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ATD Advancing Talent Development - Thought Leader Award

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Advancing the Talent Development Field

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Congratulations to the 2025 Thought Leader Award Winner!

Talent Development Thought Leader Award

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Drive Organizational Performance Through EvaluationOrganizations that embed evaluation into their culture and operations can pivot faster, innovate more effectively, and foster a growth mindset. Evaluation thus becomes a tool for learning and continuous improvement. Building a Culture of Evaluation leads you through how to integrate measurement and feedback into your organization’s DNA.Learning trailblazer and President and CEO of Kirkpatrick Partners Vanessa Alzate delivers a bold, visionary guide for transforming learning functions into strategic powerhouses. In this book, she reimagines the impact the Kirkpatrick Four Levels® can have in today’s dynamic workplace. Not just for L&D use, the model gives you and your organization a common language and decision matrix—an operating system—to align all people, processes, and performance systems with results.This book explores using evaluation as the foundation of the design process for new interventions to ensure you achieve behavior change and learning transfer. Then, it brings evaluation to life with practical applications across onboarding, leadership development, sales enablement, coaching, and even artificial intelligence initiatives. Finally, it looks ahead to how you can scale evaluation beyond just L&D across the entire organization.With contributed chapters from global experts and real-world examples, this book is your road map to shifting from order taker to business partner, from isolated metrics to enterprise-wide impact.

Building a Culture of Evaluation

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Empower Frontline Workers and You’ll Power Your BusinessFrontline employees are the backbone of every organization. They’re the grocery clerks, manufacturing workers, call center representatives, hotel housekeepers, and retail associates who keep the world running. Yet, despite making up 70 to 80 percent of the global workforce, they are often treated as an afterthought. The Frontline Enablement Playbook is here to change that.Written by JD Dillon, founder of LearnGeek and passionate advocate for the frontline, this book is a practical guide for HR, L&D, and operations professionals who want to do better by their deskless teams. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience and insights from over 100 global practitioners and actual frontline workers, Dillon delivers the first-ever playbook designed to help you build a frontline experience that’s resilient, adaptable, and human-centered. Inside, you'll dive deep into six parts that redefine frontline support: Understanding who frontline workers really are—and what they needArchitecting a modern enablement ecosystemEmpowering frontline managers to empower their employeesHelping frontline workers do a great job todayFostering future opportunities for developmentEvolving your entire strategy to get that all-important buy-inThis book is packed with tools and tactics that work—whether you’re looking to improve training, manage change more effectively, enhance communication, or support manager well-being. Modular by design, you can read the entire story or pick and choose specific sections to address timely needs. You’ll find frameworks like the Modern Learning Ecosystem, stories from the field, and letters from frontline workers themselves.Stop just saying your frontline is essential and start proving it. Because when your frontline thrives, your business does too.

The Frontline Enablement Playbook

Become Indispensable in Driving Business GrowthL&D leaders must know how to connect learning strategies with business strategies and communicate effectively with leaders to improve employee performance and drive revenue. In other words, L&D needs to run like a business. Enter learning operations expert Tracie Cantu and her innovative Learning Operations Blueprint, which puts critical business needs first and brings rigorous systems-based thinking to corporate learning. This first-of-its-kind approach offers step-by-step guidance for updating L&D processes and structures to immediately improve results and increase the relevance of the L&D function. When learning teams and leadership become better partners, outcomes improve for organizations and employees. You’ll learn how to build an L&D business model that works, how to manage a portfolio of learning products, and how to design employee learning experiences that improve outcomes without demanding more tech or human resources. Cantu also provides questions for reflection, checklists, worksheets, and scorecards for practical application of her recommendations. Each chapter includes tips for taking action immediately and real-world stories that illustrate how to use the framework successfully and avoid common pitfalls. With this book, you will learn to scale your impact, secure your influence, and reach L&D’s potential. 

Running L&D Like a Business

Incorporate Microlearning Campaigns to Reach Business GoalsWhether you’re an L&D veteran who has “been there, done that” or are just starting out, it’s time to get smarter about microlearning, and expert Robyn A. Defelice can help.Expanding on her first groundbreaking book, Microlearning: Short and Sweet, Robyn offers a new and more complete definition of microlearning as a concept, a method, and a product—all of which L&D professionals need to understand to create successful microlearning campaigns that target key business goals. She introduces a six-factor framework that leaders and managers who develop organization-wide learning initiatives can use to create top-notch microlearning strategies to fit their organizations’ learning needs. She also offers designers a set of seven principles (tool capacity, context, global equity, conciseness, meaningful media, action, and overuse) for creating microlearning solutions that work.Packed with real-world stories, tips from experts in the field, activities, and tools and templates in every chapter, Maximizing the Power of Microlearning provides foundational, research-based information in a relaxed, accessible style.As the microlearning landscape continues to evolve, professionals at all levels need clarity and guidance about what microlearning really is. In this book, Robyn offers that clarity. She addresses confusion head-on and provides insights, strategies, and practical advice to L&D professionals looking to improve learning experiences and business outcomes.

Maximizing the Power of Microlearning

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Invest in Leaders at All Levels as a Key Part of Your Business Strategy Drawing on nearly three decades of experience across sales operations, technology consulting, and talent development, Tina Schust Robinson offers a much-needed reimagining of leadership development. She guides all leadership investors—from founders, executives, and frontline managers to those doing the hands-on design and delivery work—toward a more holistic and successful development approach. Making a powerful business case for investing intentionally in leaders, Tina explores why leadership investment is a crucial aspect of any business strategy and what characteristics define a good leader. She shows how leadership investors can craft initiatives that are tied to their organization’s and employees’ specific needs, sustainable over time, and highly effective. Moving beyond quick fixes and one-off programs, Robinson makes a practical case for why investing intentionally in leaders is a crucial aspect of any business strategy.This book shares Tina’s one-to-one, one-to-many, and one-to-all leadership investment framework. It demonstrates how organizations can pursue coaching and mentoring for individuals, improve leadership training for groups, and develop a comprehensive strategy to address leadership development throughout the talent life cycle. Interviews with successful corporate and nonprofit leaders and talent development pros bring the three-pronged framework into action. Checklists, assessments, and exercises allow leadership investors to apply the framework immediately and tailor their solutions to specific audiences and business needs. Whether you’re leading a team or shaping an entire organization, this book will change how you think about leadership—and the return it can deliver when you invest wisely.

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