MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

Earn and keep your PMP certification

Getting and staying certified by the Project Management Institute takes a hefty number of education credits, or Professional Development Units (PDUs). You must take a certain number of PDU credits to qualify for the PMP or CAPM certification, and you must continue to earn PDU credits every three years.

MindLeaders is a Registered Education Provider for the Project Management Institute, and two more of our series have been approved for PDU credits.

You can take any of the following series for PDU credits. Project 2007 and Project Management from a People Perspective are the two new ones. Each of these courses include the ability to print out the necessary paperwork for your credits.

• Project Management Professional Certification 2005
• Project Management
• Effective Business Communication
• Fundamentals of Business Management
• Project 2007
• Project Management from a People Perspective
• Time Management Fundamentals
• Time Management for Maximum Productivity

Check out our Project Management certification information sheet for more details or drop a note in the comments if you have any questions.

New e-Learning courses released today

It's course release day at MindLeaders! Today's new arrivals are full Spanish translations of the Certified Professional Food Handler and Certified Professional Food Manager courses, plus new courses in the following topics:

• Innovation in the Workplace
• Problem Solving through Productive Thinking
• Lotus Notes 8.5

Full descriptions of these courses are available in our catalog. If you're a MindLeaders student, these are now available in you course listing.

More courses and tools to come. Please let me know any questions you may have!

Expect the unexpected: Fire alarm at MindLeaders

So there I am today, working diligently and getting ready to attend a webinar, when the fire alarm goes off.

At MindLeaders, we used to work in a building where the fire alarm would go off every week or so for no good reason, so we're conditioned to respond to such an event in one way only: we all mill around in the hallways and ask each other "You think that's for real? Hmmm."

It took an announcement from our receptionist, Ruthie, telling everybody to get out, for us to actually evacuate.

Thank goodness the weather was mild enough today that it was no heavy burden for us to make jokes in the parking lot until the impressive number of firefighters (3 trucks!) could declare the building all clear. Rumor is that someone burned up a toaster oven in the offices above ours.

Only harm from the event: I missed my webinar. Oh, well. But it got me thinking about a couple of things:

• I'm a big believer that trainers are uniquely suited to helping build and communicate emergency procedures for your company. In the case of MindLeaders, today's lesson is that we ought to add a procedure that Ruthie will not only announce when a fire drill is expected, she will also announce when a fire alarm is unexpected.
  
  Stay on the lookout for ways that you can help your company be prepared. It's good karma that comes back to you manyfold: you're not just keeping people safe, you're proving the value of the training group and building valuable networks with Human Resources and other highly-connected teams in your organization.

• The unexpected make people sit up and take notice. It's one of the core principles in the book Made to Stick, which I highly recommend for trainers and presenters. A change in the routine makes us look around with new eyes.
  
  I'm not suggesting pulling any fire alarms in your next training session, but as I see in our courses every day, changing things up is the way to keep people's attention.

May your day be free of fires, but full of unexpected lessons!

New white paper: the investment benefits of training

"We can help."

The economy is slamming all of us. Here in Columbus, Ohio, we got word today that two major local employers, Limited and Longaberger, are laying people off. Everyone seems to be worried about protecting our companies and our jobs.

We've released a new front page for our web site and a new white paper with a common theme: We can help. Training can help.

Our new white paper, Training in Troubled Times, gives some facts and figures about the ways that investing in training helps a company during a recession and beyond. Companies that train their employees make it through recessions better and come out the other side stronger and more ready to capitalize on the recovery opportunities. If you're involved in making budget decisions about training, I hope you'll take a look - it might provide some good statistics for you as you justify your budget costs.

I'd love to hear any comments you have about the new web front page, too! It's the first step in a larger web site redesign by our resident web genius, so any feedback will be immediately useful for us.

How the economic crisis is a call to action for trainers and human resources

It's a sign of how bad the economy has gotten that this weekend, when I saw friends I haven't seen in a month or two, their first question wasn't "How are you doing" or "How's the family," it was "How's your work? Is your job safe?"

The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Speaker of the House just published this chart comparing job losses in the past three recessions. Numbers like these aren't going to make anyone feel any better.

As trainers, we're charged with not just worrying about ourselves, but with providing information that other people need, too. We're the ones who will be teaching new skills to workers who are being asked to do more duties with fewer resources. Eventually, this recession will be over and we should be ready for the next onslaught of onboarding/orientation training, too.

MindLeaders is doing some things to try to help in this economy. We have a new white paper coming that we'll be announcing later this week (stay tuned). And we've put together a new Career Shift package of courses to help people who are looking for a new job. The package includes courses on building resumes, interviewing and negotiating, managing time and selves, and building up skills in the latest Office products.

We're offering this new package to companies that have had to lay off workers to use in their severance packages, and to state agencies and resellers who can reach job-seekers directly.

What are some of the other biggest needs in today's economy that we trainers can meet? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

[Update 2/11/09: Janet Clarey has posted a version of the above chart with even more recessions tracked, all the way back to 1948. Our troubles today look no better.]

Assigning Leadership or Project Management Roadmaps to students

I designed our new roadmaps - leadership and project management so far, more to come - to help people find the best courses to build competencies in the skillsets they're most interested in. It was great to have that on paper, but now we've taken it a step further: roadmaps can now be assigned to students' course packages.

Training administrators, you can now assign an entire roadmap or specific competencies to your students. To turn on these packages for your organization, contact your Account Manager or Education Services Representative.

Are there other features you'd like to see, or a topic you think would be great for a roadmap? Please drop a comment and let me know!

Integrating Your Learning Program

Your company has made the decision to make online learning part of their training solution, and you have been given the task of making it successful.

What is the key ingredient found within most successful training programs? Integration!

Four foundational principles of integration are:

1. Monitoring learning performance
2. Working with managers
3. Communicating with your target audience
4. Offering reward incentives

Those 4 principles represent one cycle.  Since integration is a cyclical process, the follow up – starting the cycle over again and analyzing the data - is what successful integration is all about.

To learn more, visit the “Integrating Your Learning Program” trailer in the MindLeaders Training and Development Toolbox under the Resource Center tab, or schedule an appointment with your Education Services Consultant.

The Top Ten Training Needs

MindLeaders gets a lot of information about what people want to learn more about. We hear it through our clients, usage of our courses, the topics people ask us for or search our listings for, and conversations with others in the industry. An important part of my job is trying to distill all that information to figure out what training topics are important, and who they're important to.

Here are the latest results of the top ten topics that have the most demand for online training:

1. Microsoft Excel
2. Communication
3. Customer Service
4. Project Management Professional (PMP)
5. Project Management
6. Time Management
7. Microsoft Access
8. Microsoft Word
9. CompTIA A+
10. Management

A couple of notes about the results:

• Excel is #1 by a HUGE margin. It seems to be a perfect storm of an application in ubiquitous use and complex enough that lots of people feel a need to know more about it.
• Project Management is so gigantic that I track the PMP certification separately from general project management, and yet the split vote still makes #4 and #5 on the list. (Combined, they still wouldn't quite beat Excel for the #1 spot.)

According to Bersin & Associates' brand-new Corporate Learning Factbook 2009, the topic areas this top ten falls into (Desktop Applications, Interpersonal/Soft Skills, and Management/Supervisory) are #9, #6, and #5 on their survey of training priorities. I think the difference is because they're tracking overall training programs (so company-specific information is easily #1), while I'm tracking the e-learning needs in particular. My results are a subset of the larger training industry.

What do you think of this top ten? Does it cover the topics you think of first when you think about online learning needs for yourself or your company?

Happy Holidays from MindLeaders

It's easy to get distracted at the office lately, the traffic around the local mall is impassable, the parking lot is looking sparse... it must be the holidays!

Due to the aforementioned distractions, I have few deep thoughts to offer about learning as it relates to the holidays, except that this is a great time to celebrate the "life" part of the work-life balance, recharge your batteries, and if you're feeling really ambitious, start making plans for next year. We're doing the same here.

If you're interested in a peek at some of our collective thoughts about next year, I highly recommend the "E-learning Technology in 2009" post from my friend and coworker-across-the-Atlantic Ingrid from ThirdForce. It's an excellent look at some of the things we'll probably be talking about the most in the months to come.

So a very merry Christma-Hanna-Kwanzaa-kah, however you celebrate this time of year. May everyone's holidays be safe and happy!

New e-Learning courses

MindLeaders has released 27 new courses this week! Most of the courses focus on leadership and business skills: controlling time, sparking creativity, communicating powerfully in emails, and building constructive, fast solutions to problems.

We haven't forgotten technical and software skills, though, with two new Windows Server 2008 certification study guides and new Lotus Notes content.

These series have new courses:

• E-Mailing Your Way to the Top
• Innovation in the Workplace
• Lotus Notes 8.5
• Problem Solving through Productive Thinking
• Time Management for Maximum Productivity
• Windows Server 2008 Applications MCTS 70-643
• Windows Server 2008 Active Directory MCTS 70-640

Some of the text around our courses have been improved, too: we've clarified the instructions on the scores and mastery pages to help you when you want to re-take tests to improve your score. And we've re-written the course evaluations, with fewer questions to answer and hopefully lots more ideas about ways we can improve.

Do you like the latest courses or topics? Already have feedback you can't wait until the next course to give? Please hit the comments and let me know!