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Mary Mavis

Painless performance evaluations

Dr. Mary Leary is a change agent who believes that we can harness the power of people, partnerships, and technology emboldened by entrepreneurial concepts and social justice to make the world a better place for everyone. Her 30-year career spans a dual senior leadership path in both the private and public sectors across the technology, transportation, gerontology, community-services, education, disability, federal program management, academic, and business enterprise solutions sectors. Having joined Easter Seals in late 2007, she has built a management framework for idea generation and pipeline development that leverages social networking, social entrepreneurship, and private sector partnerships, as well as launched the Easter Seals Brain Health Center. Mary’s education and academic experience includes being an adjunct professor in statistics and public policy analysis, community adult learning, organizational informatics research projects, and analyzing cross-sector systems change. She holds a BS from James Madison University; a Masters of Administrative Science from Johns Hopkins University; a Gerontology Masters Certificate from George Mason University School of Nursing and Health Science; and a Doctorate from George Mason University, School of Public Policy.

Mary Leary

Associate Professor Robert Atkinson holds a joint appointment in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering in the Ira A. Schools of Engineering and the Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation in the Mary Lou Fulton Teacher’s College. He earned an Applied Cognitive Science Ph.D. in 1999 from University of Wisconsin, Madison with a minor in statistics and research design. He joined the ASU faculty in 2002 as an assistant professor after teaching for three years at Mississippi State University.

Robert Atkinson

November 2024 - TD Magazine

Hyperefficient by Mithu Storoni and Jobs, Health, and the Meaning of Work by Mary Davis

Book Capsules, November 2024

Mary Anne (Wihbey) Davis is the president and founder of Peak Performance Solutions, and author of "The Sales Messenger: Ten Lessons for Sales Success in Your Business and Personal Life.”  She is an internationally recognized sales and management consultant and trainer, and has helped a Blue Chip list of clients achieve bottom line results with her dynamic leadership and expertise. Mary Anne has made numerous appearances on television, and served as host for a program on Time Management. Her articles have appeared in respected business publications and periodicals, including Manager's Magazine, Sales and Service Excellence, The Boston Globe, The Dallas Business Journal, and more.  Mary Anne is a member of ATD, NSA, WBE, and WIFS.  For information on her or her company, visit her website at www.peakperformancesolutions.com.

Mary Anne Wihbey Davis

Sales Coaching Will Increase Profits

You’ve all been there. You have created some content here then looked over there, and you’ve seen the same flavor of content designed in a bit of a different way and for a somewhat different audience. Maintaining consistency in the learning and development world can be challenging. That is why content reuse can be such a valuable strategy to have in your pocket. When paired with an agile design approach, consistency makes building learning programs much more approachable and streamlined.What Is Content Reuse?Content reuse differs depending on the individual’s experience and background. This tactic is when you take content (oftentimes small chunks of it) that has already been created for one use case and leverage it for another use case or deliverable. This can be taking knowledge base articles and reusing that content to build out courses or taking presentations created by a hiring manager to onboard their new hires and turning that into an onboarding course to be distributed across the company. It can be reusing the same steps or snippets in one article in other outputs like a job aid, manual, course, or webpage. It can even be taking a full program created for an internal persona and using a majority of the content for an external audience that needs to be able to master the same skills.The important distinction is that content reuse is not copying and pasting.Agile Development’s Relationship With Content ReuseThis type of reuse and recycling of content is one of the pillars of developing learning programs in an agile way. If you are looking to start building content in an agile environment, then content reuse is going to get you there. The ability to quickly take content in a modular way and piece it together in different outputs depending on your audience is how you go from a drawn-out ADDIE driven design to a quick, targeted and streamlined SAM-driven design (the successive approximation model, which is a simplified and more agile version of ADDIE). In this approach, you have already performed the analysis and the design of the snippets of content. Now you have to match them up with the correct personas, tweaking to make sure the tone and viewpoint is correct for the intended persona and then running it through evaluation and launch. You are getting from point A to point Z much quicker, thus being more agile. And when you have these pieces in smaller blocks of modular content, you can iterate in bite-sized pieces.Challenges of Content Reuse and Ways to Overcome ThemBut wait, this sounds so easy! There have to be challenges, right? Well, yes. The challenges here are real. Content reuse, while it is a fantastic way to get to the end point quicker, is a bear to maintain. Think about it. You have this content that you are reusing from several different outputs: PowerPoint, Word, Google Docs, loose-leaf paper, Captivate files, videos, webinar recordings. And these might be used in several different places. Content pulled from here and added to there. So, when it comes time for the company to release its sparkly new feature set, you need to go and find every single place in your training, knowledge base, and resources that need to be updated. Inevitably, something gets missed and now you have a maintenance and versioning nightmare. You also may need some of this content you are reusing to say and portray different bits of information based on the audience or persona. So, how do we make sure that our step to becoming more efficient and agile does not cause 1,000 other problems down the line?It’s all in the technology stack you choose. Finding the perfect blend of tools that help you streamline these processes coupled with the agile processes using content reuse will have you at hero status in no time. Bringing on board a single-source authoring solution like MadCap Flare is your way to master the content reuse space. Flare allows you to create content in these snippets of information and customize what is displayed based on audience need and output into different formats, all while maintaining that single source of truth. Now this is a truly simplified explanation of the power of Flare because it does so much more, but content reuse is Flare’s superpower. Content reuse paired with agile learning design and development has never been easier.About the AuthorAndrea Maliska is an award-winning learning and development leader, eLearning strategist and speaker with over fifteen years of experience across multiple industries. She thrives in startup cultures and excels at building out holistic programs that center around the learner experience. She currently owns her own eLearning consulting company, Rebel Learn and is located near the gorgeous Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado.

The Importance of Content Reuse in Agile Learning Development

As we march forward into this new world of work, devoting time to the development of your own mental agility just may be the key to thriving in a post-pandemic world filled with constant change and increasing complexity.

Develop Mental Agility to Thrive in Turbulent Times

Training and developing employee skill sets is one of the top items on the minds of leaders and executives. The number of companies looking to build learning and development (L&D) programs for their employees is growing, and will continue to grow, to keep up with the emerging need to provide a more learner-centric environment in the workplace.The L&D landscape is not simple or straightforward. With archaic systems, ever-changing technologies, and constantly adapting audiences, it’s vital to understand the learning and development challenges that can make building a program difficult. By identifying these challenges, you can learn to recognize pitfalls and plan accordingly.Demonstrating Value to LeadershipDemonstrating value is one of the biggest challenges an instructional designer, content manager, or developer can face. If you are lucky, you will have a champion on the executive team who already understands the value of organizational learning and how it impacts the bottom line. In most instances, you will need to work with the executives and build those relationships. Here are some ways to help build value for the work you do:● Show the value. Demonstrate to your potential advocates why L&D is going to make their lives easier.● Understand pain points. Constant communication and understanding of their main pain points is important when it comes to learning and development. To be successful you must be crushing their pain points.Adapting Content for a Varying AudienceCreating a 300-page manual for a product that employees would get on their first day and calling it training used to be enough. This, coupled with on-the-job training on day two, and the employee had completed the onboarding process.Times have changed, and our employees and clients expect more from us. Here are some tips to develop content that speaks to all your learning styles:● Microlearning. The days of sitting and consuming hours of videos at once are gone. Learners expect content to be digestible, easily consumed within five to 10 minutes at a time. Designing your program to be modular will allow your learners to have more control over what they learn and when.● Easy access to content. Your employees should be able to access content from their phone, tablet, or desk.Measuring Return on Investment (ROI) and EffectivenessShowing ROI within a learning and development program can be very difficult, as it’s not always black and white. There is not a single cause that equals one expected effect. You cannot always pinpoint a specific training that directly leads to a landed deal. However, there are ways to build this ROI.Here are a few tips on how to measure the effectiveness of training:● Start with a project. To show you can provide value and are worth the investment, start with a small, targeted program. The less money and time you need to put in, the larger the ROI will be. Positively affecting one group with this program and then being able to show the ROI will allow you to grow and expand.● Start with a group that has measurable metrics. Pick a group to build training for that you can show true black and white metrics. Sales and support are great groups to start with, as they often have a clear need for training, and already have built in metrics where you can provide training. It is much easier to show how implementation of a pipeline development training program grew pipeline development by X% over the same time last quarter.Building an organizational learning program for employees may seem daunting but as long as you keep in mind your true objective and are thoughtful about the work you are doing, you will be successful. Learning and development is a vital component of a company’s success. Don’t let training challenges block you from moving forward and providing the value you bring to the table, consider using a solution such as MadCap Flare to make this process easier for you.About the AuthorAndrea Maliska is an award-winning learning and development leader with more than 15 years of experience across multiple industries. She currently owns her own e-learning consulting company, Rebel Learn.

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