“Learning, they call it, this anticipated lightning, this thinking around an event and bringing it right.”

—William Stafford, Learning Anytime

So what can you expect to learn at ATD’s Government Workforce Conference? Here are just a few key items:

. . .how to anticipate what a new administration will want to see in your talent development program—so that you can not only keep it on a firm foundation, but even connect it to new administration priorities for the federal workforce.

. . .what a friend you used to work with long ago at another agency is doing now and how the cohort leadership program she is designing is so eerily similar to what you are designing, with similar stakeholder issues and similar pilot program challenges.

. . .the spark of an idea of how to weave the brand of your agency mission and culture into your sourcing and recruiting programs to close skill gaps, and then how to apply that same idea to engagement initiatives, frontline supervisory classes, and OD interventions with a management team.

. . . .the snippet of a passionate drive-by conversation while standing near the coffee stand on the limits of trying to work brain science, behavioral economics, design thinking, and agile methods into talent development initiatives.

 . . pride in your fellow employees and your profession as you witness them dropping organizational barriers and pass along learning to achieve critical cross-agency priorities—from job opportunities for Veterans to cybersecurity to disaster preparedness to health challenges.

. . a reminder of the sense of humor and storytelling prowess of talent development professionals as you make new friends in a conversation over lunch.

. . . the ways creativity can move into public sector innovation through low-profile experiments in delivering services that result in fast failure and eventual elegant solutions to constituent challenges and, unexpectedly, shift agency culture from conformity to accepting risk, exploration, and discovery.

. . .the flash of recognition from a set panelists a few years ahead of you who have passed through the motivation, resistance, and value-undermining challenges you are frustrated by and you walk out of the session with a new resolve.

What’s more, you might learn that you are not alone in all that you are trying to do as you work in government.