Heading to Raleigh, North Carolina, LEO Learning’s team chatted to familiar and new faces from across the learning industry. We also got to check out a range of expert talks and workshops, including a number of masterclasses and an impressive list of keynote speakers.
Kicking off the three-day event was Tiffany Poeppelman, LinkedIn’s Head of Sales Productivity, EMEA, who spoke about personal branding.
While Tiffany is hugely enthusiastic about learning technologies and social media, she emphasised that in-person experiences are equally powerful. Online and offline efforts, she said, are just as important to professionals looking to develop in these areas.
Data and negotiation: analysing learning and collaborating effectively
Tiffany also ran a session called Demonstrating Business Value: Applying Data Science to Training Measurement.
This resonated as it’s an area we feel passionately about, with the potential for rigorous data analysis techniques to enhance learning and drive performance.
Tiffany was in good company among the lead speakers. On day #2, Dr Alison Fragale, an award-winning teacher and distinguished scholar, offered insights into her specialisms as an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina.
Alison studies issues around power, status and influence in organisations, together with conflict resolution, negotiation and communication.
Of these topics, negotiation took centre stage. First, she defined negotiation as the process through which at least two people give and take in a relationship. Alison then explained why it’s an unavoidable part of organisational life and an essential part of what L&D teams need to understand and do.
As everyone in L&D knows, at times you need to manage and negotiate with a disparate variety of stakeholders. This might come in terms of technology providers, executives, learners, participants and more.
Alison discussed the strategies that work best and fall short on the path to successful negotiations, positioning this crucial capability as ‘the Swiss Army knife of relationship management’.
How to use gamification to create engaging learning
In LEO Learning’s Thursday session, we spoke to a full and receptive room about the latest gamification techniques. I was joined by Amanda Dumas, Members Solutions Manager at LOMA, to talk about the award-winning blended learning game we created for them.
The mobile-first learning game, Impact CX: The Quest, reimagines the way customer experience knowledge is presented to learners.
Using an immersive, scenario-based format centered around a fictional insurance company, we challenged learners to build their skills. I was pleased to see plenty of nodding from our audience when we shared tips on how to:
- Create a sense of character and narrative within gamification
- Make stories compelling
- Add features in order to meet clear learning objectives
- Employ best practices in the design and build of learning games
- Avoid common hazards L&D teams encounter when they start out with gamification
Visitors were able to see why Impact CX: The Quest beat a shortlist including IBM to win a Distinction in the mobile education category at the recent Annual Communicator Awards.
Lots of visitors enjoyed playing the game during their time at the event, and our case study inspired them to think about using gamification in their own learning programmes.
Stand and deliver: solving challenges at the Training Industry Conference & Expo 2018
As well as taking in some of the highlights of the main agenda, I spent plenty of time meeting people on the LEO Learning stand.
We were joined by colleagues from our authoring tool sister company, gomo, who were able to demonstrate the many benefits they can offer to global organisations.
gomo’s exceptional authoring and hosting tool caught the interest of many of the people we spoke to about their organisational challenges at the Training Industry Conference & Expo 2018.
We look forward to continuing those conversations – and seeing how LEO Learning’s expertise can transform their L&D – between now and next year’s event.