What’s Your Tag Line?

Many years ago a recruiter connected with me. During our conversation he asked me what's my tag line. My tag line, what's that? I asked. He said, you know, like someone is a "Problem Solver", or "Deal Closer" etc. You need to have a tag line that describes you, he said to me.The conversation got me thinking. Before that time I had never thought what was my tag line. After some thought, I chose "Enabling People" as my tag line. I like to enable people deliver better, by creating an…

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What Kind of a CLO Are You?

Inspired by a recent post by Anand (who btw has just turned to become an independent Learning Consultant, give him a shout out in case you are looking for someone) where he categorizes variety of stakeholders who want to get on the LMS bandwagon as Yell, Yum and Yes.In my view there are three kinds a CLOs implementing or having implemented a Learning Management System (LMS). They are the Learning CLO, Management CLO and the Systems CLO.The Learning CLOs are all about learning and not so much about training. In…

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Stay Young, Keep Learning

Tim Sanders recommends expanding your resume every year to avoid getting lapped up in the sport of business by those who do.He writes in his post:Youth is a state of mind, not a counting of years.  In my experience, the secret to eternal youth is lifelong learning...the constant expansion of one's resume of experiences and insights.  Henry Ford once quipped, "Anyone who stops learning becomes old, whether at twenty or at eighty. Anyone that keeps learning stays young." He goes on to say:If you aren't expanding your resume every year, you…

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The Learning & Development Change Grid, by Don Taylor

Donald H Taylor, chairman of LPI, LSG & the Learning Technologies conference explains how Learning and Development Departments need to change their attitude to risk in order to keep pace with the rest of the business in today's modern world. He describes 4 quadrants in which L&D departments fit: Learning Leadership, Unacknowledged Prophet, Comfortable Extinction and The Training Ghetto and explains how and why all L&D departments should join the quadrant of Learning Leadership.

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Lessons in Professionalism

I  love watching Grey’s Anatomy, an American television medical drama series. While the human drama in the series makes it a gripping watch, what I find really amazing is the professionalism of characters in the series. The surgeons and interns are intensely competitive, and yet are completely professional about their jobs, irrespective of the positions they hold, or not hold for that matter.I feel there are many life management lessons to be learned from the series. What do you do when a peer becomes your boss? What do you do…

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The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same

This year I completed 20 years in the learning and development industry. As I reflect back, some things just remain the same, especially in elearning. Even today when I tell someone that I develop elearning, I get the “Oh that’s an upcoming industry”. Even after 20 years, elearning is still an upcoming industry!!!Elearning development continues to be riddled with the same questions over the years with no right answers. Many years ago, when I was learning Instructional Design (ID), one of the mentors said the full form of ID is…

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I Am Not Learning Anything New!!!

I am not learning anything new.I am still doing what I did years ago.There is no “growth” for me.I have heard this a few times lately. It seems there’s a quest for continuous learning. And there’s the quest for learning something “new” all the time. Unfortunately there’s no quest to hone and improve what we know. There’s a quest to spread ourselves thin without learning in depth about anything. If I have done something once, it seems I know everything there is to know about it. And “growth” is only…

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Clients From Hell… and Heaven!

This is a guest post By Puja AnandRecently, I saw a website titled Clients from Hell that had funny anecdotes from web designers about unreasonable or uninformed clients with strange requirements. It got me thinking about the clients I have interacted with in the last 10-12 years. Who among them would qualify as clients from hell? Are they the clients who ask us to reduce our prices, even as the expenses go up? Are they the ones who expect work to be delivered two weeks earlier than our proposed tight…

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Career Paths for Trainers

Someone asked a question on the career growth paths for trainers on one of our internal forums. And about the same time I came across this interesting blog post which talks about not worrying about career path and living your career story, written by Jason Seiden. It is from Dan McCarthy’s list of 20 Best Leadership Blog Posts of 2010. Just loved the way Jason explains the need to dump career paths and focus on building your career stories. . So, what could be a Trainer's career stories? While it…

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