It is hard to fault the idea that appraisal reveals an employee’s abilities and a development plan should follow naturally from that. The smooth link looks good on paper. The reality is a good deal messier. It is not that HR is doing something wrong, just that the process is harder than it looks. Understanding why it is hard will lead to better results. Download this complimentary ebook and gain a full understanding of the link between appraisal and development, and what you can do to smooth this tricky process.

The reality of business today means that organizations will have to grow the talent they need when they can’t find it. Developing talent internally over the long term will be most of the solution. You’ll want some recommendations in your back pocket when your CEO turns to you for answers. Learning managers will be seen as the go-to resources when it comes to compensating for major skill gaps in talent. By socializing learning, mobilizing the technology, creating strategic stretch assignments, partnering with institutions, and speaking to the bottom line, HR can make learning an integral solution to filling skill gaps in the organization.

Social business tools are not entirely new. Enterprises have been using virtual tools such as chat and message board tools for years. Yet today, Gartner predicts that by 2016 half of all large organizations will have internal Facebook-like social networks, and that 30% of those will be considered as essential as email and phone.   Why are we seeing such a rapidly accelerating interest and business investment in social business implementations, especially as Gartner notes in Enterprise Social Networks (ESN)? How do you understand how ESNs can help you and how do you get started? Don't get overwhelmed. Download this free eBook from Bloomfire to learn how.

I spent this summer writing the second edition of my book Web-Based Training. One of the topics that required updating was blended learning. In the four years since the book was published, the term has taken on several new means. In my research I found the term blended learning referred to four different concepts.

As instructional designers we are constantly being bombarded with new technologies and new trends. It’s difficult to distinguish which are fads, and which are worthy of our investments of time and resources. The safest, and often most expedient course of action is to continue to focus on the delivery technology we know is NOT a fad, the traditional classroom. After all we’ve been using the traditional classroom forever, how can we possibly go wrong teaching in a classroom in front of an audience? As new technologies, like the virtual classroom, eLearning, and social media, are introduced, we continue to play it safe by trying to make these technology experiences replicate the classroom.

Microlearning is a new kind of training for the digital age. This playbook offers strategies for applying this methodology to your own curriculum - a positive step in gaining back lost productivity and finding affordable, effective training for a more digitally capable workforce.

Bringing a new product to market? One of the hidden success factors of a product launch is your sales force, and by extension your customers. Do they have the right skills and knowledge to make your launch successful? This white paper will show you how a curriculum of learning solutions can be used as part of a product launch to solve common business problems.

To make technical and compliance elearning engaging, it needs to focus on the learners’ point of view. Thus, it must be short, immediately useful and employ episodic events and stories to help learners absorb and recall knowledge quickly.

Although variations of the flipped ideology have been around for years, Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams are considered pioneers of the movement since their adoption of the flipped classroom in 2007.       The idea of the flipped classroom is simple: take what's typically done in the classroom (lecture, direct instruction) and provide that for students to view at home, or outside of class, in the form of a video.  

It is not uncommon for learners' jobs to depend on their ability to master the critical information delivered to them via training. Imagine you must design and deliver a learning solution that addresses a critical business need. What would your approach be? Every day, stakeholders and designers make choices that sabotage corporate learning efforts... and result in wasted dollars that produce no result. If learners take a course, will they remember what they learned? In this white paper, you will discover four learning strategies that maximize long-term retention. Then, you'll learn about four additional strategies that maximize the learning from a single training event.