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BEST Award Winners

2025 BEST Winners

Designed for experienced L&D professionals who are ready to lead. Gain tools to shape learning strategies, develop teams, and advance the business through talent development. 

Leading in Talent Development Certificate

Grow Your Self-Awareness, Become a Better LeaderWritten by leadership expert and coach Dan Gallagher, The Self-Aware Leader is designed to sharpen the self-awareness of middle managers to drive their career growth and roles as leaders. Being a middle manager takes patience and loyalty, as these leaders often find themselves in the unenviable role of buffering between employees and upper management. They can also become overly entangled in just getting things done. Self-awareness is an enduring business skill that, when developed successfully, can free managers from the day-to-day weeds and allow them to master their own destiny, reinvent their teams, and achieve their business goals.Dan presents a leadership model that up-and-comers, veterans, and even senior leaders can use as a catalyst to propel their careers. Based on empirical research involving more than 700 middle managers and more than two decades of use, the model highlights two key principles of leadership self-awareness: reinvention to remain relevant and proactive (not reactive) action. It is the first to fully integrate the idea of reinvention, servant leadership, and business transformation into a single framework.Topics addressed in this second edition include leadership health and well-being, artificial intelligence, the digitization of work, the connection between employee and customer experiences, trust, and leading remote teams. The final chapter highlights how self-awareness has risen to the forefront of business skills. The book includes thought exercises, role-specific insights for leaders in various functions, and real examples of how increased self-awareness grows a leader’s value.

The Self-Aware Leader, 2nd Edition

Become an Expert AI User and Strategy LeaderArtificial 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. Josh provides his L&D 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—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.

Applying AI in Learning and Development

The ATD SELL conference focuses on bringing together the best practices and strategies across sales training, tools and technology, and processes needed to drive incremental sales performance. 

ATD SELL Registration

ATD OrgDev will provide you with the skills needed to develop employee programs at all levels and throughout their employment lifecycle. You’ll learn innovative methods at all levels to manage the ever-increasing rate of change in today’s workplace.

ATD OrgDev Registration

Make Learning Stick Through Reflection ActivitiesEmployees 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 audiences. 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 learners’ motivation, social connection, memory, and critical thinking skills through targeted reflection activities—all of which are adaptable for in-person or remote training situations.Start achieving your organization’s business goals and building learners’ capacities with this comprehensive reflection toolkit.

Learning That Lasts

Make Employee Skills the Currency Within Your OrganizationIn today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations are increasingly recognizing the critical importance of employees’ skills as a means of building the organization. This is a fundamental change from focusing solely on specific job titles, position credentials, org charts, and reporting hierarchies when considering organizational growth. 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 organizational and employees’ needs by focusing more on how to tap into the existing skills of their workforce and develop the skills they 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 you a blueprint for making the shift and achieving success. She shows you how to get started and build over time, emphasizing that you do not have to overhaul every HR, learning and development, and management process and program at once. Start small and wherever it makes the most sense for your organization.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 the 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, but one that actual companies are achieving.

Building the Skills-Based Organization

This three-day event features sessions from our best and most popular speakers on the most essential topics for all learning and development professionals: Instructional Design, Training Delivery, Measurement & Evaluation, and Learning Technologies.

ATD Core4 Registration

Learn to use storytelling to boost learner engagement and retention. This L&D workshop equips you with proven techniques for in-person and virtual training. 

Storytelling in L&D Workshop

Strengthen Your Acquisition and Retention Efforts Through EverboardingTraditional 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 job, 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 to move beyond generic checklists and create customized journeys that resonate with individual needs, jobs, and roles. Smooth the transition from onboarding to manager by defining clear expectations and creating a seamless handoff process to ensure ongoing support and development. 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. And cultivate a growth mindset, encouraging new hires and existing employees to embrace lifelong learning and growth. This book also includes three case studies that capture the different stages of everboarding and offer ideas for how to implement an everboarding strategy yourself, no matter your company’s industry or size.Perfect for HR and L&D leaders seeking to transform their onboarding and employee development programs, this book provides actionable strategies and practical advice you can implement immediately. Stop treating onboarding like a sprint and start building a marathon of growth and success.

Congratulations to the 2025 BEST Award winners!