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Mark Ruth is director of research and education for the International Coach Federation (ICF). Since joining ICF more than a decade ago, Mark has been committed to developing and expanding the ICF’s presence as an industry thought leader. His department has unveiled more than a dozen global industry studies on the coaching industry since 2006. Prior to joining ICF, Mark served as Market Research Analyst for the National Tour Association, where he managed an economic impact study of the North American group travel industry.

Mark Ruth

Recent research explores how helpful coaching and formal training are with achieving change management goals.

Helping Leaders Embrace Change Through Coaching

Future Challenges for Talent Development

Mary Lyons and Jeff Hesse discuss how learning executives can help create value with talent strategies. Their recommendations are based on a PwC survey of U.S. CEOs.

Creating Value with Talent Strategies

New Brain Research Finds that Quality of Learning Really Matters

Learn how to bridge the divide between learning and business strategy. Explore the importance of linking learning to business outcomes, effective learning evaluation strategies, and achieving learning ROI.Get ready for a startling statistic: ATD’s 2025 research report, The Future of Evaluating Learning and Measuring Impact: Improving Skills and Addressing Challenges, found that only 4 percent of organizations excel at using learning data to inform business decisions. L&D professionals are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the value of their initiatives, yet outdated measurement methods and fragmented systems often hinder their ability to prove learning impact. This devastatingly low number highlights a significant disconnect in how companies leverage learning to drive strategic outcomes. It also begs an important question: What if learning could transform from a perceived cost center into a catalyst for tangible business growth? Why This Gap ExistsThere are several factors that contribute to the divide between learning and business strategy. A common obstacle is the over-reliance on “smile sheets” and participation data—sure, they count who showed up, but old-fashioned feedback forms fail to capture the true impact of learning on performance. Plus, many organizations struggle to get access to performance-related data because it’s scattered everywhere, making training feel separate from actual work. According to McKinsey research, L&D managers often spend a disproportionate amount of time—nearly one full day a week—on administrative tasks, leaving little room for strategic initiatives. These challenges weaken the link between L&D activities and strategic business outcomes, making it difficult to demonstrate learning ROI and secure stakeholder buy-in. The Case for Linking Learning to Business StrategyOur findings reveal that only 43 percent of organizations report a strong alignment between learning and business goals. That’s a pretty big gap! However, when learning is linked to business strategy, L&D teams gain:Better stakeholder buy-in: Stakeholders who see a clear connection between learning programs and critical business objectives are more likely to champion L&D’s efforts and provide the necessary support.Increased investment in L&D: Companies that recognize learning as a strategic driver of success are more willing to allocate budget and resources to adopt innovative technologies, high-quality content, and a talent development strategy that helps employees thrive.More meaningful learning initiatives: By understanding the specific knowledge and skills that employees need to reach business targets, L&D can create programs that actually hit the mark. This means tackling those skill gaps head-on, boosting how well people perform, and ultimately getting the results the company’s aiming for. Strategic alignment isn’t just about planning; it’s about demonstrating measurable impact and showing how your learning initiatives contribute directly to KPIs. If learning is tied to the company’s goals, L&D goes from being a support team to a key player in making the organization successful. What High-Performing L&D Teams Do DifferentlyProficient organizations, as defined by the ATD 2025 research report, are all about using data. They don’t just look at training feedback but also track performance and business results from at least four different sources. This helps them see how training makes things like productivity, quality, customer happiness, and sales better.These companies are also great at communicating data effectively to stakeholders. They use dashboards and charts to make it easy for leaders to see how training pays off. Plus, they tell stories with the data, showing wins and areas to improve, which gets everyone on board with training.What they do best is start with the company’s goals. They work backward to figure out what skills people need to hit business KPIs, then design training to match. This way, training becomes a key part of making the business succeed and staying ahead of the game.Embedding Learning Where Work HappensSolutions like Learn365 LMS are emerging to help L&D teams close the gap by embedding learning directly into Microsoft 365 tools like Teams, Outlook, and Power BI. This strategic embedding fundamentally shifts the paradigm of workplace training. Instead of isolated, scheduled events, learning evolves into an organic process that’s a natural, trackable part of employees’ workday. Using AI-powered personalized learning pathways and incorporating sophisticated built-in analytics, these platforms enable smarter measurement and a tighter alignment of learning initiatives with strategic business goals. Ultimately, this maximizes learning ROI and fosters a culture of continuous growth within your organization.Is Your Learning Strategy Aligned?It’s time to rethink how your organization measures learning impact and identify opportunities for improvement. Is your learning strategy truly connected to your business strategy? Explore how tools like Learn365 are empowering L&D professionals to translate insights into outcomes, creating learning that transforms rather than just informs. 

Mind the Gap: Closing the Distance Between Learning and Business Strategy

First impressions have gone digital, and people—whether a headhunter for a Fortune 500 company, curious colleagues, or fellow conference participants—are meeting the digital you even when the real you is otherwise occupied. Within the pages of Digital You: Real Personal Branding in the Virtual Age, William Arruda makes the case for why the digital you “needs to be as magnetic, human and engaging as the real you.” More importantly, he details with great clarity exactly how to make that possible.When Arruda—founder of Reach and CareerBlast.TV—penned this book, people knew little about personal branding. Even today, many people cannot tell you precisely what branding is about. And if you really what to render someone speechless, ask them to tell you about their personal brand.Cleanly divided into four parts, Arruda’s thorough guide on personal branding describes the different versions of you: real, virtual, visual, and social. Readers begin the journey to strengthen their virtual presence by gaining a deeper understanding of who they are in real life.Fun facts, pop quizzes, and brand hacks strategically scattered throughout Arruda’s book facilitate introspection and help make your journey to discovering the digital you an interactive and intriguing experience. By the time you are halfway through this 200-pager, you will have gained insights into your own personal brand and will have been tasked to use those insights to create a bio that’s LinkedIn ready.Arruda wants readers to see digital branding as an exercise in translation—that is, translating your own real-world narrative into a healthy digital brand. He guides you to uncovering and building your personal brand but takes it a step further by describing how to manage your digital presence in virtual spaces, such as LinkedIn. By offering practical tips from how to make your mark in virtual meetings to how people with common names can stand out online, the book is the prototype of practicality.Another highlight of Arruda’s read on personal branding is the comprehensiveness of his perspective. He explains how others qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate individuals’ online presence. A struggling virtual presence says much more about you than you realize, Arruda suggests. Lots of content about you online could mean you must have something to say, while little or no content may send the opposite message.Many will find that this isn’t a one-time read to pass on to a colleague but rather a comprehensive reference tool for professionals who choose not to leave their digital presence to happenstance. In plainly laying out the principles of personal branding, Arruda eradicates all excuses for readers to have digital brands that struggle to represent their true competence or charisma. “All strong brands are clear about their story,” says Arruda. Pop quiz: What’s yours?Join Arruda on Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m. ET for a live session, where he will answer questions about personal branding.Share your ATD Virtual Conference experience on social media. #ATDVirtualConference

Make a Digital First Impression

With Bill Rothwell’s experience, there was little question that he would take part in our series of interviews with experts to mark ATD’s 75th year.

The Target Remains the Same: Improve Performance, Boost the Bottom Line

What are Section 508 and WCAG? How do they differ? Why should you care? What tools can you use to make your e-learning courses follow accessibility best practices and adhere to the law? Have you ever thought about how someone with a disability experiences the online courses you create? What if your target audience includes people who are deaf or hard of hearing, color blind, visually impaired (partially or totally), or have limited mobility? Shouldn’t they be afforded the same learning opportunities and access to your courses?Section 508 and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) help with just that—by establishing a set of rules that, when followed, will ensure your e-learning content is accessible to those with disabilities.What Are Section 508 and WCAG?Section 508 refers to an amendment of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that requires U.S. Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. The law includes a set of technical standards that establish requirements for software applications, operating systems, web-based information and applications, telecommunications hardware and software, and video and multimedia products.Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a technical standard outlining a set of guidelines and success criteria for making web content more accessible to people with disabilities. It was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community where members, staff, and the public work together to develop web standards. It is the same organization whose members are responsible for the original HTML, CSS, XML, and other specifications.There are three WCAG levels: A, AA, and AAA. Level A represents the minimum suggested accessibility standards for web-based content and most closely resembles the rules outlined in Section 508, while levels AA and AAA include more rigorous guidelines that further improve accessibility. Meeting level AA guidelines means meeting everything that’s A or AA, while meeting level AAA guidelines means meeting all guidelines—whether A, AA, or AAA.How Do Section 508 and WCAG Differ?Section 508 is part of a U.S. law (the Rehabilitation Act of 1973) and therefore only applies to the United States. Further, the law itself only requires that U.S. Federal agencies comply. Alternatively, WCAG is not a law and is instead only a set of guidelines. These guidelines, however, have been agreed upon internationally as the appropriate standard for ensuring web-based content is accessible to people with disabilities.To put it simply, WCAG is a set of best practices that applies to web-based content in general, and Section 508 is a law requiring mainly U.S. government entities to comply with a set of rules covering a broader span of electronic and information technology. See the breakdown below:Section 508 United States only Law Required for federal agencies One set of standards for different types of electronic communication (software, operating systems, web-based content, etc.)W3C – WCAG 2.0 International Suggested guidelines Optional best practices for any organization Three levels of guidelines of increasing rigor specifically for web-based contentWhy Should You Care?E-learning is a type of web-based content, and therefore, the technical standards outlined in the WCAG and Section 508 §1194.22 apply, if you want or need to make your e-learning courses accessible to those with disabilities. If you’re creating e-learning content for a U.S. government entity, your e-learning content likely needs to be 508-compliant. Several state government entities also require 508-compliance. Also, if you’re not creating e-learning courses directly for a government agency, but you provide services to or are funded by the government, it’s likely that some form of 508-compliance also applies to you.Similar laws exist in other countries for their government entities, but most other countries have chosen to adopt WCAG as a legal requirement, rather than drafting their own rules. So if you’re creating e-learning content for government entities in other countries, there’s a chance that some level of the WCAG applies to you.Even if you aren’t required by law to meet the guidelines, isn’t making your e-learning courses more accessible to people with disabilities the right thing to do? You may immediately think “Yes,” however, that the extra cost, effort, and sometimes compromised experience keep many non-government organizations from making accessibility a priority. Instead, they will often choose to use “reasonable accommodation” and provide training in another way, such as having someone sit down with the person and go through the training together.Before you make a decision for your own organization or try to convince a client one way or another, consider the following statistics based on U.S. Census data:Approximately 56.7 million (about 19 percent) people living in the U.S. had some kind of disability in 2010. This number increased by 2.2 million between 2005 and 2010. \[Source\] Of the 241.7 million adults aged 15 and older, about 14.9 million or 6.2 percent of adults aged 15 and older experienced some level of difficulty with seeing, hearing, or having their speech understood. \[Source\] Individuals with disabilities account for approximately 9.4 million (about 6%) of the 155.9 million civilian labor force (for the time period 2008-2010). \[Source\]**Which E-Learning Authoring Tools Are Best?**Three of the most popular Windows-based, non-PowerPoint-plugin rapid e-learning authoring tools are Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, and Trivantis Lectora. Each has its strengths and weaknesses in general, which Diane Elkins covers at length in her regular tools comparison blogs, but when it comes to complying with accessibility standards, there’s still plenty that divides them.Each tool states that courses published with it can adhere to Section 508. However, both Storyline and Lectora include documentation stating their respective tool satisfies the WCAG level AA. We were unable to find specific documentation relative to Captivate's capabilities for creating courses that can adhere to the different levels of the WCAG.Ultimately, all three tools let you create accessible content. While one tool may rate better than the others in its ease-of-use or ability to meet the requirements, all three end up with fairly consistent total scores. Here’s a closer look at how Captivate 8, Storyline 2 (Update 5), and Lectora 12 fulfill several accessibility requirements, as well as their rankings for creating accessible courses. (Please note that 1 equals the highest rating.)Accessibility Requirement: Text AlternativesProviding a text alternative that describes media such as images or audio narration is important for people with compromised vision. The primary way to make our media accessible is by creating ALT tags for images and text transcripts for audio.Ranking:  Storyline  Captivate  LectoraStoryline gets the highest ranking because it allows you to manage all of your ALT tags for a given slide in one place. Lectora and Captivate require that ALT text be managed on an object-by object basis, but Captivate gets a higher score than Lectora because, like Storyline, it allows for more characters within ALT text. Further, while adding text transcripts is possible in all three tools, the Storyline player’s built-in transcript panel makes it the easiest tool for creating a static text transcript of audio.Accessibility Requirement: Focus/Tab OrderFocus and Tab Order apply to those with compromised vision and/or mobility. This is the order in which the page will be read or processed by a screen reader. It is also the order in which objects will receive focus when pressing Tab on your keyboard. Purely decorative items, such as shapes and lines, should never receive focus, nor be announced by screen readers, since they are not important to understanding the content.Ranking:  Storyline  Captivate  LectoraStoryline is strongest here because, like with ALT text, you can manage Tab and Focus Order for all objects on a slide in a single dialog box. This includes removing items from the Tab Order so they never receive focus.You can manage Tab Order in both Captivate and Lectora, but the ordering also affects layering (or z-order), which can sometimes cause conflict when you want the layering order to be different than the Tab order. Both tools provide a means of flagging items that should not receive Focus, but this has to be done on each individual object. Captivate gets the higher mark between the two since it provides a dialog box that allows you change the Focus and Tab Order of interactive objects.Accessibility Requirement: Synchronized CaptioningSection 508 and the WCAG require synchronized captioning for multimedia such as animated objects synchronized with audio and video, and video that includes audio. It is important for those with compromised vision and/or hearing.Ranking:  Lectora  Captivate  StorylineLectora and Captivate are close in this category, as both provide a means of adding closed captioning to your courses. Both allow you to set the timing of when captions appear and disappear, and provide player controls for turning the captions on and off. We give the higher rating to Lectora because it allows you to import industry-standard caption files (such as those provided by 3PlayMedia.) With Captivate, you have to type each caption and synchronize it manually, but there is an easy-to-use utility to help you do it.Storyline is the weakest in this area. It requires manually adding text blocks as captions, timing them appropriately with the content, and setting up a way to turn those captions on and off. In other words, you can create a similar end product, but there isn’t a feature dedicated for this.Accessibility Requirement: Skip Navigation CapabilitiesImagine if you have a menu button, glossary button, exit button, and more that appear on each page of your course. For learners relying on screen readers, this means those items will be announced on every slide or page they visit. This can get annoying fast! Section 508 and the WCAG require that those relying on screen readers have the ability to skip all redundant navigation items so they can get right to the main content of each page.Ranking: Lectora Storyline, CaptivateLectora is the strongest here, because there are no limitations to how you set this up. You can set the course to skip as many elements on the page as necessary. Storyline and Captivate are tied because they provide close to the same solution. They both provide the ability to skip navigation components that are part of the player, but there are no out-of-the-box capabilities for skipping redundant controls that are part of your slide content.Accessibility Requirement: Data TablesTables that contain data, where understanding the arrangement of the data is necessary to understand the data itself, are not (by default) able to be interpreted by those with compromised vision. Section 508 and WCAG require that when data tables are present, they are labeled in a way that screen readers can interpret the data.Ranking: Lectora Storyline, CaptivateLectora gets the highest rating in this category because first, it supports adding tables to your content, and second, it provides a means of appropriately labeling the table in order for it to be read by screen readers. Captivate has an interaction widget that lets you create tables, but it does not have the behind-the-scenes programming needed to be compliant. Storyline does have the ability to insert a table. With both those tools, any information presented in a table has to be treated as a graphic with an appropriate text alternative for interpreting the table.Moving ForwardIf you’ve come this far, you should now have a good understanding of Section 508 and the WCAG, how they differ, and why they matter to those of us developing e-learning courses. Your next step will be to understand and learn how to implement the requirements in your own courses. Keep in mind, it’s far easier to begin your development process with accessibility in mind than to have to retrofit current courses to meet the requirements. Luckily, there are several resources available online to help. Use these online resources to stay informed and learn more about Section 508 and the WCAG.Section 508 Standards for Electronic and Information Technology Section 508 Technical Standards for Web-based Intranet and Internet Information and Applications Access Board whitepaper on e-learning and accessibility Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 How to Meet WCAG 2.0 Storyline and Section 508 Accessibility Developing Accessible Content in Lectora Creating Accessible Projects (in Adobe Captivate) One-hour webinar overview of Section 508 and WCAG (E-Learning Uncovered)

Accessibility for E-Learning: Section 508 and WCAG

Mark Miller is the VP of marketing for Emergenetics International, a global human capital development company that has developed a suite of psychometric tools and training that reveal thinking and behavioral preferences and works with individuals to educational organizations to Fortune 500 Companies. Mark leads the company's global branding and marketing and is the lead writer for the company's widely read blog. Mark also authors a regular column for Inc. magazine called "The Power of People" and has written feature articles for Talent Management Magazine, Innovation Excellence, and the Human Capital Lab. Mark has also been featured in Forbes and other industry publications.

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