Association for Talent Development

Use change as a competitive tool and efficiently move organizations through the change process.

Thriving Through Change is not a book of theories, but a change leader's practical guide focused on supercharging the change implementation process. Templates, checklists, and advice help to walk you through.

Career satisfaction directly affects personal fulfillment and mental and physical well-being. Now anyone can learn how to get the most from his or her career. The secret is deceptively simplea meaningful, fulfilling career is available to anyone who makes the active decision to pursue it. Career Contentment details the various organizational factors affecting job satisfaction and shows you how to take control of your own happiness. 

An easy-to-implement, eight-step methodology to engage and connect with all learning styles.

Hold On, You Lost Me! provides a thorough explanation of the four major learning styles and how to satisfy the needs of each. Use Hold On, You Lost Me! to drive the gold standard of learning and increase understanding for accelerated on the job performance.

Create a dynamic strategic plan, central to your organizations ability to make critical business decisions, with this step-by-step walk through the strategic planning process.

10 Steps to Successful Strategic Planning offers a simple 10 step process to assessing your priorities, organizing your goals, and getting your organization on the path to planned success. Loaded with worksheets, exercises, tips, tools, checklists, and other easy-to-use and interactive learning aids, this title guides you through the entire strategic planning process. 

Understand where myth and reality diverge in the multi-billion dollar workplace learning industry.

Lies About Learning offers rare insight into the business of organizational learning, exposing the prevalent myths and offering the counterweight of reality and real world practice. With detailed insight from 12 notable executives, Lies About Learning provides the tools to ask the right questions and make learning decisions that are measurable, predictable, and meaningful for your organization.

A crash course for effectively planning and managing timely, organized projects.

10 Steps to Successful Project Management features a structured methodology for delivering high-quality projects on time. Learn how to distinguish between a project and task, build a convincing business case, define project scope, assess risks and constraints, create a project plan, collaborate on action items, and measure and communicate results. This title is an essential resource for anyone, in any function, of any business. 

An essential companion guide for implementing the powerful principles of Telling Ain't Training.

A field companion to the original Telling Ain't Training, the Beyond Telling Ain't Training Fieldbook includes a detailed action plan and support materials to help you transform "telling to training." Like its predecessor, this fieldbook features a fun, interactive format and easy-to-navigate icons. Worksheets, assessments, and tools will enable your organization to realize the true value of workplace learning. 

Start, Build, and Navigate Your Training and TD Career

ATD’s Handbook for Training and Talent Development is the premier resource and compendium of everything a training and talent development (TD) professional needs to know to start, build, and navigate a thriving career.

Now in its third edition and grounded by the Talent Development Capability Model, this is more than a revised volume. This edition offers an up-to-date view of the growing roles of talent development professionals, our changing world of work, and the critical need for business alignment.

Edited by Elaine Biech, the third edition is divided into eight sections comprising 57 chapters authored by 100 expert practitioners—the brightest thinkers in the field—who share foundational and advanced perspectives and information. The Handbook dives deeply into growing professional expertise and personal skills, virtual learning and remote work, trends affecting TD, managing organizational and career change, growing roles in TD, and understanding organizational impact and business alignment. Fifty online tools are available to download, and there is also a glossary and references.

TD professionals, keep this practical, companionable volume close by; it’s the reference you will always turn to.

Design Learning Experiences, Not Events

Learning Experience Design Essentials explores how new instructional designers and those looking to build their skills and align their function to the business can blend content and context to elevate learning experiences. Expert Cara North maps out the skills and capabilities that define the work learning experience design (LXD) professionals do.

Cara lays out an LXD process to guide readers in creating effective experiences. It includes the all-important task analysis to understand the shoes your learners walk in while performing at work. Other steps include creating assessments, conducting usability testing, and messaging the why behind the learning experience.

Traditional instructional design places undue emphasis on dumping training content on learners through a combination of information, media, and technology. What’s missing is the context of how learning happens and the understanding that learning is a process, not a one-time event.

This book will help you craft a 30/60/90–day plan to apply the concepts throughout. By the end, you’ll feel confident saying “yes” to the simple question, “Would you want to take your own learning experiences?”

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.

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.

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.

Go From Accidental to Intentional

Filled with insights and tips, this updated edition of The Accidental Instructional Designer, by e-learning veteran Cammy Bean, covers nearly every aspect of the learning design process for those getting started or even for the experienced practitioner in need of new ideas.

Many trainers and instructional designers fall into the talent development profession by accident, often having been tasked by their organization to train others on a subject they are expert in. Whether they’re good at explaining technical concepts or have a way with PowerPoint, they have often have little to no formal education in instructional design. Many are looking for grounding in the core principles of instructional design so that they can design effective and engaging digital learning experiences.

Cammy explores instructional design basics such as working with subject matter experts, picking a design approach, and making your learning experiences better through storytelling, interactivity, and visuals. In this second edition, she goes deeper into the learning and development space (where instructional design happens at organizations), learning tools, the technology ecosystem, and assessment and evaluation frameworks. Along the way, you'll hear from a few other accidental instructional designers, get ideas for your own projects, and find resources and references to take your own practice to the next level.

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.

Add Data and Analytics to Your TD Toolkit

Instructional design pro Megan Torrance addresses the importance of instructional designers accessing and applying learning and performance data—from how to design learning experiences with data collection in mind to how to use the data to improve and evaluate those experiences.

With the advance of new learning technologies and data specifications, instructional designers have access to more and richer data sources than ever before. With that comes the question of what to do with the data. While most data and analytics books focus on their application for measurement and evaluation and assume a prior baseline understanding of what learning data and analytics mean, Data and Analytics for Instructional Designers delves into the foundational concepts that will enable instructional designers and L&D professionals to use data in their roles.

Split into two parts, the book first defines key data and analytics terms, data specifications, learning metrics, and statistical concepts. It then lays out a framework for using learning data for planning how to gather data and to building scale and maturity in your data operations. Megan reassures readers that basic math skills with some computer assistance is what you’ll need to get going. So set aside any math anxiety!

Through a “If I can see it, I can be it” approach to learning data and analytics, the book blends practical what-is and how-to content with real-world examples and longer case studies from practitioners. Chapters conclude with opportunities for you to put these techniques to work right away, whether you are in a data-rich environment already, or whether you are just getting started and working on hypotheticals.

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.

Reimagine the Role of L&D in the Modern Workplace

How can we possibly keep up? This question is front and center in today’s workplace thanks to the downright ridiculous pace of change. There’s a never-ending stream of new processes, regulations, products, and technologies with which employees must contend. And in the middle of everything—between executives, stakeholders, managers, IT, subject matter experts, legal, and employees—sits L&D, charged with making sure people have the knowledge and skills needed to execute but rarely provided with the time and resources to get it done.

The Modern Learning Ecosystem outlines a practical approach for navigating nonstop workplace change. Inspired by decades of operations and talent development experience with the world’s most dynamic companies, learning and enablement expert JD Dillon challenges the traditional L&D mindset with a tried-and-true framework that makes right-fit support a meaningful part of the everyday workflow. This book provides step-by-step instructions for architecting a disruption-ready learning ecosystem that will help employees solve today’s biggest problems while building the knowledge and skills needed to seize tomorrow’s opportunities.

Do you believe workplace learning is about more than courses? Do you struggle to gain stakeholder buy-in for alternative learning strategies? Do you want to make smarter decisions when it comes to solution design, technology application and measurement practices? Grab your copy of The Modern Learning Ecosystem and make sure the people you support are always ready for what comes next.

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.

Make DEI Training Foundational in Your Organization

When done well, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training creates space for courageous conversations that acknowledge hard truths around systemic inequities and explores topics that touch on people’s vulnerabilities in all facets of their lives. For those of you who do this work, there has not been a clear path to follow for making progress. As a DEI trainer, you have forged your own way and learned as you went.

With Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for Trainers: Fostering DEI in the Workplace, the need for DEI trainers to go at it alone comes to an end. Expert facilitator Maria Morukian provides the guidance you need to develop the knowledge and skills required for DEI training. Morukian covers the historical underpinnings and rationale for DEI work; takes you through the process of organizational assessment, design, and delivery; and offers strategies for embedding DEI and promoting sustainability through collaborative practices and dialogues, allowing you to develop and understand your own identity lenses and biases. Reflection questions and worksheets are included in every chapter.

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:

A timely update to a timeless model.

Don Kirkpatrick's groundbreaking Four Levels of Training Evaluation is the most widely used training evaluation model in the world. Ask any group of trainers whether they rely on the model's four levels Reaction, Learning, Behavior, and Results in their practice, and you'll get an enthusiastic affirmation.

But how many variations of Kirkpatrick are in use today? And what number of misassumptions and faulty practices have crept in over 60 years? The reality is: Quite a few.

James and Wendy Kirkpatrick have written Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Training Evaluation to set the record straight. Delve into James and Wendy's new findings that, together with Don Kirkpatrick's work, create the New World Kirkpatrick Model, a powerful training evaluation methodology that melds people with metrics. In Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Training Evaluation, discover a comprehensive blueprint for implementing the model in a way that truly maximizes your business's results. Using these innovative concepts, principles, techniques, and case studies, you can better train people, improve the way you work, and, ultimately, help your organization meet its most crucial goals.

Enhance Your Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence is about people. And so is talent development (TD). For TD professionals to succeed, they must be comfortable with all aspects of working with people. The best tool for their success is emotional intelligence.

Part of the ATD Soft Skills Series, Emotional Intelligence in Talent Development is your resource for developing your emotional intelligence skills. Expert Patrick Malone explains emotional intelligence and explores its five dimensions: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. He examines why emotional intelligence matters to the self, to organizations, and to your business, along with the barriers you face when building these competencies.

While improving your emotional intelligence can seem daunting, Malone demonstrates that developing strong emotional intelligence is attainable by examining real-world challenges that TD professionals face. Learn how to manage the stress of constantly doing more with less; focus on one task at a time and do it well; effectively communicate your message; and identify and address conflict.

Included are reflection questions and exercises to practice and test your development.

Other books in the series:

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: