Association for Talent Development

Grow Your Self-Awareness, Reinvent Your Value

There’s a moment of hesitation surfacing today in organizations. Executives want middle managers to operate more cross-functionally so they can scale performance. Middle managers are waiting for permission from executives to activate their leadership voice and create more value. Written by leadership expert and coach Dan Gallagher, The Self-Aware Leader sharpens the self-awareness of middle managers to drive productivity and career growth.

Gallagher presents a model that emerging leaders, middle managers, and senior executives can use as a catalyst to grow their leadership value. Based on empirical research and more than two decades of use, the model fully integrates a deep focus on self-awareness and reinvention with the practices of servant leadership and business transformation.

This second edition includes additional thought exercises, new research on the Self-Aware Leader model and Generosity Quotient, and real examples of how increased self-awareness grows a leader’s value.

Make Learning Stick Through Reflection Activities

Employees today crave development, growth, and skill building. They also want more meaning and connection at work. When they learn to reflect on training experiences intentionally, they get all that and more. Pausing to reflect makes it easier to retain and transfer the knowledge and skills we need on the job.

L&D expert Katrina Kennedy shares more than 45 reflective learning activities that instructional designers, facilitators, and trainers can use in face-to-face and online classrooms to create more meaningful learning experiences for a variety of contexts and participants. Each activity is designed to help participants develop critical thinking skills and improve future performance by analyzing what they’ve learned and how far they’ve come.

Built around eight essential outcomes, this book will show you how to strengthen motivation, social connection, memory, and critical thinking skills through targeted reflection activities—all of which are adaptable for in-person or remote training situations. Activities include mental inventories for boosting motivation, shared learning maps for building social connection, and after-action reviews for improving performance.

Start achieving your organization’s business goals and building people’s capacities with this comprehensive reflection toolkit.

Become an Expert AI User and Strategy Leader

Artificial intelligence (AI) and performance expert Josh Cavalier shares his in-depth knowledge and skills to help L&D professionals master learning experience design by using generative AI in their employee learning and development efforts. More than just a technical manual on generative AI or a collection of best prompt practices, this book explores how AI is reshaping jobs, skill development, and human performance. Cavalier provides his Learning and Development AI Ecosystem framework as a practical road map for integrating AI into your day-to-day work and your organization.

Discover how to seamlessly incorporate AI into your existing L&D processes and broader L&D ecosystem, optimizing workflows and driving measurable results. Explore how AI-enabled L&D platforms can facilitate personalized learning paths, automated performance support, and real-time skills gap analysis. Learn how to craft effective prompts for learning design and use chatbots and AI assistants for help in the moment of need. And importantly, dive deep into the ethical considerations, from maintaining data privacy and security to mitigating bias in AI-powered learning solutions.

No matter how advanced artificial intelligence becomes, L&D professionals must remain focused on performance—both of humans and now machines. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting your AI journey, this book is your essential resource to unleash the power of AI in L&D.

Demand for creative thinking is currently outpacing supply. Despite that need, creative thinking is one of the skills most lacking in job candidates. The good news is that creative thinking is a trainable skill. In this issue of TD at Work, Gerard J. Puccio and Pamela A. Szalay will:

• Explain the nature of creativity.
• Identify the four stages of the creative process.
• Present, and provide the opportunity to practice, six strategies to enhance creative thinking.
• Describe ways to facilitate creativity at individual, team, and organizational levels.
• Provide opportunities to pair creative thinking with artificial intelligence.

The Tools & Resources in this issue include a Worksheet: Diverge First Strategy, Tool: POINt Evaluation, and Exercise: Stakeholder Analysis.

Become Indispensable in Driving Business Growth

L&D leaders must know how to connect learning strategies with business strategies and communicate effectively with leaders to improve employee performance and drive revenue. In other words, L&D needs to run like a business. Enter learning operations expert Tracie Cantu and her innovative Learning Operations Blueprint, which puts critical business needs first and brings rigorous systems-based thinking to corporate learning.

This first-of-its-kind approach offers step-by-step guidance for updating L&D processes and structures to immediately improve results and increase the relevance of the L&D function. When learning teams and leadership become better partners, outcomes improve for organizations and employees.

You’ll learn how to build an L&D business model that works, how to manage a portfolio of learning products, and how to design employee learning experiences that improve outcomes without demanding more tech or human resources.

Cantu also provides questions for reflection, checklists, worksheets, and scorecards for practical application of her recommendations. Each chapter includes tips for taking action immediately and real-world stories that illustrate how to use the framework successfully and avoid common pitfalls.

With this book, you will learn to scale your impact, secure your influence, and reach L&D’s potential.

Empower Frontline Workers and You’ll Power Your Business

Frontline employees are the backbone of every organization. They’re the grocery clerks, manufacturing workers, call center representatives, hotel housekeepers, and retail associates who keep the world running. Yet, despite making up 70 to 80 percent of the global workforce, they are often treated as an afterthought. The Frontline Enablement Playbook is here to change that.

Written by JD Dillon, founder of LearnGeek and passionate advocate for the frontline, this book is a practical guide for HR, L&D, and operations professionals who want to do better by their deskless teams. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience and insights from over 100 global practitioners and actual frontline workers, Dillon delivers the first-ever playbook designed to help you build a frontline experience that’s resilient, adaptable, and human-centered.

Inside, you'll dive deep into six parts that redefine frontline support:

• Understanding who frontline workers really are—and what they need
• Architecting a modern enablement ecosystem
• Empowering frontline managers to empower their employees
• Helping frontline workers do a great job today
• Fostering future opportunities for development
• Evolving your entire strategy to get that all-important buy-in

This book is packed with tools and tactics that work—whether you’re looking to improve training, manage change more effectively, enhance communication, or support manager well-being. Modular by design, you can read the entire story or pick and choose specific sections to address timely needs. You’ll find frameworks like the Modern Learning Ecosystem, stories from the field, and letters from frontline workers themselves.

Stop just saying your frontline is essential and start proving it. Because when your frontline thrives, your business does too.

Drive Organizational Performance Through Evaluation

Organizations that embed evaluation into their culture and operations can pivot faster, innovate more effectively, and foster a growth mindset. Evaluation thus becomes a tool for learning and continuous improvement. Building a Culture of Evaluation leads you through how to integrate measurement and feedback into your organization’s DNA.

Learning trailblazer and President and CEO of Kirkpatrick Partners Vanessa Alzate delivers a bold, visionary guide for transforming learning functions into strategic powerhouses. In this book, she reimagines the impact the Kirkpatrick Four Levels® can have in today’s dynamic workplace. Not just for L&D use, the model gives you and your organization a common language and decision matrix—an operating system—to align all people, processes, and performance systems with results.

This book explores using evaluation as the foundation of the design process for new interventions to ensure you achieve behavior change and learning transfer. Then, it brings evaluation to life with practical applications across onboarding, leadership development, sales enablement, coaching, and even artificial intelligence initiatives. Finally, it looks ahead to how you can scale evaluation beyond just L&D across the entire organization.

With contributed chapters from global experts and real-world examples, this book is your road map to shifting from order taker to business partner, from isolated metrics to enterprise-wide impact.

Understanding the delicate balance of neurotransmitters and hormones that regulate motivation, stress, and trust is more than an interesting science lesson. It is the key to unlocking better leadership, stronger teams, and sustainable high performance. In this issue of TD at Work, Jessica Billiet will:

• Outline brain chemistry components and how they interact with each other.
• Define the four pillars of Longevity Leadership.
• Explain how the work environment affects brain hormones and neurotransmitters.
• Share practical ways leaders can foster a healthy workspace and avoid burnout.

The Tools & Resources in this issue include a Worksheet: Growth Ritual Design, Inventory: The Motivation Method, and Matrix: Stretch and Support.

Strengthen Your Acquisition and Retention Efforts Through Everboarding

Traditional onboarding is a relic of the past. That frantic sprint to get new hires “up to speed,” followed by a deafening silence, often falls short. What if, instead, you could create a seamless, ongoing journey of growth and development from the day an employee starts and throughout their tenure—an everboarding experience?

Employees say they need to develop new skills to be successful at their jobs, and many will look for another job if not offered development opportunities. In this book, leading HR talent strategy and everboarding expert Amber Watts offers solutions to help you shift your organization’s mindset that onboarding has an exit day and embrace a culture of continuous learning. It guides you through building a dynamic everboarding strategy that fosters long-term employee engagement, accelerates performance, and strengthens your talent acquisition and retention efforts.

Inside, you’ll discover how to personalize and elevate the onboarding experience, move beyond generic checklists, and create customized journeys that resonate with individual needs, jobs, and roles. Smooth the transition out of onboarding by defining clear expectations and creating a seamless handoff process to ensure ongoing support. Equip managers to be continuous development partners and provide them with the tools and resources they need to effectively coach, mentor, and guide their employees throughout their careers. Cultivate a growth mindset, encouraging new hires and existing employees to embrace lifelong learning and growth. This book also includes three case studies that explore how an everboarding strategy solves key challenges and delivers business results, while offering ideas for how to implement it yourself.

Perfect for HR and L&D leaders seeking to transform their onboarding and employee development programs, this first-ever book on everboarding provides actionable strategies and practical advice you can apply immediately. Stop treating onboarding like a graduation and start building an everlasting culture of growth and success.

Make Employee Skills the Currency Within Your Organization

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations are recognizing the critical importance of employees’ skills as a catalyst for organizational success. This is a fundamental change from focusing on job titles, position credentials, org charts, and reporting hierarchies when considering organizational talent. Meanwhile, workers and job seekers desire better opportunities to showcase their unique abilities and greater career mobility. Now, organizations have the opportunity to meet their business and employee needs by tapping into the existing skills of their workforce and developing the skills their employees need to remain agile and competitive.

While the transformation process to a skills-based organization is complex and may seem overwhelming, skills expert and visionary Koreen Pagano offers a blueprint for making the shift and achieving success. She shows how to build over time, emphasizing that you do not have to overhaul every HR, learning and development, and management process and program to see the benefits of skills. Start small and wherever it makes the most sense for your organization to begin the skills journey.

In this book, explore the different components of a skills-based organization—hiring and recruitment, organizational culture, performance management, and career development—as well as strategies for continuous improvement at the people, process, and system levels. Learn to understand the current potential for skills, what is needed to overcome resistance to change, and how to secure buy-in from your organization’s decision makers. Examine how to plan for the collection, analysis, and governance of your skills data.

This book is perfect for HR and talent strategists who want to go beyond the theoretical and see real results, regardless of where they may be on their path to building a skills-based organization. Case studies of companies at different stages in the journey prove this isn’t just an aspirational goal—it’s one that actual companies are achieving.

C-suite personas can strengthen individual learning and growth, influence leaders, foster healthy teams, enable change at the senior leader level, and optimize strategy. Knowing the way leaders think and how they make decisions can augment TD’s approach and enhance the function’s influence in the boardroom. In this issue of TD at Work, Esther Jackson will:

• Introduce leader personas.
• Explain how they differ from learner personas.
• Describe the primary executive decision-making styles.
• Detail the benefits of understanding personas for TD.
• Outline ways to support leader development using C-suite leader personas.
• Fuse artificial intelligence and personas to enhance TD outcomes.

The Tools & Resources in this issue include a Template: C-Suite Persona and Worksheet: Pitch Preparation.

A focus on personalization and user experience is transforming technology solutions from one-size-fits-all to curated environments that cater to end users’ unique needs. Learning experience platforms play into that paradigm shift by driving effectiveness through training delivery and user engagement. In this issue of TD at Work, Theresa Decker will:

• Describe different types of learning platforms.
• Present a business case for choosing an LXP.
• Offer guidance for selecting a platform.
• Unpack a framework for implementing an LXP.
• Present change management strategies for user adoption.
• Explain how to plan for future success.

The Tools & Resources in this issue include an Assessment: Organizational Readiness.

Transform Your L&D Team Into Your Organization’s Strategic Business Partner

Most L&D pros dream of the day when stakeholders will stop viewing them as mere order takers and consider them critical, strategic partners in shaping the future of their organization. But how do you get there? In this book, veteran talent development leader Jess Almlie introduces her formula for becoming the valued strategic business partner (SBP) that leaders in the C-suite and elsewhere in an organization need and want.

Partnering effectively with stakeholders requires a new mindset and behavior, a keen understanding of the business, a willingness to collaborate, and targeted tools. Almlie provides detailed guidance on how to succeed in each of these areas and invites you to start by taking an in-depth assessment of your strengths and gaps in working as an SBP. She shares her own wins and failures along with wisdom from three dozen other L&D pros who work in small, midsize, and large organizations across a wide variety of industries.

This step-by-step guide will help current and aspiring L&D leaders understand business basics, create a playbook for team collaboration, work productively with stakeholders, and teach others to work in harmony with L&D. The final chapter offers practical advice for those who need to take small steps toward becoming SBPs in organizations resistant to change.

This book includes questionnaires, worksheets, and other tools that will help L&D leaders understand business terminology and needs, see a stakeholder’s point of view, and develop strategies for creating effective partnerships and measuring impact. You’ll be able to create a plan for developing and advocating for a team of L&D professionals who all work as strategic business partners.

When L&D professionals properly incorporate fun, it leads to positive course evaluation feedback from participants and results in reaching desired learning outcomes that align with organizational business objectives. In this issue of TD at Work, Paige Parker Salazar will:

• Explain why fun is an integral part of good facilitation.
• Outline personality styles and reveal how they affect which training activities to choose.
• Share techniques to interject interactivity, engagement, and fun into training events.
• Enumerate how to assess knowledge and skills.
• Offer ways to evaluate training.

The Tools & Resources in this issue are a Template: Fun and Engagement and a Worksheet: After-Training Action Plan.

Get the A-to-Z Resource on Training Evaluation

Fully revised and updated, ATD’s Handbook for Measuring and Evaluating Training is the comprehensive go-to reference for talent development professionals in need of immediate measurement and evaluation (M&E) guidance. Edited by M&E powerhouse Patti Phillips, with contributions from 30 expert practitioners, this handbook provides an essential roadmap to developing effective processes to prove the value and impact of your learning and development programs.

Training measurement and evaluation is one of the top frustrations of a talent development professional's job. At first glance, it appears to be a drain on precious time and resources, yet it is a critical function for understanding the results and proving the value of L&D programs. If not conducted properly, it can yield questionable results, lack of accountability, and stakeholder skepticism. All to say, TD professionals must have a solid foundation in measurement and evaluation to do their jobs effectively.

With this handbook, you’ll feel confident each time you face an M&E challenge, from planning the evaluation and collecting and analyzing data to optimizing results and making evaluation efforts work in your organization. You will use the data to improve your training programs and meet the standards your organization strives for.

The updated edition includes new chapters on how to tell the evaluation story to business leaders, visualize data in reports, and leverage artificial intelligence smartly as well as refreshed chapters on all the M&E fundamentals. Rich in real-life application, it offers practitioner tips, knowledge checks, and support resources and references. Your advisors along the way are an impressive array of experts from the field, each chosen for their knowledge, experience, and actual results in specific areas.

Whether you’re a trainer, manager, professor, or student of training evaluation, this handbook has been designed to meet your needs. 

Make Employee Skills the Currency Within Your Organization

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations are recognizing the critical importance of employees’ skills as a catalyst for organizational success. This is a fundamental change from focusing on job titles, position credentials, org charts, and reporting hierarchies when considering organizational talent. Meanwhile, workers and job seekers desire better opportunities to showcase their unique abilities and greater career mobility. Now, organizations have the opportunity to meet their business and employee needs by tapping into the existing skills of their workforce and developing the skills their employees need to remain agile and competitive.

While the transformation process to a skills-based organization is complex and may seem overwhelming, skills expert and visionary Koreen Pagano offers a blueprint for making the shift and achieving success. She shows how to build over time, emphasizing that you do not have to overhaul every HR, learning and development, and management process and program to see the benefits of skills. Start small and wherever it makes the most sense for your organization to begin the skills journey.

In this book, explore the different components of a skills-based organization—hiring and recruitment, organizational culture, performance management, and career development—as well as strategies for continuous improvement at the people, process, and system levels. Learn to understand the current potential for skills, what is needed to overcome resistance to change, and how to secure buy-in from your organization’s decision makers. Examine how to plan for the collection, analysis, and governance of your skills data.

This book is perfect for HR and talent strategists who want to go beyond the theoretical and see real results, regardless of where they may be on their path to building a skills-based organization. Case studies of companies at different stages in the journey prove this isn’t just an aspirational goal—it’s one that actual companies are achieving.

لمورد النهائي لمهنة تطوير المواهب هو
دليل TDBoK™: الدليل المعرفي لتطوير المواهب، الطبعة الثانية، هو مجموعة شاملة تتضمن مفاهيم تطوير المواهب، والتعريفات، والمنهجيات، والأمثلة التي تضع الأساس والمبادئ التوجيهية اللازمة لمَن يطورون المواهب في مكان العمل. أنشأت جمعية تطوير المواهب (ATD) هذا المرجع ليكون المعيار الذهبي لمهنة التعلّم وتطوير المواهب. تم توفير الإصدار الأول من الدليل المعرفي لتطوير المواهب في عام 2020 من خلال منتج اشتراك في جمعية تطوير المواهب. يسرّ جمعية تطوير المواهب تقديم هذه الطبعة المُحدّثة والمنقحة في صيغة كتاب.

 الدليل المعرفي لتطوير المواهب متجذّر في نموذج قدرة تطوير المواهب (Talent Development Capability Model™) ويقدم نظرة متعمقة فيه، ويتخطى الجوانب الأساسية للتدريب والتطوير ويدعم النهج الذي يحتاج إليه أخصائيو تطوير المواهب - ليكونوا أكثر فعالية - لتطوير القدرات الشخصية والمهنية بهدف التأثير في القدرة المؤسسية.

يتناول الدليل المعرفي لتطوير المواهب 23 تخصصًا رئيسيًا (أو مجال قدرة) في تطوير المواهب، وينقسم إلى ثلاثة أقسام تتماشى مع المجالات الثلاثة التي يتألف منها نموذج القدرة - الشخصي، والمهني، والمؤسسي. وتتفرد هذه الطبعة الثانية — التي طورتها جمعية تطوير المواهب بالشراكة مع خبير الصناعة Elaine Biech — بتحديثات شاملة تستند إلى الملاحظات المستخلصة من المجال، وأكثر من 100 مساهم خبير في موضوع الدراسة، كما راعت وجهات النظر المسجلة في آلاف المطبوعات.

بالنسبة إلى هؤلاء الذين يستعدون للحصول على شهادات البرامج التي يقدمها معهد اعتماد الشهادة التابع لجمعية تطوير المواهب - أخصائي تطوير المواهب (APTD) أو شهادة المحترف المعتمد في تطوير المواهب (CPTD) - يُعد الدليل المعرفي لتطوير المواهب مصدرًا مفيدًا للاستعداد للاختبار.

الدليل المعرفي لتطوير المواهب من جمعية تطوير المواهب هو نبراس المجال؛ إنه مورد لا غنى عنه لكل أخصائي تطوير مواهب يطمح إلى تحقيق تقدم في حياته المهنية، في الوقت الحاضر والمستقبل.

The Definitive Resource for the Talent Development Profession
The TDBoK™ Guide: Talent Development Body of Knowledge, second edition, is a comprehensive collection of TD concepts, definitions, methodologies, and examples that lays the foundation and guiding principles for those who develop talent in the workplace. Created by the Association for Talent Development (ATD), this reference sets the gold standard for the learning and talent development profession. The first iteration of the TDBok was made available in 2020 through an ATD subscription product. ATD is delighted to present this updated and revised edition in book format.

Grounded in and offering a deep dive of ATD’s Talent Development Capability Model, the TDBoK Guide goes beyond the core foundational aspects of training and development and supports the approach that—to be most effective—TD professionals need to develop personal and professional capabilities to impact organizational capability.

Covering the TD field’s 23 key disciplines (or capability areas), the TDBoK Guide is divided into three sections that align with the Capability Model’s three domains-personal, professional, and organizational. This second edition—developed by ATD in partnership with industry expert Elaine Biech—includes comprehensive updates based on feedback from the field, more than 100 subject matter expert contributors, and curated perspectives from thousands of publications.

For those preparing to obtain certifications offered by ATD—ATD CI’s certification programs, the Associate Professional in Talent Development (APTD), or the Certified Professional in Talent Development (CPTD)—the TDBoK Guide also serves as a helpful resource for exam preparation.

ATD’s TDBoK Guide is the differentiator for the field—a resource that every TD professional needs to grow in their careers, today and in the future.

Grow Your Self-Awareness, Reinvent Your Value

Middle managers shape an organization’s ability to scale the business based on how well they can operate cross-functionally as one team. Self-aware leaders accomplish this by slowing themselves down to speed themselves up. They use brief and intentional pauses to gather insights that inform new pathways for creating value as a leader. This value, called reinvention, is propelled by a deep focus on how to reinvent self, others, and the business, as well as the prioritization of outcomes that positively influence results and people.

Written by leadership expert and executive coach Dan Gallagher, The Self-Aware Leader increases leadership performance, business outcomes, and career growth. Middle managers are repeatedly tasked with navigating the competing needs of frontline employees and upper management. These mixed messages often result in practices that are not scalable and managers who are simply doers. Self-awareness teaches managers how to activate their leadership voice to create profitable, sustainable growth.

Gallagher presents a practical leadership model that any middle manager—or anyone responsible for growing middle manager performance—can implement. Based on empirical research involving more than 700 middle managers, this model highlights four pillars that drive leadership success: above average support system and network, proficiency in critical and systems thinking, savvy perspective of the political landscape, and courageous drive for magis (or more for the good of others). This book fully integrates the idea of reinvention, servant leadership, and business transformation into a proven framework with more than two decades of use.

New for this second edition is the inclusion of 24 validated behaviors from Gallagher’s research, plus expanded exercises for applying the content. In addition, new topics include leadership health, artificial intelligence, inclusion, the digitization of work, the connection between employee and customer experiences, trust, and leading remote teams. A new final chapter highlights how self-awareness and reinvention have risen to the forefront of business skills and what this means for new models of work and new expectations for specific functions. 

Game On! Action-Based Training Designs for Better Learning

Passive learning just doesn’t cut it in today’s evolving, competitive workplace. Research demonstrates that action-first learning works because it engages the mind immediately and makes sure that knowledge and skills will stick. With a more diverse array of action-based training designs, organizations can motivate learners, provide hands-on, collaborative practice, and drive behavioral change.

In Action-First Learning, educator and tech expert Karl M. Kapp covers nine distinct types of learning experiences in one volume—from card and board games, escape rooms, and branching scenarios to augmented reality and AI-powered coaching. He explains why each design works and how to choose, plan, and execute the right kind of project for your goals. Each chapter includes a detailed case study, a design checklist, and tips on how to leverage AI in the creation of action-first learning.

The book includes a chapter by instructional designer Amy Pape about how to improve action-first learning through accessibility and another by L&D expert Kevin Thorn on the use of comics in action-first learning.

Are you being asked to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of the learning programs you created for your company, but don’t know where to start and have limited resources? 

Measure Learning Impact Despite Limited Resources

Year after year, talent development professionals report that lack of time, lack of support or partnership from stakeholders, and limited budgets are key barriers to measuring and evaluating their learning programs. Measurement and Evaluation on a Shoestring offers TD professionals a process to measure what matters to the organization with the tools and resources they have available. M&E pro Alaina Szlachta applies the Build-Borrow-Buy approach to provide guidance, quick tips, and shortcuts for making measurement easier while still demonstrating the value and impact of organizational learning.

With this book, you will learn to ask the right questions, brainstorm metrics to evaluate learning, and build a measurement strategy that fits your needs. It also guides you on integrating measurement and evaluation into your instructional design approach from the beginning as well as using and analyzing data sources you might already have. You’ll discover how to build stakeholder relationships to secure buy-in and when to look beyond your expertise for external support and technology.

The Association for Talent Development’s On a Shoestring series helps professionals successfully execute core topics in training and talent development when facing limitations of time, money, staff, and other resources. Using the Build-Borrow-Buy approach to problem solving, this series is designed for practitioners who work as a department of one; for new or “accidental” trainers, instructional designers, and learning managers who need fast, inexpensive access to practical strategies that work; and for those who work for small organizations or in industries that have limited training and development resources.

The Definitive Resource for the Talent Development Profession
The TDBoK™ Guide: Talent Development Body of Knowledge, second edition, is a comprehensive collection of TD concepts, definitions, methodologies, and examples that lays the foundation and guiding principles for those who develop talent in the workplace. Created by the Association for Talent Development (ATD), this reference sets the gold standard for the learning and talent development profession. The first iteration of the TDBok was made available in 2020 through an ATD subscription product. ATD is delighted to present this updated and revised edition in book format.

Grounded in and offering a deep dive of ATD’s Talent Development Capability Model, the TDBoK Guide goes beyond the core foundational aspects of training and development and supports the approach that—to be most effective—TD professionals need to develop personal and professional capabilities to impact organizational capability.

Covering the TD field’s 23 key disciplines (or capability areas), the TDBoK Guide is divided into three sections that align with the Capability Model’s three domains-personal, professional, and organizational. This second edition—developed by ATD in partnership with industry expert Elaine Biech—includes comprehensive updates based on feedback from the field, more than 100 subject matter expert contributors, and curated perspectives from thousands of publications.

For those preparing to obtain certifications offered by ATD—ATD CI’s certification programs, the Associate Professional in Talent Development (APTD), or the Certified Professional in Talent Development (CPTD)—the TDBoK Guide also serves as a helpful resource for exam preparation.

ATD’s TDBoK Guide is the differentiator for the field—a resource that every TD professional needs to grow in their careers, today and in the future.

Evaluation-oriented instructional design that delivers business results.

Rethink how to design training instruction to meet bottom-line business goals. With his eight-step framework for measurement and evaluation-focused instructional design, Kristopher Newbauer offers a straightforward process for helping instructional designers and talent development (TD) leaders demonstrate and actualize their value while also transforming their attitude toward an often-dreaded practice.

With Aligning Instructional Design With Business Goals, improve your business acumen by adopting the language of your business leaders. Enhance the partnership among measurement and evaluation specialists, instructional designers, and business leaders to improve the TD function. Uncover the root cause of performance gaps to design more meaningful instruction—and thus increase ROI.

With case studies and examples to illustrate, learn to:

• Promote your TD function as a strategy for achieving business goals.
• Ensure TD programs are aligned to the company’s strategic objectives.
• Design and develop effective TD programs.
• Demonstrate to business leaders measurable added value in revenue and employee success.

Employ a structure for establishing, tracking, compiling, and communicating training results.

How do you know that your HR or training department has accomplished its objectives? A training scorecard enables you to evaluate your programs subjectively and standardize the tracking process. Implementing Training Scorecards features eight powerful case studies that illustrate how to use and implement training scorecards.

Next Level Virtual Training, by Diana L. Howles, has received awards from Axiom Business Book Awards, Goody Business Book Awards, and North American Book Awards.

As virtual training continues as a go-to, effective learning option, and platform providers improve functionality, trainers and facilitators need to take their skills to the next level. Written by expert facilitator Diana L. Howles, this book goes beyond the basics of virtual training and online synchronous instruction, providing in-depth insights into advanced challenges.

Next Level Virtual Training introduces the Virtual Trainer Capability Model, which identifies eight areas of expertise for the top virtual professional. A train-the-virtual-trainer resource, this book will guide you developing the specific knowledge and skills to facilitate online interactivity, manage multitasking, be technically fluent, oversee logistics and troubleshooting, leverage your voice, and engage virtual learners. Importantly, this book is about actionable tips, strategies, and techniques rather than the technologies.

Inside you’ll find comprehensive chapters on developing on-camera competence; applying learning experience design to live online learning; and preparing for the combination of onsite and online learners together in a post-pandemic hybrid work environment.

Whether you are a virtual trainer, a live online facilitator, a synchronous educator, an online adult education instructor, this book is for you. It is also for designers, developers, evaluators, and producers of virtual learning.

Motivate and Engage Learners to Drive Your Business Forward

Organizations that prioritize employee learning are best positioned to thrive in our rapidly evolving business landscape. Veteran learning strategist Becky Willis demonstrates how an organization can achieve stellar learning engagement in seven simple steps and then turn that engagement into business value and a powerful competitive advantage.

Willis writes this book for those who have strategic responsibility for integrating learning into broader organizational initiatives—whether they are learning leaders, HR professionals, L&D practitioners, or other talent development (TD) professionals. After demonstrating why engagement is important, she walks you through the step-by-step process of devising and communicating a clear strategy for learning engagement, selecting and implementing the right technology, recruiting and deploying champions, mastering the art of marketing learning experiences, and creating the right learning designs for career development. She helps you learn to work with leaders and managers to sponsor, support, and collaborate on learning.

Each chapter includes stories, tools, and templates to ensure TD pros and learning designers can translate ideas into practical actions immediately. With this book in hand, you will have what you need to become an effective business partner who enhances employees’ knowledge, skills, and commitment to the organization and drives positive bottom-line results. Willis shows you how to make changes today that will help your organization value and deploy learning content successfully tomorrow.

Make Learning Stick Through Reflection Activities

Employees today crave development, growth, and skill building. They also want more meaning and connection at work. When they learn to reflect on training experiences intentionally, they get all that and more. Pausing to reflect makes it easier to retain and transfer the knowledge and skills we need on the job.

L&D expert Katrina Kennedy shares more than 45 reflective learning activities that instructional designers, facilitators, and trainers can use in face-to-face and online classrooms to create more meaningful learning experiences for a variety of contexts and participants. Each activity is designed to help participants develop critical thinking skills and improve future performance by analyzing what they’ve learned and how far they’ve come.

Built around eight essential outcomes, this book will show you how to strengthen motivation, social connection, memory, and critical thinking skills through targeted reflection activities—all of which are adaptable for in-person or remote training situations. Activities include mental inventories for boosting motivation, shared learning maps for building social connection, and after-action reviews for improving performance.

Start achieving your organization’s business goals and building people’s capacities with this comprehensive reflection toolkit.

Create TD Solutions That Embrace and Strengthen Organization Development

Industry professionals can contribute and influence the organization’s learning culture in multiple ways—by developing and delivering training programs directly to employees and by taking a seat at the table where leaders execute and discuss opportunities to promote healthy, energized, and engaged employees.

Volume 3 of Train the Trainer, Training Programs: Create a Culture of Learning and Maximize Your Organization's Potential offers trainers critical information about areas of organization development that they are often asked to address in their talent development solutions. Modern mentoring, the virtual workforce, upskilling employees, and succession planning are but a few examples.

This collection includes 15 TD at Work issues, including:

• “Orient Managers for Career Success”
• “A Modern Approach to Performance Feedback”
• “Succession Planning for Today’s Work World”
• “Embrace Mentorships”
• “Engage in Mental Health and Well-Being”
• “Upskilling for Talent Mobility”
• “Competency Framework: Build for Tomorrow”

Volume 3 comes complete with job aids, case studies, and references that readers can use immediately.

About the Train the Trainer Volumes

The Train the Trainer Volumes contain the most popular TD at Work guides about training and talent development. The four volumes include:

• Train the Trainer, Second Edition, Volume 1: Foundations and Delivery: Become a Successful Trainer
• Train the Trainer, Second Edition, Volume 2: Instructional Design: Captivate Your Learners
• Train the Trainer, Second Edition, Volume 3: Training Programs: Create a Culture of Learning and Maximize Your Organization’s Potential
• Train the Trainer, Second Edition, Volume 4: Measurement and Evaluation: Demonstrate Your Program’s Impact and Value

You can purchase them separately or together as a set. Each volume includes 15 issues, is available in print or as a PDF, and serves as a solid foundation for any training department or trainer. The revised volumes consist of 95 percent new content that will help talent development professionals stay on top of industry shifts.

Use Marketing Strategies to Captivate and Persuade Your Audience

At first glance, marketing and L&D may seem like an unlikely combination. But upon closer inspection, both fields share two core goals: getting people’s attention and influencing their behavior. Marketing involves captivating, persuading, and creating value—all of which are key to learning design. When done well, learning design grabs participants’ attention like a great marketing campaign and engages them emotionally and intellectually to make learning stick. In this innovative volume, marketing and L&D experts Bianca Baumann and Mike Taylor ask: How can L&D pros make learning programs more effective by thinking like expert marketers?

To answer that question, Baumann and Taylor explore the potential of marketing-inspired L&D, diving into essential marketing principles, strategies, and techniques and applying them to learning experience design to improve learning transfer. With a learner-centric perspective, the authors explain the science of marketing, how to use personas, and how to craft a successful learner journey. They cover effective writing, the use of powerful graphics, how to plan and execute a winning learning campaign, how to harness technology, and the all-important activities of evaluation and learning analytics.

L&D pros will learn new ways to capture their target audience’s attention and influence their behavior. Each chapter includes engaging stories from Baumann and Taylor’s work in the field, case studies, and definitions of essential marketing concepts and how they apply directly in the L&D environment, plus activities and tools instructional designers can apply immediately to transform their learning programs.

A Complete & Practical Toolkit for Successful Virtual Training

Create the most effective virtual training solutions for your organization by using the right tools for the right learning situation. In this updated edition of Virtual Training Tools and Templates, online learning pioneer Cindy Huggett expands on her first edition by adding more than 80 new tools and sharing her most powerful ones to help training professionals create engaging virtual learning that leads to results. Whether you’re a training program manager, designer, facilitator, or producer, you’ll find expert guidance on selecting the right technology, working with IT colleagues, designing creative programs, developing activities, and facilitating experiences to engage and inspire learners.

The new edition includes:

• 185 checklists, worksheets, questionnaires, templates, and other training and learning aids that provide accessible, effective virtual learning for everyone
• Tips on incorporating the latest trends in hybrid, immersive, and global classrooms
• More than a dozen tools for measuring your program’s success so you can move forward with confidence
• Resources to make the behind-the-scenes work of producers and administrators more effective

For a complete reference on virtual training, see Cindy’s companion volume, The Virtual Training Guidebook, second edition, which offers step-by-step advice for planning, designing, and building high-impact programs. These two volumes combined cover what you need to know to design and deliver successful virtual training.

Develop a Quality Management System to Support Learner and Organizational Goals
Quality management is collectively all the activities and processes that ensure your learning products meet the standard your organization is committed to. All errors have consequences that compromise that standard. Organizational outcomes are compromised if learners can’t complete e-learning courses due to navigation errors like broken hyperlinks or slides with buttons leading nowhere. Stakeholders and subject matter experts are embarrassed when learners walk away confused and with no clue how the content helps them with their job. Some learners are excluded from the experience entirely if accessibility measures aren’t in place. And so on.

In Quality Management in Learning and Development, you will learn to mitigate negative consequences. Go beyond checklists for correcting typos and incorrect branding, and instead consider the bigger picture. Define your organizational standard for quality, and learn how to create your own quality management system to support it. Explore how ultimately everyone is responsible for quality, and implement guidelines and policies that keep people accountable. Make sure everyone has the tools, templates, and support they need to support the standard’s guidelines. This book equips you with resources and insights from the field that are ready for you to adapt to your own organization.

For instructional designers and managers of the learning function, and even for the resource-strapped department of one, this book can help you step off the hamster wheel of fretful last-minute checks and re-work. Instead step into a proactive process that facilitates quality and results. Rather than agonizing over a broken hyperlink in an already-launched presentation when you’ve moved onto the next urgent project, feel confident in the quality management system that helps you and your stakeholders produce successful content from the outset.

Determine Organizational Needs Despite Limited Resources 

Needs Assessment on a Shoestring offers talent development professionals a process for addressing organizational needs and determining whether training is the solution. Needs assessment pros Kelly L. Jones and Jody N. Lumsden apply the Build-Borrow-Buy approach to provide guidance, quick tips, and shortcuts for investigating and uncovering everything you can about the organizational problem you need to solve.

With this book, you will learn to build a needs assessment strategy, gather insight through data analysis, and put forward effective solution recommendations. You’ll also pick up strategies for borrowing existing information, talent, and resources, and for making resource management decisions. Regardless of the scope of the project, the constraints of the business problem, or how you get the job done, the steps associated with needs assessments are flexible enough to scale up or down.

To conduct high-quality needs assessments, think like a detective. The detectives Sherlock Holmes, Velma Dinkley, and Hercule Poirot didn’t have large teams, unlimited budgets, or a bottomless well of resources to work with, but they succeeded by identifying who, where, and how to solve mysteries that no one else could. With this book, talent development professionals can too. This is a perfect resource for small companies—and departments of one or few—who need to get started right away.

The Association for Talent Development’s On a Shoestring series helps professionals successfully execute core topics in training and talent development when facing limitations of time, money, staff, and other resources. Using the Build-Borrow-Buy approach to problem solving, this series is designed for practitioners who work as a department of one; for new or “accidental” trainers, instructional designers, and learning managers who need fast, inexpensive access to practical strategies that work; and for those who work for small organizations or in industries that have limited training and development resources. 

Demonstrate the value of training to clients and stakeholders.

Training is often the first item to be stricken from the budget in tough economic times. Yet, with increasing global competition and new methods of doing business, including the use of new technologies, training is as imperative as ever, and showing the value of it crucial.

Volume 4 of Train the Trainer, Measurement and Evaluation: Demonstrate Your Program’s Impact and Value, features essential new issues, along with evergreen material from TD at Work’s most popular issues. It gives trainers the tools to evaluate the success of their learning solution and explain the benefits of training to key stakeholders, including the C-suite.

This collection includes 15 TD at Work issues, including:

• “The Four Levels of Evaluation—An Update”
• “Surveys From Start to Finish”
• “Get the Whole Picture With a Performance Assessment”
• “The Missing Link in Learning: Transfer”
• “Executive Dashboards to Win Over the C-Suite”
• “Project Management for L&D Purposes”
• “Preparing Your Organization for New Technologies”

Volume 4 comes complete with job aids, case studies, and references that readers can use immediately.

About the Train the Trainer Volumes

The Train the Trainer Volumes contain the most popular TD at Work guides about training and talent development. The four volumes include:

• Train the Trainer, Second Edition, Volume 1: Foundations and Delivery: Become a Successful Trainer
• Train the Trainer, Second Edition, Volume 2: Instructional Design: Captivate Your Learners
• Train the Trainer, Second Edition, Volume 3: Training Programs: Create a Culture of Learning and Maximize Your Organization’s Potential
• Train the Trainer, Second Edition, Volume 4: Measurement and Evaluation: Demonstrate Your Program’s Impact and Value

You can purchase them separately or together as a set. Each volume includes 15 issues, is available in print or as a PDF, and serves as a solid foundation for any training department or trainer. The revised volumes consist of 95 percent new content that will help talent development professionals stay on top of industry shifts.

Become an Expert AI User and Strategy Leader

Artificial intelligence (AI) and performance expert Josh Cavalier shares his in-depth knowledge and skills to help L&D professionals master learning experience design by using generative AI in their employee learning and development efforts. More than just a technical manual on generative AI or a collection of best prompt practices, this book explores how AI is reshaping jobs, skill development, and human performance. Cavalier provides his Learning and Development AI Ecosystem framework as a practical road map for integrating AI into your day-to-day work and your organization.

Discover how to seamlessly incorporate AI into your existing L&D processes and broader L&D ecosystem, optimizing workflows and driving measurable results. Explore how AI-enabled L&D platforms can facilitate personalized learning paths, automated performance support, and real-time skills gap analysis. Learn how to craft effective prompts for learning design and use chatbots and AI assistants for help in the moment of need. And importantly, dive deep into the ethical considerations, from maintaining data privacy and security to mitigating bias in AI-powered learning solutions.

No matter how advanced artificial intelligence becomes, L&D professionals must remain focused on performance—both of humans and now machines. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting your AI journey, this book is your essential resource to unleash the power of AI in L&D.

Get the A-to-Z Resource on Training Evaluation

Fully revised and updated, ATD’s Handbook for Measuring and Evaluating Training is the comprehensive go-to reference for talent development professionals in need of immediate measurement and evaluation (M&E) guidance. Edited by M&E powerhouse Patti Phillips, with contributions from 30 expert practitioners, this handbook provides an essential roadmap to developing effective processes to prove the value and impact of your learning and development programs.

Training measurement and evaluation is one of the top frustrations of a talent development professional's job. At first glance, it appears to be a drain on precious time and resources, yet it is a critical function for understanding the results and proving the value of L&D programs. If not conducted properly, it can yield questionable results, lack of accountability, and stakeholder skepticism. All to say, TD professionals must have a solid foundation in measurement and evaluation to do their jobs effectively.

With this handbook, you’ll feel confident each time you face an M&E challenge, from planning the evaluation and collecting and analyzing data to optimizing results and making evaluation efforts work in your organization. You will use the data to improve your training programs and meet the standards your organization strives for.

The updated edition includes new chapters on how to tell the evaluation story to business leaders, visualize data in reports, and leverage artificial intelligence smartly as well as refreshed chapters on all the M&E fundamentals. Rich in real-life application, it offers practitioner tips, knowledge checks, and support resources and references. Your advisors along the way are an impressive array of experts from the field, each chosen for their knowledge, experience, and actual results in specific areas.

Whether you’re a trainer, manager, professor, or student of training evaluation, this handbook has been designed to meet your needs. 

Transform Your L&D Team Into Your Organization’s Strategic Business Partner

Most L&D pros dream of the day when stakeholders will stop viewing them as mere order takers and consider them critical, strategic partners in shaping the future of their organization. But how do you get there? In this book, veteran talent development leader Jess Almlie introduces her formula for becoming the valued strategic business partner (SBP) that leaders in the C-suite and elsewhere in an organization need and want.

Partnering effectively with stakeholders requires a new mindset and behavior, a keen understanding of the business, a willingness to collaborate, and targeted tools. Almlie provides detailed guidance on how to succeed in each of these areas and invites you to start by taking an in-depth assessment of your strengths and gaps in working as an SBP. She shares her own wins and failures along with wisdom from three dozen other L&D pros who work in small, midsize, and large organizations across a wide variety of industries.

This step-by-step guide will help current and aspiring L&D leaders understand business basics, create a playbook for team collaboration, work productively with stakeholders, and teach others to work in harmony with L&D. The final chapter offers practical advice for those who need to take small steps toward becoming SBPs in organizations resistant to change.

This book includes questionnaires, worksheets, and other tools that will help L&D leaders understand business terminology and needs, see a stakeholder’s point of view, and develop strategies for creating effective partnerships and measuring impact. You’ll be able to create a plan for developing and advocating for a team of L&D professionals who all work as strategic business partners.

Unlock the full potential of your employees with effective feedback.

Providing performance feedback is one of the most challenging tasks leaders face. Feedback often sparks frustration and fear for both leaders and their teams. Why? Because there is a disconnect between what leaders think they are communicating and what employees receive.

In this essential book, leadership experts Mashihi and Nowack offer leaders their four-part Performance Feedback Coaching Model, designed to bridge this gap. After over a decade spent developing, testing, and refining their model with leaders around the world, the authors offer this powerful framework based on research in neuroscience and psychology.

The book equips leaders at all levels with practical strategies and tools to deliver tailored feedback that aligns with each employee’s unique skills and interpersonal strengths. By personalizing feedback, leaders can inspire significant improvements in employee behavior, creating a workplace where leaders achieve their goals and employees thrive—a true win-win situation. The authors share powerful stories, real-life examples, and user-friendly tips, as well as questionnaires, worksheets, and other tools leaders can apply immediately in managing today's diverse and global workforce.

With this book as your roadmap, you will have the guidance you need to improve your employees’ development, performance, motivation, satisfaction, and retention.

Volume 2 of Train the Trainer, Instructional Design: Captivate Your Audience, helps you design and deliver training that sticks by using fundamental adult learning techniques, including the use of digital and social tools for learning, engagement, and collaboration.

This volume pulls together 15 of TD at Work’s most popular issues featuring essential information and material on instructional design. It provides the techniques trainers need to design and implement effective training solutions and comes complete with job aids, resources, case studies, and references.

Issues include:

• “Learner Personas: Beyond Demographics”
• “And Action: Start Rolling With Mobile Video”
• “Welcome Neurodiversity”
• “Secrets to Successful SME Projects”
• “A Framework for Immersive Learning”
• “Self-Directed Learning Made Simple”
• “Building Compliance Training That Actually Matters

The Train the Trainer Volumes contain the most popular TD at Work guides about training and talent development. The four volumes include:

• Train the Trainer, Second Edition, Volume 1: Foundations and Delivery: Become a Successful Trainer
• Train the Trainer, Second Edition, Volume 2: Instructional Design: Captivate Your Learners
• Train the Trainer Volume 3: Training Programs: Create a Culture of Learning and Maximize Your Organization's Potential
• Train the Trainer, Second Edition, Volume 4: Measurement and Evaluation: Demonstrate Your Program’s Impact and Value

You can purchase them separately or together as a set. Each volume includes 15 issues, is available in print or as a PDF, and serves as a solid foundation for any training department or trainer. The revised volumes consist of 95 percent new content that will help talent development professionals stay on top of industry shifts.

Strengthen Your Acquisition and Retention Efforts Through Everboarding

Traditional onboarding is a relic of the past. That frantic sprint to get new hires “up to speed,” followed by a deafening silence, often falls short. What if, instead, you could create a seamless, ongoing journey of growth and development from the day an employee starts and throughout their tenure—an everboarding experience?

Employees say they need to develop new skills to be successful at their jobs, and many will look for another job if not offered development opportunities. In this book, leading HR talent strategy and everboarding expert Amber Watts offers solutions to help you shift your organization’s mindset that onboarding has an exit day and embrace a culture of continuous learning. It guides you through building a dynamic everboarding strategy that fosters long-term employee engagement, accelerates performance, and strengthens your talent acquisition and retention efforts.

Inside, you’ll discover how to personalize and elevate the onboarding experience, move beyond generic checklists, and create customized journeys that resonate with individual needs, jobs, and roles. Smooth the transition out of onboarding by defining clear expectations and creating a seamless handoff process to ensure ongoing support. Equip managers to be continuous development partners and provide them with the tools and resources they need to effectively coach, mentor, and guide their employees throughout their careers. Cultivate a growth mindset, encouraging new hires and existing employees to embrace lifelong learning and growth. This book also includes three case studies that explore how an everboarding strategy solves key challenges and delivers business results, while offering ideas for how to implement it yourself.

Perfect for HR and L&D leaders seeking to transform their onboarding and employee development programs, this first-ever book on everboarding provides actionable strategies and practical advice you can apply immediately. Stop treating onboarding like a graduation and start building an everlasting culture of growth and success.

Design Effective E-Learning Courses Despite Limited Resources

Have you suddenly been asked to put together an e-learning course, but you have limited experience, time, or resources to do so? This happens often, and you’re not alone. E-Learning Design on a Shoestring offers talent development professionals a process for designing and developing e-learning courses, without breaking the bank. E-learning expert Marina Arshavskiy applies the Build-Borrow-Buy approach to provide guidance, quick tips, and shortcuts for creating meaningful asynchronous learning experiences.

With this book, you will learn to tap into learner motivation and engagement; create e-learning scripts, storyboards, and prototypes; and build inexpensive yet effective interactivity in your courses. It also guides you on saving time and money by auditing existing e-learning content and creating reusable content. You’ll discover how to manage e-learning projects efficiently, select technology that meets your course needs, and secure buy-in for current and future e-learning efforts.

The Association for Talent Development’s On a Shoestring series helps professionals successfully execute core topics in training and talent development when facing limitations of time, money, staff, and other resources. Using the Build-Borrow-Buy approach to problem solving, this series is designed for practitioners who work as a department of one; for new or “accidental” trainers, instructional designers, and learning managers who need fast, inexpensive access to practical strategies that work; and for those who work for small organizations or in industries that have limited training and development resources.  

Your Road Map to Career Success

There has never been a better time to invest in your own L&D career.

No matter where you are in your L&D career, expert career coach and L&D luminary Sarah Cannistra delivers tactical and industry-specific advice for how to conduct and succeed in your next job search.

There isn’t a “one size fits all” strategy to career success, so Cannistra walks you through four L&D career success codes—her ABCDs. They will help you achieve alignment and get clarity on your career goals and L&D niche; create your personal and professional brand; network intentionally and build your L&D community around your L&D niche; and identify your interests, skills, and belief systems, which are all key to building a development plan for achieving your career goals.

Cannistra dissects job applications, resume and cover letter writing, and interview processes as well as hard topics, such as rejection and job searches after layoffs. She also explores the mindset shifts and self-awareness needed to successfully land a stable and fulfilling position. Follow along with stories of how Cannistra has helped clients secure their dream roles. Take the next step on your own with more than 40 activities, reflection questions, and worksheets.

A cover-to-cover resource for landing your next role while choosing your own path, this is a book you will turn to again and again throughout your career.

Design Effective Training Programs Despite Limited Resources

Instructional Design on a Shoestring offers talent development professionals a process for developing effective training programs, even with limited resources. Expert instructional designer Brian Washburn applies the ADDIE model of instructional design and the Build-Borrow-Buy approach to provide guidance, quick tips, and shortcuts for designing a range of training modalities, including in-person, virtual and asynchronous, and self-guided e-learning. 

With this book, you will learn to build the structure of the instructional design process, effective formal and informal learning experiences, and an ecosystem that supports the learning initiatives. This crash-course of a book also guides you on working with subject matter experts, supervisors, and early testers and drawing learning design ideas from unfamiliar places. You’ll learn how and when to make decisions for using tools and technologies, hiring external help, and purchasing off-the-shelf training programs to speed up the work.

Even if you don’t have a ton of time or access to a lot of money, you can still produce an effective learning experience based on sound educational theory and adult learning principles.

About the On a Shoestring Series

The Association for Talent Development’s On a Shoestring series helps professionals successfully execute core topics in training and talent development when facing limitations of time, money, staff, and other resources. Using the Build-Borrow-Buy approach to problem solving, this series is designed for practitioners who work as a department of one, for new or “accidental” trainers, instructional designers, and learning managers who need fast, inexpensive access to practical strategies that work, and for those who work for small organizations or in industries that have limited training and development resources. 

Get the Toolbox You Need to Design for All Learners

Design for All Learners empowers instructional designers, trainers, and other talent development professionals to create learning experiences that are accessible to and inclusive of all people. Learn from practitioners’ vulnerable lived experiences, moving stories, and practical advice. Written with accessibility, inclusion, and L&D experts and edited by Sarah Mercier, this book will help you ensure that individuals can fully participate in the talent development and training programs you offer.

Adopt a progress-over-perfection approach. Start with shifting your mindset to consider that all learners are people who have unique experiences, perspectives, backgrounds, and abilities—and that learning design should be built for people, not just to meet compliance standards. Find what you need to know about designing for the modality you’re using to reach learners—from e-learning and job aids to training in the physical and virtual classroom. Gain a clearer understanding of requirements and standards, and then explore strategies and tactics to foster an inclusive mindset throughout your organization.

Anyone involved with the practice of design in learning and development will benefit from the wide range of perspectives and techniques offered, whether you’re a team of one or work in an organization with a variety of resources. If your goal is to become a better designer, developer, teacher, and leader, this book presents a packed toolbox to do so. It will change everything you think you know. Use it as a guide in your journey to accessible, inclusive design for all.

Incorporate Microlearning Campaigns to Reach Business Goals

Whether you’re an L&D veteran who has “been there, done that” or are just starting out, it’s time to get smarter about microlearning, and expert Robyn A. Defelice can help.

Expanding on her first groundbreaking book, Microlearning: Short and Sweet, co-authored with Karl Kapp, Defelice offers a new and more complete definition of microlearning as a concept, a method, and a product—all of which L&D professionals need to understand to create successful microlearning campaigns that target key business goals. She introduces a six-factor framework that leaders, managers, and anyone who develops organization-wide learning initiatives can use to determine if their organizations are ready to incorporate top-notch microlearning strategies to meet their learning needs. She also offers designers a set of seven principles—based on tool capacity, context, global equity, conciseness, meaningful media, action, and overuse—for creating microlearning solutions that work.

Packed with examples and stories from the field, tips, activities, tools, and templates, Maximizing the Power of Microlearning provides foundational, research-based information in a relaxed, relatable style.

As the microlearning landscape continues to evolve, professionals at all levels need clarity and guidance about what microlearning really is. In this book, Defelice offers that clarity. She addresses confusion head-on and provides insights, strategies, and practical advice to L&D professionals looking to improve learning experiences and business outcomes.

Turn to the Definitive Guide for All Your Consulting Questions

ATD’s Handbook for Consultants unpacks what it takes to run a successful consulting practice that delivers world-class solutions for clients all with the benefits of a self-directed work life. 

As companies and organizations become increasingly strategic with how they use employee resources, more are engaging external consultants as highly skilled temporary labor when they lack the specialized expertise to handle their growing needs. Without the staffing flexibility to complete special projects that require more employee hours and specialized skills, companies recognize the benefits of fresh perspectives, new ideas, outside opinions, and the speed and efficiency of an expert consultant who in many cases has already tackled similar challenges with other companies.

Consulting is at the top of the list of career moves for talent development professionals and others who have unique skill sets and expertise. Whether you’re considering branching out on your own, you’ve just launched and are struggling to keep yourself afloat, or you’re looking to take your business to the next level, this book will help you clarify your “why” and make your transition a soft landing. Learn to set a business strategy, write winning business proposals, and market your products and services. Gain perspectives on multiple consulting career paths—from forming an independent consultancy to joining a boutique consulting practice to consulting with a large company.

Edited by consulting powerhouse Elaine Biech, this book is broken into five parts:

• Exploring consulting: So you want to be a consultant
• Getting started: Plan your consulting future
• Delivering results: The work of a consultant
• Developing business: Find and keep clients
• Focusing on your future: Define success your way

Tap into the sage wisdom, actionable takeaways, and practical tools in this book, and set yourself apart from the competition on your journey to becoming a successful consultant. 

A one-stop resource for developing creative ways to ensure the right people learn the right skills and produce the right results.

Getting butts in seats is not a measure of success nor is it a guarantee that your messages will be heard. Beyond Free Coffee & Donuts will help you get the word out. Understand what motivates customers (both external and internal), develop a successful marketing campaign, and learn the essentials for garnering attention and promoting retention.

An excellent starter pack for a training department of any size, Train the Trainer Volume 1, second edition: Foundations and Delivery: Become a Successful Trainer, delivers practical wisdom and essential tools designed to address the immediate needs of new trainers or serves as a refresher for more seasoned trainers. From designing learner-centered instruction to managing difficult participants, it covers core capabilities that all trainers must master to deliver top learning experiences, both in person and online.

Among the 15 TD at Work issues are:

• “Basic Training for Trainers”
• “Great Presentations”
• “Icebreakers: Be Strategic”
• “Tap Memory Strategies for Learning Success”
• “Prioritize Inclusivity in Your Training Sessions”
• “Principles for Brain-Friendly Learning”
• “6 Steps to Moving Your Training Online”

Volume 1 comes complete with job aids, case studies, and references that readers can use immediately.

About the Train the Trainer Volumes

The Train the Trainer Volumes contain the most popular TD at Work guides about training and talent development. The four volumes include:

• Train the Trainer, Second Edition, Volume 1: Foundations and Delivery: Become a Successful Trainer
• Train the Trainer, Second Edition, Volume 2: Instructional Design: Captivate Your Learners
• Train the Trainer Volume 3: Training Programs: Create a Culture of Learning and Maximize Your Organization's Potential
• Train the Trainer, Second Edition, Volume 4: Measurement and Evaluation: Demonstrate Your Program’s Impact and Value

You can purchase them separately or together as a set. Each volume includes 15 issues, is available in print or as a PDF, and serves as a solid foundation for any training department or trainer. The revised volumes consist of 95 percent new content that will help talent development professionals stay on top of industry shifts.

This turnkey guide helps you build a successful executive coaching framework and practice.

The Executive Coaching Playbook offers experienced and newly minted executive coaches a complete framework for building your coaching skills and business with proven results. Beyond offering the ultimate, proven coaching theory, this book provides the tools and templates you need to set up a thriving business—from working with your first executive clients to developing the business plan and marketing strategy for your brand.

With more than 30 years of experience as both an executive and a top executive coach, Dr. Nadine Greiner, along with talent development expert Becky Davis, shares her extensive knowledge, hard-won lessons, and practical advice covering everything from the first chemistry call with a potential executive client to closing out engagements with meaning and poise. In this book, you will learn how to be the exemplary, sought-after executive coach that leaves clients, sponsors, and yourself more than satisfied.

The perfect companion to Dr. Nadine's The Art of Executive Coaching, the playbook offers:

• 75+ downloadable templates and techniques (including email templates, worksheets, forms, and agendas) to support and to customize for your coaching endeavors
• A four-step coaching process to adopt with your clients
• Practical advice for starting and growing your business

Your All-In-One Guide to ISD

Known as “the man who wrote the book on ISD,” Chuck Hodell offers a comprehensive and practical handbook on core instructional systems design (ISD) practices and principles with a practitioner’s eye.

This updated fifth edition covers all the basics and many advanced tenets of ISD, walking you through each phase, including advanced concepts such as microlearning, social media, and leveraging technology. Stand-alone chapters offer crucial support to practitioners building foundational skills, while in-depth tutorials on subjects such as collaborating with experts offer rich insights to guide the credentialed designer.

This fully revised and expanded volume offers new case studies, discussion questions, and sample design and lesson plans, ISD From the Ground Up demystifies the learning design process. Whether you are just getting your feet wet or have extensive experience in ISD, this industry staple provides the essential building blocks and more for ISD mastery.

Keeping and retaining your best, high-performing employees is tough. But here's a resource that helps you take the best retention strategies from other organizations and apply them to your own situation. Explore what others are doing about managing retention, and learn about retention's impact on the individual employee who has chosen to leave or has been forced to leave an organization. This book includes 10 case studies on important topics, such as using recognition to manage retention, reinvigorating a mature company and using an internal degree program to reduce turnover. 

The Definitive A-to-Z Guidebook on Virtual Training

Is your virtual training getting the results you want? The ability to deliver training at any time and to any location allows maximum flexibility for organizations and learners, which ultimately means more training opportunities than in-person classes could ever provide. As more organizations switch to or increase virtual training programs, learning how to excel in designing and delivering those programs is critical.

The Virtual Training Guidebook, second edition, is a resource that will make the difference for beginners and veterans alike. It is a comprehensive and accessible manual for anyone who needs to create robust employee training solutions that solve real-world business challenges. Novices and experienced training professionals will find field-tested advice on choosing the right technology for their organization’s training needs, designing and facilitating classes that help all participants level up their skills, developing more engaging activities for learners, measuring success, and turning virtual training programs into valuable contributors to talent development and the bottom line.

The new edition includes:

• Step-by-step instructions for designers, facilitators, producers, administrators, and participants on how to enhance their efficiency and    effectiveness
• Dozens of new and updated case studies and practical checklists, templates, and worksheets
• Expanded coverage of accessibility, hybrid learning, and immersive technologies
• A look at what’s trending in global classrooms and mobile technology

Looking for a workbook on implementing key lessons from the guidebook? Be sure to check out the companion volume, Virtual Training Tools and Templates, featuring 185 checklists, questionnaires, templates, and other practical tools. These two volumes combined cover what you need to know to design and deliver successful virtual training. 

LIKE FILM SCHOOL FOR TRAINERS! Film and edit effective training videos—using your smartphone.
Whether you’re a facilitator, instructional designer, or L&D department of one, you don’t need a fancy DSLR camera or film crew to create successful training videos. All you really need is a learning strategy, a good production plan, and a smartphone camera. Informed by his 30-year career in training and media, including his time as learning executive with the BBC, author Jonathan Halls is committed to best practices in video production that will actually help your learners to learn, and without a giant strain on your resources.

With straightforward and accessible language, in Creating Training Videos you’ll get:

• The intersection of media and learning research: Uncover how your videos can effectively provoke learning.
• Best practices for instructional video: Create a smart outline for your instructional video, creatively use repetition, highlight schemas that are familiar to your audience, and more.
• Visual grammar: Learn rules of film that you can put into effect immediately, like framing your shots and selecting the best shot sizes to more powerfully support learning.
• Planning your pictures: Gain a practical framework for mapping out the elements of your video using storyboards, shot formulas, and narrative templates designed to meet various training needs. Understand how picture, graphics, spoken word, and more come together to tell your story.
• Your videographer’s toolkit: An honest discussion of essential gear, helpful gear, and the serious tools you might consider for your toolkit.
• Filming with your smartphone: Learn how to best light, stabilize, and frame your shots using the tool you already have in your pocket.
• Editing and workflow: Stitch shots together for a powerful final product that supports learning, no matter what software you decide to use (yes, even an app on your phone!), and workflow considerations that satisfy all of your stakeholders.