Association for Talent Development

Improve the Impact of Your Facilitation

Facilitation is about mastering how to deliver an engaging learning experience, all in the effort of improving workplace performance. It’s also about developing your unique approach and building confidence in it so you can achieve your facilitation goals. In Facilitation in Action, four master ATD facilitators open your eyes to the range of facilitation methods and techniques and help you find your authentic training style.

Authors Carrie Addington, Jared Douglas, Nikki O’Keeffe, and Darryl Wyles provide tips, lessons, and stories rooted in hands-on application, from experiences leading ATD’s education programs and delivering training in industries from government and healthcare to marketing and beauty. Learn how to develop a facilitation mindset that identifies what learners need to be successful before, during, and after training. Explore how to adapt your facilitation across various modalities and how to be prepared when you must pivot in the moment. And, dive into the importance of empathy, inclusion, feedback, and performance to facilitation.

This guide takes both new and established facilitators on a journey of honing training delivery skills, and demonstrating agility for the benefit of the learners, the organization, and themselves. The chapters are structured around actual questions the authors have received over the years from learners in ATD Education’s train-the-trainer sessions. Each chapter concludes with invitations and moments of reflection for the reader as they consider their own development as a facilitator.

Better Learning Solutions Through Better Learning Experiences

When training and development initiatives treat learning as something that occurs as a one-time event, the learner and the business suffer. Using design thinking can help talent development professionals ensure learning sticks to drive improved performance.

Design Thinking for Training and Development offers a primer on design thinking, a human-centered process and problem-solving methodology that focuses on involving users of a solution in its design. For effective design thinking, talent development professionals need to go beyond the UX, the user experience, and incorporate the LX, the learner experience.

In this how-to guide for applying design thinking tools and techniques, Sharon Boller and Laura Fletcher share how they adapted the traditional design thinking process for training and development projects. Their process involves steps to:

Motivation, direction, and inspiration for every trainer, presenter, or facilitator who has ever "lost" an audience.

Part handbook and part inspiration, Crash and Learn presents road-tested strategies for becoming more polished, powerful, and effective. From audience motivation to honing storytelling skills to the simple act of setting chairs in a room for maximum impact, Crash and Learn will enable you to captivate, teach, and inspire. 

Show the value of virtual learning to demonstrate business impact.

In Designing Virtual Learning for Application and Impact, virtual learning expert Cindy Huggett teams with evaluation experts Jack and Patti Phillips and learning transfer authority Emma Weber to create a guidebook for TD practitioners to ensure that their online programs achieve measurable results beyond the virtual classroom.

This practical book outlines a design process focused on how to deliver on-the-job application of learning and a positive impact on business results. It gives 50 techniques you can immediately use to effectively design an engaging virtual learning program that helps learners apply the knowledge they’ve gained back on the job.

Virtual learning is here to stay. And it must add value to an organization, otherwise it’s a waste of time and resources. As budgets are slashed, the ability to show that a program is an investment, rather than an expense is vital. Thus, we need a renewed sense of urgency to make sure virtual learning delivers results for those who support it, expect it, and even demand it.

Step up to the challenge and get serious about delivering business impact with your virtual learning programs. This book will show you how.

In The Facilitator’s Guide to Immersive, Blended, and Hybrid Learning, veteran virtual trainer and learning tech maven Cindy Huggett examines the role of a facilitator in immersive, blended, and hybrid learning environments and offers cutting-edge insights and practical advice on how facilitators can make programs effective and engaging in any scenario. She introduces the new learning experience facilitator role and the skills needed to be successful in today’s modern learning environments.

While the shift from traditional classrooms to immersive learning experiences (including immersive, blended, virtual, and hybrid) has exploded in recent years, the supporting technologies and techniques have been evolving over time and now include augmented, mixed, and virtual realities. In fact, immersive, blended, and hybrid learning have become the new reality of training.

Cindy walks you through how to facilitate in each of these modalities, covering everything from technology needs to suggested modifications of activities. Throughout, she includes real-life examples of immersive, blended, augmented, virtual, and hybrid learning in action. And she asks the vital question: Is facilitation necessary in immersive learning experiences? The answer is yes, but to be successful, facilitators need to update their skills on an ongoing basis.

Prepare yourself with the skills and knowledge to navigate the new world of learning and to make your facilitation shine.

Use the evaluation process to prove the value of training.

Evaluation is the key component to proving the value of training. Make Training Evaluation Work is structured to allow both selective exploration of the topic by seasoned professionals and a beginning-to-end learning experience for the less experienced. All readers will benefit from the included assessment tools, templates, and resources.

Promotions Are So Yesterday is the recipient of the 2023 Bronze Medal from the Axiom Business Book Awards in the category of Success/Motivation/Coaching and the 2023 Nautilus Book Award in the category of Business & Leadership (Self Pub/small Press).

The time-honored tradition of defining career development exclusively in terms of promotions, moves, and title changes is dead. Beyond, between, and besides the climb up the positional ladder, there are many other ways that employees can—and want to—grow. However, many organizations still operate under the notion that promotions are the only option for career development, leaving employees disengaged, managers frustrated, and the business disadvantaged in its efforts to retain talent.

The good news is that career development is so much more than promotions alone, and managers are in a powerful position to redefine career development and create positive results for their employees and their organizations in this area.

In Promotions Are So Yesterday, Julie Winkle Giulioni offers you a new approach for developing your employees’ careers and helping them thrive in a company when promotions are not readily available. Discover an easy-to-apply framework of seven alternative dimensions of development (contribution, competence, confidence, connection, challenge, contentment, and choice) that will engage your employees—dynamic opportunities for growth that are completely within your control as a manager.

Promotions Are So Yesterday is filled with practical advice, nearly 100 questions to spark reflection and productive dialogue, and actionable templates and tools that managers can use with employees. Help bring your employees and your organization to even greater achievement with a strategy that will increase your employees’ job satisfaction, performance, knowledge, and skills, and strengthen your organization’s workforce.

The foundational and go-to book for anyone who does training in the talent development field.

A must have for trainers... Telling Ain't Training is an essential book for all learning and development professionals. When the first edition of Telling Ain't Training was published in 2002, its practical, learner-focused approach quickly became a favorite with learning and development professionals, as well as school teachers, parents, professors, and anyone else who trains, educates, or instructs. Chock-full of myth-busting research and ready-to-use tools, always delivered in a lighthearted and entertaining style, Telling Ain't Training set new standards for the training industry.

That's a tough act to follow, but the long-awaited new edition of Telling Ain't Training does not disappoint. While it has been updated, expanded and enhanced to reflect almost a decade of progress, fans of the original Telling Ain't Training will be relieved to find that its lively, user-friendly tone has been carefully preserved. In fact, this is a book that faithfully practices what it preaches, engaging the reader from page one and immediately involving them in the first of many try-it-yourself exercises that teach trainers how to avoid telling in favor of more interactive training.

This substantially heftier edition covers everything you must know to be a better trainer, plus:

Ignite Online Events and Virtual Training with the Use of Well-Designed and Facilitated Activities

Creating outstanding virtual meetings, webinars, and training programs has always been challenging for novice and experienced instructional designers and facilitators alike. Virtual learning experts Kassy LaBorie and Tom Stone understand that the need to interact and engage is more important than ever, as online collaboration becomes the norm rather than the exception.

In this new, updated edition of Interact and Engage!, the authors offer more than 75 activities as well as tips and strategies to help you create effective online learning and masterful meetings and webinars. Activities range from warmups and icebreakers to closers and celebrations, and everything in between. LaBorie and Stone cover advanced features and techniques and guide you on how to convert or create your own online activities, no matter what technology you are using now or in the future. An appendix presents two capability models for the positions of virtual facilitator and producer.

Elevate Your Work and Relationships Through Conscious Accountability

Results and relationships—managers and leaders no longer have to prioritize one over the other to build a culture of exceptional accountability. You don’t have to choose between being the hard-charging task master and being the easy-going people pleaser. By expanding your awareness to create deliberate intentions, take informed actions, and be responsible for your impact, you can achieve better business outcomes and experience greater satisfaction in doing so.

In Conscious Accountability, Yale professors, psychologists, and leadership consultants David C. Tate, Marianne S. Pantalon, and Daryn H. David invite you to think about yourself and your working relationships more completely and integrate a practice of conscious accountability in your daily life. A forward-thinking approach to realizing organizational and team goals, conscious accountability can help you move beyond traditional ways of engaging with your employees, team members, and peers. The impact will be transformative.

To help you develop the skills and the mindsets of conscious accountability, this book introduces a straightforward and powerful CONNECT framework that gives you the tools you need to better relate to everyone in your professional (and personal) life, build trust, and motivate yourself and your colleagues for greater outcomes. Step up your game by following the seven practices of conscious accountability—creating clarity, opening up engagement, nailing it, noticing, exchanging feedback, claiming it, and trying again. You will connect more closely to others, put people in a position to succeed, elevate and distinguish yourself, and generate excellence everywhere you turn.