T+D Blog

Hello, goodbye

Hello. This is Rex Davenport, editor of T+D. As of today, I am your new friendly neighborhood T+D blogger.

I was telling Eva Kaplan-Leiserson, the founder of this blog, about my first job. The newspaper had a few electric typewriters, but I inherited an old, but serviceable Royal 440. And that, my friends, may be a great metaphor for today. This is Eva’s last day at T+D. You have had your slick, bright, intuitive 21st Century blogger replaced by a graying Baby Boomer. You have swapped a tricked-out PDA for that manual typewriter – and the ribbon is in need of replacement.

And, like the dilemma faced by network TV programmers, my picture above is definitely going to make us skew older.

Seriously, I want to tell you how much we at ASTD and T+D are going to miss Eva. She has helped lead us into a new world of content delivery. She has championed the technology that has improved the way we operate. Oh, and she has been an excellent journalist, editor, writer and teammate. Give it six months, then Google her name. I am sure she will have a big impact on her new world as well.

Moving on

Well, folks, the time has come for me to move on. As of November 10th, I will no longer be working at ASTD. I am taking another job opportunity--this one as a full-time writer (as opposed to an associate editor who also writes)--and leaving this organization where I have been for the last 5 1/4 years.

It is a bittersweet time for me. I have learned and grown so much in my time here. I started out as a two-years-out-of-college neophyte who was assigned to edit (really just format and proofread) the Mailbox column and other low-responsibility jobs, and grew to a developed writer who contributed 5,000 word feature articles to T+D. (My seeming inability to write short, as this posting will prove, is a running joke around here.)

I am eternally grateful to my bosses here at ASTD who have given me the latitude to propose an article idea and run with it, even when some of them were a bit unorthodox, like my story back in 2002 about prisoners who learn braille to make textbooks for visually impaired kids.

The latitude has also extended to the column I've written for the last several years, Intelligence. I have been fortunate enough to be able to pick my own content and cover some trends and ideas that really intrigued me. I have also been fortunate enough to be right on the money a few times--scooping some of the large business magazines.

In my work on Learning Circuits, especially in the Trends column I write for that webzine, I have also been dead-on a few times. It's a good feeling when I see my articles linked to from all over the world.

And then this blog...It's been a pet project of mine. I started the original T+D blog back in 2003, when blogs were still very much a leading-edge idea. Not a lot of people in the business world had heard about them, read them, or wrote them. Now Technorati indexes 20.6 million blogs, and it seems like every other company has one or is trying to start one.

When I relaunched the T+D blog this April, I was proud of the new look and new content I was adding. Our monthly readership numbers have almost doubled between May and October.

So it is definitely with some sadness that I leave this blog and ASTD as a whole. But both will be in good hands. The editor of T+D, Rex Davenport, will be taking over writing the blog. He'll bring a great new perspective and connection to a whole lot of ideas and people that I'm confident will greatly benefit the readers.

I'll try to post a few more times before I head off, although time is short these days with finishing things up and cleaning out my office.

I wish you all the best. I'm on LinkedIn if anyone wants to connect. I can also still be reached for the next week at my ASTD email.

Best,
Eva Kaplan-Leiserson

BEST companies

Which companies set the standard for enterprise-wide training and development? ASTD announced the winners of the BEST awards last week, as well as their rankings. Each company is profiled in the October issue of T+D magazine.

The 2005 ASTD BEST Award winners and rankings:

1 - Caterpillar Inc., Peoria, IL
2 - HP, Palo Alto, CA
3 - EMC Corporation, Hopkinton, MA
4 - ICICI Bank Limited, Mumbai, India
5- IBM, Armonk, NY
6 - GENPACT, Gurgaon, India
7 - Israel Discount Bank Limited, Tel-Aviv, Israel
8 - Johnson Controls, Inc., Milwaukee, WI
9 - TATA Consultancy Services Limited, Mumbai, India
10 - Capital One Financial Services, Inc., McLean, VA
11- St. George Bank Limited, Kogarah, Australia
12 - MultiCare Health System, Tacoma, WA
13 - Reliance Industries Limited – Hazira Manufacturing Division, Surat, Gujarat, India
14 - The Schwan Food Company, Marshall, MN
15 - Portland General Electric Company, Portland, OR
16 - Booz Allen Hamilton, McLean, VA
17 - QUALCOMM, San Diego, CA
18 - Lockheed Martin Corporation, Bethesda, MD
19 - Wipro Technologies, Bangalore, India
20 - CheckFree Services, Inc., Norcross, GA
21 - Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA
22 - Merck & Company Inc. – Merck Manufacturing Division, Whitehouse Station, NJ
23 - Barclays Bank, London, United Kingdom
24 - TELUS, Vancouver, BC, Canada
25 - Deloitte & Touche USA LLP, New York, NY
26 - Colorado Springs Utilities, Colorado Springs, CO
27 - Equity Residential, Chicago, IL
28 - Toshiba America Business Solutions, Inc., Irvine, CA
29 - Computer Sciences Corporation, Falls Church, VA

T+D October issue posted

T+D magazine's October issue is now available for viewing on the website, with one important exception. The BEST feature, the profiles of ASTD's BEST award winners, will not be available until after the gala event on October 6th. (The ranking of winners is kept top-secret until the company's representatives learn where they stand at the gala evening.)

So check back on October 7th, when the BEST profiles will detail how 29 organizations have leveraged learning to achieve amazing results.

In the meantime, you can still access all this great content:

• The C-Level and the Value of Learning discusses a survey comparing perceptions of CEOs and CLOs.
• My Intelligence column reports that just 48 percent of HR professionals who were recently surveyed agree that their organizations effectively identify employee development needs.
• The Trends column lets five CLOs speak their minds on hot topics.
• Fundamentals says that if you want to motivate employees, you have to understand what's behind their behaviors.
• Development offers table manners for those who finally got their "seat at the table."
• Books reviews a new book co-authored by Peter Senge.
• and more!

E-Learning standards survey results

In July, ASTD's e-learning webzine Learning Circuits ran a survey on e-learning standards. Now the results are out. Although standards have been slow to reach universal use, they seem to be gaining traction recently.

A few pertinent numbers:

• 57 percent of respondents think that standards are critical
• 45 percent use standards when purchasing or developing programs
• 58 percent are getting value out of following standards
• 66.8 percent say that standards are "very important," or "important" in purchasing decisions.

The majority of respondents are new to standards: 41.8 percent of respondents have been using them for less than a year.

ASTD moves International Conference and Exposition to Dallas

We've just announced here at ASTD that our big annual conference, which was scheduled to be in New Orleans in 2006, will be moved to Dallas, Texas. The dates will be changed as well--the conference will now run from May 7th to May 10th.

Find the latest information about the conference here.

Learning Circuits conducts reader survey

Learning Circuits, ASTD's e-learning webzine, is conducting its annual reader survey. (I work on this publication in addition to the print T+D magazine.)

We'd be grateful if any of you who are readers would stop by and let us know what you like and what we can improve. Thanks!

ASTD awards

Someone recently asked me if ASTD gives out e-learning awards. We don't, but I know Brandon Hall does.

ASTD does hand out a multitude of other awards for workplace learning and performance, though. The deadline for many of these is coming up--September 20th. So if you're interested, check out our awards page quick!

The deadline for our BEST awards, which "recognize enterprise-wide success through learning," has already passed. But we'll be publishing writeups on the award winners in the October issue of T+D magazine.

This year, for the first time, we'll be profiling every winner--along with lots of photos. We're working on the issue now, and we hope readers will like it. Check it out in a couple of months!

Update on E-Learning Strategy webinar

Turns out that the E-Learning Strategy webinar is based on an article written for an ASTD publication (Learning Circuits). I went looking for the article yesterday and couldn't find it, so I checked with the editor. She says it'll be up on the site on Friday, so if you can't make the webinar, check into Learning Circuits for the piece. (It'll be free as well.)

New e-learning articles

Need an e-learning fix? Check out these recently-posted articles on ASTD's Learning Circuits webzine.

• Engaging Learning: Experience Basics by Clark Quinn (excerpted from his book Engaging Learning: Designing E-Learning Simulation Games) looks at various types of learning games and ties in well to my recent post on games in training.


• New Territory: Adding Video to Online Learning Offerings by Ed Mayberry offers key questions to ask when implementing streaming video in e-learning as well as some lessons learned.
  
  
• Slowing Down to Get Results Up-to-Speed by Jean Adams is an Op-Ed explaining that "Paradoxically, coping in the current climate of 'survival of the fastest' is often more about helping people get off the productivity treadmill by making time for reflective learning than it is about working faster."

The great thing about Learning Circuits is that most of the content is free and doesn't require registration.

One more thing: If you have a minute, please take this short nine-question survey on learning simulations. Learning Circuits will collate the results and share them in October.