 2017 Talent Development Compensation, Benefits, and Job Seeker Report, dove into the data to discover just how many talent development practitioners are currently looking for jobs and what they consider before accepting a new one.

Toll Brothers is a public company traded on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2016, the company had revenue of $5.2 billion. Even with that track record, the firm is gearing up for serious change. Cynthiann King started with Toll Brothers in 2012 as a training director. Three promotions later she is now vice president of learning and development, with company-wide responsibility for L&D. Her boss, Joy Roman, was hired early in 2017 as the company’s first chief human resources officer. Both women’s organization-wide roles signal the rising importance of human...