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Erich Hardt

Motivation and Conflict Inherent in Welfare Work

The Correspondence Course Method Of Industrial Training

New York City Workshops Successful

Erich F. E. Hardt

Do Your Supervisors Need NonTechnical Training

Erica Nelson, MA, has been in the learning and development field for 25 years, consulting with clients from various fields at the corporate level. Clients include Horizon Therapeutics, Wintrust Financial Corporation, and ACE Hardware. As a Business Leader Faculty® member with the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management's Center for Leadership, she applies her expertise working with mid-level to executive-level professionals. She aids with their personal growth and them becoming effective communicators to build better relationships within their organization.As an ATD program facilitator of seven certificate programs, Erica applies her professional background by aligning the content to the personal experiences of program participants. She views each course as a way to deepen everyone's understanding and abilities.Her coaching practice provides a customized model for each client and their unique interests and development needs. She has been certified in mediation practices and is affiliated with the Center for Conflict Resolution in Chicago. She also served as a mediator for 10 years with the Cook County Court System in Chicago, Illinois.Erica wrote a training book, Management Development Training, published in 2021 for the ATD Workshop Series©. The book is a guide on the essential elements of great management, leadership skills, and behaviors. Erica's passion is to focus on development for each person in their organization, believing we are always searching for growth opportunities.

Erica Nelson

The pace of innovation is rapidly accelerating, and artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to redefine how we work, learn, and connect with technology in surprising ways. From empowering new roles and fostering inclusivity, AI is on the brink of reshaping entire industries. As the year comes to a close, CYPHER Learning shares its predictions for how AI will continue to evolve in 2025. 1. A news-worthy blunder courtesy of AI oversightA Fortune 500 leader will deliver a high-profile keynote containing uncorroborated passages produced by generative AI—and regret it. Someone somewhere is going to embarrass themselves in 2025—probably someone we’ve all heard of, too—by inadvertently relaying plagiarized or inaccurate AI-generated content. Content sent up to the executive suite, unproofed, by a team that ought to know better. AI’s role is best governed by an 80-20 rule: Let it handle 80 percent of routine and tedious tasks, but human oversight is essential for the remaining 20 percent, which includes fact-checking, editing, and managing content. Left to its own devices, AI is still young and imperfect enough to mess up. It’s hard to imagine a time when it—and we—won’t need human overseers. While AI has sparked fears of workforce disruption, especially in creative fields, the reality is that it empowers talented professionals—writers, teachers, designers—by taking on routine work, allowing them to focus on the creative and strategic judgment that will be even more valuable in the years to come.2. Prompt engineering will no longer be crucial2024 conventional wisdom: mastering AI requires mastering prompt engineering. 2025: never mind. Not long ago, we were told that to use AI effectively, users would need to master complex prompt design. But this idea is quickly proving outdated. Generative AI is increasingly embedded as a user-friendly, intuitive feature in everyday applications, and soon, any app without AI will seem behind the curve. The belief that specialized skills are required for AI is fading, which is a positive shift since this notion could have limited AI’s potential and widened existing digital divides. Just as previous tech revolutions succeeded by being accessible to all, AI is evolving to understand natural language, user intent, and behavior, allowing a broader range of people to harness its power. Far from deepening digital divides, AI is poised to bridge them as it continues to develop.3. AI breaks into the C-suiteWe’ll see the emergence of a new, immediately vital C-suite position: CAO. Meet the Chief AI Officer (CAO). Much like CIOs and CISOs before them, who spent years pushing for a voice in corporate strategy, CAOs will now take a leading role as AI becomes central to modern business—bringing both vast potential and unique risks. Unlike past oversights that delayed cybersecurity’s rise to a top corporate priority, the importance of AI won’t be overlooked. The CAO will provide broad oversight across technical and ethical domains, integrating AI into key processes like product design, security, and communications. Not every task will need AI, though, and a high-ranking officer will be essential to set boundaries and make strategic decisions. As AI rapidly evolves, organizations will rely on the CAO to establish guidelines to ensure that AI is used responsibly, aligning with corporate goals rather than posing risks.4. AI-enhanced customer service for allUser satisfaction with retail customer service channels will do something incredible: go up. Customer-service horror stories about incoherent chat agents or frustrating voice recognition systems may soon be history. By 2025, generative AI and AI-driven analytics are set to transform automated customer service, creating friendlier, more efficient customer interactions. Imagine a voice agent that truly understands your request—whether it’s for a flight change or a prescription refill—rather than just parroting account details. Even better, advantages like these won’t be limited to massive corporations and Fortune 500 companies. Small businesses can join in, using AI to create high-quality, personalized customer service with less effort, reduced costs, and wider reach. If there’s any downside to all this, it’s that consumer expectations for responsive, intelligent service will rise, with companies that fail to catch the AI wave risking being left in the dust.5. Personalized workplace development displaces old-school trainingPersonalized workplace development will become the new standard, displacing old-school, one-size-fits-all training. With hang-onto-your-hat speed, personalized training is accelerating rapidly, becoming more feasible both economically and logistically for large enterprises with thousands of employees. Modern learning platforms, powered by conscientiously deployed AI, drive this shift, allowing companies to provide dynamic, on-demand upskilling tailored to individual needs. By 2025, we’ll see bite-sized lessons seamlessly fitting into unique workflows, empowering companies to reduce worker-error rates, boost competitiveness, and turn workplace development from a cost center into a value-generating engine. The outdated, linear training approaches—often disruptive and off-target—will be replaced by a hybrid model, blending still-relevant traditional coursework with rich, interactive experiences. As AI enables companies to create targeted, context-appropriate training regimes for everyone, employee satisfaction will grow, turning previously tedious tasks into engaging, job-relevant learning opportunities.How can you leverage AI going into 2025?As AI continues to evolve in 2025, its potential to boost productivity, streamline customer experiences, and drive innovation will only grow. By embracing AI thoughtfully—focusing on responsible use, clear oversight, and leveraging its strengths for routine tasks—users can maximize its benefits while minimizing risks. Whether you’re a leader looking to integrate AI into strategic initiatives or a professional aiming to enhance daily workflows, now is the time to explore how AI can elevate your future. 

5 Bold Predictions for AI in 2025

When you’re looking to maintain, protect, or grow the budget that powers your corporate LMS (not to mention the rest of your L&D ecosystem!), you need to be able to make your case to business-minded stakeholders. These C-suite executives want hard data that points to tangible business impact—and, when you know where to look, that’s exactly what you can give them.You’ve got a wealth of areas across your organization that benefit from L&D, and they all have a data-backed story to tell. When you know what kind of results you can expect your L&D investments to deliver, you can start planning ways to measure those results and couch them in terms your C-suite will appreciate. That means looking beyond the course usage and completion metrics that, while an essential part of your learning analytics, need to be combined with business impact data to make the most compelling case to the people holding the purse strings.Read on to discover the quantifiable outcomes your C-suite wants to see, including:Increased levels of engagementA strong reputation for learningPowerful internal mobility practicesEmployee Retention and AcquisitionYou’ll likely be aware, in broad terms, that good L&D can have a positive impact on employee retention and acquisition. These are fantastic factors to consider when you’re looking to demonstrate quantifiable returns on your L&D investments, provided you can guide stakeholders through the chain of linkages that connect learning to cost savings. So, what’s the evidence that L&D reduces turnover and increases an employer’s appeal for prospective applicants? And how can you leverage that information to impress your internal stakeholders? Read on.Articulating the Value of a Strong Reputation for LearningAccording to 2023 research, organizations that don’t offer development opportunities risk losing talent—in fact, that lack of development was respondents’ most commonly cited reason for quitting. The conclusion here is simple enough: when you’ve got a robust, tech-backed culture of learning, your organization is going to be more appealing to all those prospective hires looking for development-rich career opportunities. We’ve established that L&D can, in theory, have an impact on your reputation and on the talent acquisition that follows. But how might you turn this observation into a solid case for the business impact of your L&D investments?If you just wanted to show that your L&D efforts have left you with a good reputation for employee development, that’s fairly straightforward to achieve. You might, for example, incorporate a survey question into your application process, asking applicants why they’re interested in your organization. If applicants are citing your learning culture, you’ll know your reputation is growing in the right direction. But on its own, that information just isn’t enough. It might get across some positive sentiment directed toward your L&D function, but it doesn’t tell upper management how your learning-first reputation leads to business impact.Instead, you’ll want to identify some of the measurable benefits associated with your talent acquisition. If you’ve got a reputation for those sought-after employee development offerings, you can expect a wider pool of candidates—which means you’ll have more high-caliber hires to choose from. Demonstrate that high caliber to your CFO by taking note of factors like reduced time to competency or increased productivity in departments that receive new hires. You’re then just a step away from a set of highly tangible data that business leaders will find much more persuasive.Communicating the Links Between Engagement and Your Bottom LineGiven the popularity of employee development among workers, it’s no wonder that L&D is often linked to higher levels of employee engagement. According to research sponsored by Bridge, learning opportunities were the most commonly cited factor among respondents looking to nurture engagement. Gaining employee engagement data is straightforward enough with the right tools. In fact, Bridge itself offers employee engagement software that allows you to send out regular pulse surveys to check in on engagement levels. So, if you’re looking to establish how your L&D program leads to better business outcomes, you’d be wise to prove that your learning investments are affecting engagement. You might achieve this by conducting before-and-after snapshot surveys to see if your engagement levels improve following a new learning initiative.However, once again, engagement statistics alone aren’t necessarily enough to sell your learning investments internally. To the people holding the purse strings, the question’s going to be “so what?”, and—with the right preparation—that’s a question you can answer with hard figures.According to Bridge’s report, the area most commonly affected by employee engagement is retention. So, once you’ve established that your learning investments are engaging your people, you can start to examine your turnover figures. If your more engaged employees are sticking around for longer periods of time, you’ll be able to point to the substantial, dollars-and-cents cost savings that’ll likely justify any initial L&D expenditure.Connecting Mobility Metrics to Clear Cost ReductionsPromotions and other kinds of internal movement are made possible in part by learning—and, handily, this is something that your HR function will have plenty of data on. If your people are using your learning ecosystem to qualify for internal vacancies, you’ll be able to link the course usage data in your LMS to the talent mobility data held by your HR team. The result? A compelling business case for your learning function: one in which L&D is the lynchpin of talent mobility.That said, higher rates of internal movement aren’t necessarily going to impress your CFO without a little extra context. If you want buy-in for mobility-enabling software, you’ll have to contend with a key question: what’s the business impact of better internal mobility?Once again, turnover numbers are your friend here. Research shows that turnover is less likely when employees are able to move internally. And that’s especially true of workers born after 1996, who—according to LinkedIn—are much more likely than older generations to agree with the statement that “through learning, I can explore potential career paths at my company”.So, your challenge isn’t just to show that your learning ecosystem has led to a rise in internal mobility. It’s to show that these upward or lateral movers are sticking around for longer rather than seeking opportunities elsewhere, reducing the various costs associated with hiring new talent.Reskilling and UpskillingAccording to a survey from GP Strategies and Watershed, less than half of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that their organization uses data to understand skills gaps. That’s a lot of room for improvement, especially when 69 percent of organizations reported having a skills gap in 2023—compared to 55 percent in 2021. This is an alarmingly large number that’s growing at an equally alarming rate, and there’s no question that when employees don’t have the skills they need to do their jobs effectively, you’re going to see lower productivity and decreased employee performance.Clearly, the ability to close those gaps through learning and skills development practices has huge implications for any business’ bottom line: It’s no wonder that Watershed names new skills qualifications as one of the more valuable L&D targets to measure. Regulatory ComplianceIn general terms, your discussions about L&D investments will center around how your learning resources make an impact. But there’s one exception. In the world of compliance, there’s a strong case to be made for the avoidance of impact—especially when it comes to the serious penalties that noncompliance can bring.If your learning technology can keep your people compliant—whether that’s by consistently training employees on the same standards, keeping everyone up to date, or providing that all-important compliance documentation—you’ll protect your organization from outcomes as serious as major fines or even being shut down. This is especially true of organizations in high-consequence industries, which often face additional compliance challenges around multilingual needs and data security.A little digging into the penalties your organization is exposed to can go some way toward justifying any L&D expenditure that puts compliance first. According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, 2023 saw fines for financial noncompliance alone totaling around $5 billion. Against even a small slice of a figure like that, you’ll have no problem making the case that the cost of a compliance-first LMS (for example) is more than justified.And good compliance training doesn’t just help you avoid fines. It can also offer savings like lower insurance costs—a tangible figure that will go some way toward mitigating your initial learning tech expenditure.

How to Prove the ROI of Learning & Development: Unlocking the Metrics That Matter 

Knowledge is hard to define, much less manage. One way to lower expectations—meaning get them to a reasonable level—is to manage information, not knowledge. In the Learning Information Management model, information is moved from node to node, but knowledge is created by employees when they engage the work and other stakeholders like they’re customers. There’s an evolution that takes place from data to results. Raw data is turned into information by placing it in an organizational context, which gives it meaning . Information is captured, stored, transferred, and used by the Learning Information System. Employees use the information in the conduct of business, turning it into knowledge, which is made up of explicit information and tacit knowledge held by the user. This creates workplace performance and, if properly applied, business results.There are several principles appropriate to this approach to learning (knowledge) management:Manage information, not knowledge. Information, not knowledge is a commodity. Information management can help stave off information overload by storing information, which can be turned into knowledge where and when necessary.Knowledge is information operationalized. Combine the tacit knowledge the employee already has with the explicit information available and put it to use.Knowledge is situated. It is created and used in the situation facing the employee.Knowledge is personal. Two or more people can create their own versions of knowledge based on the same information. And it’s socialized, with people learning from each other and communicating.Tacit knowledge can be transferred through action learning. The knowledge management process is ongoing, recursive, and circular. It is not sequential, nor does it have a beginning and an ending. Learning can be experiential. It’s important to realize that beyond information being moved throughout the knowledge system, people may also be moved to work together on projects and, in turn, to learn from each other.Knowledge can be retained by retaining people. When organizations experience large amounts of personnel turnover, sometimes known as “brain drain,” they lose significant amounts of tacit knowledge possessed by their employees, despite efforts to codify and store knowledge to turn it into explicit information.Teach people how to learn. It’s not enough to make information available. Managers need to promote openness and recognize and retain diversity. So, information management is the basis for knowledge management, called Learning Information Management in the model described earlier. Thus, knowledge management systems taking this approach will not differ greatly from other information technology and management systems. Managing information effectively will lead to greater knowledge generation, distribution, and use. This will ultimately create better business results and make the organization more responsive to the demands of the knowledge economy.

Manage Information, Not Knowledge

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