What does performance improvement look like in practice in today's organizations? As part of its commitment to the learning profession, the American Society for Training and Development annually judges the practices of organizations through a blind peer review process to determine what merits the best practice designation. This article contains…

Farmers Insurance claims the No. 2 spot on the Training Top 125 with a forward-thinking training strategy linked to its primary mission: FarmersFuture 2020. It's not surprising an insurance company would have an insurance policy for the future. But Farmers takes that strategy one step further, setting its sights on 2020 with a far-reaching plan to…

The professional standards of school nursing practice provide a framework to help school nurses focus on their unique mission of promoting health and academic achievement for all students. Without the standards, the nurse’s role can become task oriented and limited in scope. By using an evaluation tool that reflects the standards, nurses not only…

"Training" magazine taps 2012 Training Top 125 winners and Top 10 Hall of Famers to provide their learning and development best practices in each issue. This article looks at strategies to foster technology innovation and implementation and onboarding.

Since getting books into the hands of her students was of utmost importance to her, this author began to look at areas that took away from the time she had to work with the students. In this article, the author offers suggestions on how to have a successful school library program, regardless of reductions in budget and/or staff. She mentions that…

Half of servers in higher ed are virtualized. But that number's not high enough for Link Alander, interim vice chancellor and CIO at the Lone Star College System (Texas). He aspires to see 100 percent of the system's infrastructure requirements delivered as IT services from its own virtualized data centers or other cloud-based operators. Back in…

Preparing employees for the immediate work in front of them is a challenge. While most companies are still mastering effectively training their own workforce, some, such as "Training" magazine Top 10 Hall of Famer The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, have set up for-profit academies open to the public. When Ritz-Carlton won the national Malcolm…

Although sustainability best practices for buildings are generally well understood, campuses face unique challenges because they are developed to support a diverse community with a variety of facilities. From academic facilities and labs to residences and sports facilities, all operate under one organizational umbrella. This can make it difficult…

Although the current interest in informal learning seems recent, performance improvement professionals have long had an interest in informal learning-the ways that people learn outside of formal structures. The earliest forms of learning for work were informal, including de facto and formal apprenticeship programs and the "school of…

As the solo school librarian in a modestly sized private school, the author is responsible not only for managing the school library, but also for many other things that come his way throughout the school year. Among the many balls the author has to keep in the air are budgeting, collection development, weeding, lesson planning, fundraising, and…

In 2013, compliance issues march, unceasingly, through every aspect of higher education. Yet the intricacies of privacy, information security, data governance, and IT policy as compliance and risk areas within the IT organization can reverberate and impact every other department within the higher education institution. The primary focus is always…

Conventional human performance technology has had a good run. It allowed scientific and data-based research to be applied to improve performance, usually just individual performance. The field must be expanded without losing this individual performance focus to include a scope that measurably improves performance for individuals and organizations…

The demand for accountability through measurement continues to increase. Although much progress has been made, it remains an issue that challenges even the most sophisticated and progressive performance improvement function. This article provides an overview of best practices in the return-on-investment process and describes how applying these…

The business of training and performance improvement has always been cyclical, with the fortunes of human resource development (HRD) and performance improvement professionals rising and falling with the economic fortunes of the workplace. The current economic downturn and nascent recovery represent an opportunity for HRD and performance…

Family Life Education (FLE) websites can benefit from the field of user experience, which makes technology easy to use. A heuristic evaluation of five FLE sites was performed using Neilson's heuristics, guidelines for making sites user friendly. Greater site complexity resulted in more potential user problems. Sites most frequently had problems…