Portland, OR – 11 March 2021 – OpenSesame, the elearning innovator, announced the addition of The Galvanizing Group to its popular OpenSesame Plus subscription. The partnership expands OpenSesame’s curated library of courses designed to sharpen critical business relationship building skills.

“Strong, trust-based relationships are key to personal and professional success,” said Patrick Galvin, Chief Galvanizer of The Galvanizing Group. “Relationship building is integral to the advancement of successful and productive teams in every industry worldwide. Together with OpenSesame, we will transform organizations by transforming the way people build and maintain relationships.”

Applying the timeless principles of Patrick Galvin’s best-selling book, The Connector’s Way, The Galvanizing Group helps high-performance companies and teams grow bottom line results through better internal and external relationships. In OpenSesame, it sees a global partner committed to developing online learning programs that deliver a systematic and measurable approach to business relationship building.

“Relationship building—specifically, connecting—is a skilled activity that can be learned, improved, and measured,” said Spencer Thornton, Senior Vice President of Curation at OpenSesame. “In an increasingly virtual world, making meaningful connections is more important than ever.  We are delighted to make The Galvanizing Group’s interactive and user-friendly elearning courses available to our OpenSesame Plus subscription customers.” 

“Everything in business is connected to other people,” concluded Galvin. “We’re thrilled to be working with OpenSesame and its team of smart and talented individuals who are committed to building strong relationships and serving the needs of its customers and publishers.”

###

About OpenSesame

OpenSesame helps develop the world’s most productive and admired workforces. With the most comprehensive catalog of elearning courses from the world’s top publishers, we are here to help you every step of the way, from finding courses, mapping them to your core competencies, syncing them with your LMS to increasing utilization and improving your L&D programs. Not only will you have the flexibility of multiple purchasing options from OpenSesame, you’ll find it simple to use and administer your elearning courses. To learn more, visit www.opensesame.com.

About The Galvanizing Group

The Galvanizing Group, www.thegalvanizinggroup.com, is a Portland, Oregon-based learning and development company that helps high-performance companies and teams grow bottom line results through better internal and external relationships. Our innovative coaching, training, and online learning programs deliver a systematic and measurable approach to business relationship building that is used by growing businesses and Fortune 100 companies selling products and services B2B and B2C.

The post OpenSesame galvanizes business relationship building through expanded partnership with The Galvanizing Group appeared first on OpenSesame.

In this era of digital disruption, businesses need to make plans to match their mission and vision. Leadership plays a vital role in making significant impact on the strategic management process. Competent leadership is of utmost importance to guide the organization through prodigious changes. To make leaders future-ready, new skills to improve behaviors and competencies are needed to be incorporated in leadership development programs. For aspiring leaders, it is paramount to learn and adapt to new conducts to deal with unforeseen business challenges.

Only 56% of organizations take steps to ensure overall goals of leaders are closely aligned with business goals of the organizations

– Leadership Development Research, Brandon Hall Group, 2019

As L&D departments are looking for new methodologies to modernize their leadership programs, let’s dig deep into the characteristics that make up for an ensemble to take up leadership role and bring agility from strategizing to executing:

Leadership and Management

Willingness to learn and self-awareness activities enable leaders to effectively reach across teams and move strategically into the layers of business to unlock success. With hierarchical structure being dissolved rapidly, it becomes necessary for leaders to go beyond dedicated role and undertake tasks cross-functionally. This leads to more employees take up responsibilities and learn various leadership qualities in order to supersede their job functions.

Critical Thinking

Unquestionably the most critical function of a leader’s role is thinking. A leader needs to plan and foresee circumstances before anyone else to ensure that the steps taken derive results which are best suited for the business. Definitive methodology helps in breaking down the problem, implement strategy and generate alternative solutions through critical thinking. Our Ultimate CLO Toolkit for Leaders lists the resources that support them navigate through this process.

Communication

Effectively transferring information is the cornerstone for any business accomplishment. The productivity, results, morale, relationships and expectations are directly affected basis how the communication has taken place. To ensure worthwhile communication, writing also plays a very important role because a lot of messaging happen over emails, collaterals and other documents. Sharing information regarding the project within the team is also a major part of a leader’s role, where effective communication becomes crucial.

Diversity and Inclusion

Leaders that display company’s culture in their work ethics tend to influence more workforce than those who don’t. Portraying organizational values by leaders build trust in employees and shows their improved ability to recruit and retain talent with better leadership effectiveness. Good corporate leaders identify the importance of diversity and inclusion to fuel enthusiasm and encourage the teams involved to outperform their tasks. 

Project Management

Leadership development must have a direct influence in grasping the issues behind the problem. In addition to that, scenario planning is also one of the most efficient tools for project planning. As part of this process, leaders need to focus upon preparing various scenarios of what the business might look like in the coming years. Once these scenarios are outlined, teams can work backwards to achieve the objectives of the best-suited scenarios.

Sales and Customer Support

Customer needs are constantly growing and changing even rapidly, and companies are bound to meet those expectations. Effective leaders empower teams by not only improving team’s potential but also increasing their current performance in existing roles. One of the prime area of concerns of leaders in sales and customer support is to focus and enhance communication skills. For being a strong communicator, it becomes essential for the workforce to stay focused on delivering the right message. 

Team Building

Working across cross-functional teams is a very common ask for leaders. This is beneficial from a business standpoint as it brings diverse minds to pool in for solutions on a specific need. Leaders work in such scenarios that push the workforce outside of their functional roles to develop strategies and achieve productive results. At times when challenges surface, the right leadership style outweighs obstacles to focus on better ideas and outcomes.

Based on the requirements and business demands, organizations need to understand the value of leadership styles, and proliferate communication more effectively. For better understanding, download our free eBook: High-potential Leadership Programs that talks about developing the right kind of leadership skills for a rock-solid talent bench.

Infopro Learning, a leading provider in corporate training outsourcing and human capital transformation, helps organizations create an exceptional employee and customer experience through bespoke eLearning solutions. For more than 25 years, the company has designed and implemented engaging learning experiences that attract, develop and retain talent across the entire employee lifecycle. To learn more, visit www.infoprolearning.com.

About the author: Divesh Srivastava is currently working as the Marketing Manager at Infopro Learning, a leading provider in corporate training outsourcing and human capital transformation. He has over 5 years of experience in marketing strategy development and is a certified Content Marketing professional. His interest lies in conducting market researches to understand learning business needs and develop best practices to benefit organizations and amplify their return on investment.

The post Leadership Development – Bridging the Gap from Strategy to Execution appeared first on OpenSesame.

Picking Up the Phone – If you text me, I can answer you when I feel like it and while I’m doing 6 other things at once.  If you email me, I can ignore you. But if you call me and I’m foolish enough to answer, you will have the closest thing to my undivided attention as it’s possible to get.  

Sending a Thank You Note in the Mail – I know it hurts your hand to write more than two sentences longhand.  I also know your handwriting is barely legible even to you. But even a typed thank-you note that arrives in the mail is 17 times better than a thank-you email – which most people don’t bother with either, by the way.  The last person I hired got the job for several reasons, but one of those reasons was because he sent us thank-you notes in the mail. Am I easily bought? Absolutely. And so are a lot of other people.

Paying Attention While Someone Else is Talking – That’s my super polite way of saying TURN OFF YOUR PHONE DURING YOUR MEETINGS!!!!  Don’t turn it to vibrate, because that buzzing in your pocket (or on your wrist) will make you start to salivate the second it happens.  “Who’s calling, it must be important, someone loves me I have to answer it now!!!!” If you want others to take you seriously, you might need to give them some indication that the stuff they say isn’t boring the crap out of you.  

Meeting Face-to-Face – Here’s one where technology is currently failing us, since exactly every time I’ve seen someone on a conference call they’ve put it to mute and are either scrolling through Facebook or catching up on emails until they feel the need to unmute themselves, say “Totally agree,” and then hit mute and go back to not paying attention.  I know that conference calls and virtual meetings are occasionally necessary, but they will never be more effective than face-to-face interaction.

Basically, if you can force yourself to put 5% more effort in than everyone around you, you’ll win respect or customers or a promotion or whatever it is you’re looking for.  That will always be true. At least, until we turn ourselves into cyborgs – at which point, just so you know, I’m done with all this. I’ll find an island somewhere and farm coconuts instead.  And be happy, too, until the cyborgs come for me.  

For more information on business practices check out available courses from The Jeff Havens Company in the OpenSesame course catalog.

About the Author: Jeff Havens is a speaker, author, and business growth expert who has spoken to over 1,000 companies and associations across the Americas and Asia. The mission of his training company, The Jeff Havens Company, is to provide serious solutions in a seriously funny way through their video-based courses that tackle everything from industrial safety to corporate ethics to customer service, and all of them are as entertaining as they are educational. Jeff is a contributing writer to Fast Company, Entrepreneur, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal; and has been featured on CNBC and Fox Business. For more information, email info@jeffhavens.com, or visit JeffHavens.com.

The post 4 Old School Business Practices That Still (And Will Always) Work appeared first on OpenSesame.

I can’t tell you what your new strategy is going to be.  But I do know how you’ll get there.  

Solicit Everyone’s Input – You can’t change your strategy if you don’t have any ideas about how to do it, and you can’t know which ideas are best unless you have some options to choose from.  So get everyone to think about what they’d like to see as you move forward. Not only will it get everyone thinking in the right direction, but it will also begin the process of getting your team to buy in to the idea that things are about to change.

See Which Ideas Overlap – Odds are you’ll have several different people come up with very similar ideas, and that might help you set your direction right from the beginning.

Have Some Messy Conversations – This is probably the most important step, and also (naturally) the one people tend to like the least.  Setting a new direction is not an easy thing to do, and the process is not simple and straightforward.  So prepare yourself for a few meetings that don’t result in concrete solutions, and accept the fact that big decisions generally take more than an hour of thought before the right answer presents itself.

See Which Ideas Survive – If you began this process with ten ideas, it’s likely that a few of them only have the support of one or two people.  It’s also likely that a few of them will turn out to be impractical, too expensive, or otherwise inappropriate. The ones left over are the ones that have proven themselves to be interesting and viable, and slowly you’ll start to see where you should be concentrating your time and attention.

Have Some More Messy Conversations – I think you see where this is going.

Continue Until You’ve Settled On A Strategy – Eventually, inevitably, you’ll figure out what you want to do.  That doesn’t mean everyone is going to be in perfect agreement – very few strategies have unanimous and unqualified approval – but it does mean you’ve analyzed all the possibilities, given everyone an opportunity to voice their support and concerns, and settled on something that the majority of your organization is excited to implement.  

Charting a new course is a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be a painful one.  As long as you’re willing to listen to others and open yourself up to the minor chaos of a few wide-ranging conversations, you’ll find what you’re looking for.

For more information on how to choose a new business strategy check out available courses from The Jeff Havens Company in the OpenSesame course catalog.

About the Author: Jeff Havens is a speaker, author, and business growth expert who has spoken to over 1,000 companies and associations across the Americas and Asia. The mission of his training company, The Jeff Havens Company, is to provide serious solutions in a seriously funny way through their video-based courses that tackle everything from industrial safety to corporate ethics to customer service, and all of them are as entertaining as they are educational. Jeff is a contributing writer to Fast Company, Entrepreneur, BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal; and has been featured on CNBC and Fox Business. For more information, email info@jeffhavens.com, or visit JeffHavens.com.

The post How to Choose A New Business Strategy appeared first on OpenSesame.

Prioritizing soft skills training

More than 35% of the average learning budget is tied directly or indirectly to soft skills and leadership development, with the majority being spent on content and content development. This raises some critical strategic questions on spending priorities. Now that you are spending more on content, what type of content do you need. Should it be spent on on updating internal resources, using off-the-shelf learning courses, bringing in a subject expert or creating stimulating experiences through role play and on-the-job experience?

Changing learning landscape

Werner reports that organizations that use a combination of learning methods are having a better response with learners, such as just classroom learning. Werner revealed that delivery of soft skill training in a formal, classroom environment has decreased from 65% to 47% in 2014, and expected to drop to just 40% by next year as other learning methods continue to be rated more highly by employees. While everything should not be necessarily outsourced to a third party vendor, learning programs should begin combining off-the-shelf content with traditional learning methods to respond to changing learner needs. Soft skill development is one of the top content categories where organizations are seeing better learner response and increased learner engagement and participation.

Mobile learning and employee driven learning

35% of L&D programs are currently not offering any mobile friendly courses for training. When it comes to soft skills, not having mobile access to support learners who are searching for content to fit their own work needs, this can be a missed opportunity for your organization. Offering easy to access learning content will support your learners while maximizing their soft skill development.

Conclusion

Nurturing employees soft skills is changing to be a more prominent priority as organizations rely more on these skills in today’s business environment. Traditional methods of in-house training and internally produced content is not necessarily the most effective way to deliver soft skills training anymore. Employees being able to access their own training quickly and on devices that readily available to them is producing a faster turnaround time and expediting training initiatives for employers.

To learn more about how you can develop your organization’s soft skills, watch the webinar recording here.

The post Developing Your Organization’s Soft Skills appeared first on OpenSesame.

The best way to prepare your IT security professionals for the new challenges faced in protecting network data is to train your them on security vulnerabilities and how to take action to decrease the likelihood of any data breach incidents at your company.

Many of these courses are available from IT University Online through OpenSesame, such as the Certified Information Systems Security Pro (CISSP) course or the popular Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) course. We highly recommend the CompTIA Security+ course series for your IT security team because these course offerings have always set the standard of foundational, non-vendor specific IT security knowledge and skills.

Furthermore, when looking for IT training, be sure to ask about how often content is updated to the constantly changing requirements and challenges.

Check out IT University Online, a leader in security elearning courses to best prepare today’s IT security professionals for the new challenges faced in protecting network data. Our courses are always updated to comply with changing certification requirements for different programs. No need to worry about training information being outdated.

The post Is Your Data Safe? Challenges in a Changing Security Environment appeared first on OpenSesame.

Align training with organization goals to establish a successful learning program. According to a Brandon Hall group study, 70% of companies that tie training to goals see an increase in profits. But, how can an organization actually do this?

The first step is to examine your core values and strategic goals and map core competencies for employees. In other words, based on core values and goals, are there any skills that all employees should have? For instance, Zappos has a strong inherent culture of providing excellent customer service; their mantra is even “Powered by Service.” To meet this goal, all employees undergo an intense customer service training program that includes shadowing experienced customer service representatives and learning best practices. Additionally, are there any skills that specific teams need?

Once you identify what skills are needed, you can start selecting content based on these core competencies that will achieve organization goals. For example, if your organization has the goal of providing excellent customer service, you might have an internal objective of responding to all support requests within 24 hours. In order to achieve this goal, relevant teams should have customer service training and communication skills. When browsing for content that can accomplish this, you might select courses like Excellence in Customer Service or Communicating on the Phone.

2. What metrics will you use to measure success?

Define the expectations for your training program for various stakeholders. What does your training audience expect? What does management expect? These metrics should be a combination of both quantitative and qualitative points. For example, quantitative metrics would include sales performance change and the effect on company turnover. Qualitative metrics would include learner response to courses and whether they feel that they apply training to their work. Creating metrics to evaluate your training program will help you determine whether your program is actually accomplishing its goals and will also help with measuring ROI.

3. What resources do you need for training?

Delve deep into answering this question to set a strong foundation for your program. Go beyond the financial considerations! Understand what IT resources you will need. Do you need to allocate workstations just for training? Do you have adequate IT support in the event that courses don’t work?

Consider what communication platforms your organization has and how you can leverage them to promote training. For instance, does your organization have Slack or another internal communication platform? If so, consider creating a channel on it for training purposes and regularly post updates and questions to gather feedback. If your organization has an intranet, would you be able to post learning updates on an already existing page or a new one? Determine who will be responsible for communications.

Identify what additional budget you may have for promoting elearning. For example, you may want to run a contest to incentivize learners by rewarding the department with the greatest participation. You may want to also motivate learners through prizes depending on your organization’s culture. By identifying what resources you have before beginning training, you can maximize these opportunities to create a successful learning program.

Creating a successful training program requires preparation. Answering these three questions can help you determine the objectives of your program, justify the program to those controlling budget and resources in your organization, as well as maximize your resources to increase learner utilization. You will be also be able to create a dialogue at your organization about what a successful learning program looks like. Naturally, the next step is developing your training program! As the leading provider of elearning courses, OpenSesame offers flexible options to maximize your budget, over 20,000 off-the-shelf courses, and compatibility with every LMS.

The post Top Three Questions to Ask Before Setting up Your L&D Program appeared first on OpenSesame.

Back to the Basics

No matter how proficient you may be in Excel, it is likely that you are still using only a sliver of Excel’s built-in tools. In the Introduction to Excel course offered by Atomic Learning, users are exposed to some of the softer but necessary components of Excel such as organization, formatting, and shortcuts to make formatting more efficient. Whether you are looking to explore how you can make your data beautiful or something as simple as locking documents with a password, this course will bring the basics to you in a full-circle.

Formulas

One of the components of Excel that made it revolutionary, formulas! The hundreds of formulas that excel offers range from basic organization tools like the COUNTIF and SUMIF functions to formulas designed to derive key metrics in statistical analysis. For more complicated formulas, there are courses that will provide users a step-by-step walk through troubleshooting and customization techniques. There are many options for Excel courses focused on formulas, so now it’s up to you to decide what parts of your spreadsheet you would like to automate.

Data Visualization

Now that you have learned how to organize and compute in Excel, let’s tell a story with your data. Charts, graphs, and models can all be used to add a visual component to your data. With specialized courses in Excel Charts, users will be able to find the best ways to display their data could drive more effective decision making. Not only can you optimize the way which your company’s data is presented through courses in Excel Charts, but you can also learn customization techniques so you can coordinate your Excel figures with associated documents in Microsoft Office.

These are only a few of the useful tools that users can learn from Excel Online courses. With 80% of Middle Skill-level jobs requiring Excel literacy, becoming familiar with Excel and the rest of the Microsoft Office suite is a must. Not only will becoming an Excel wiz make you a company asset, but it can also help you earn up to 18% more on average. Whether you are looking to learn the basics, or more advanced, specialized tools, there is a course for you. The OpenSesame course library contains a number of different individual courses and bundles for learning Microsoft Excel.

The post Microsoft Excel: Easier to Learn Than Ever Before appeared first on OpenSesame.

Research suggests trying to learn too much at one time is simply not working. Technology is advancing, attention spans are decreasing, and learning and development is struggling to keep up. Information is now more widely available, quicker to access, and easier to process. Could all of this mean long-form training models are becoming redundant?

With learners having less time available but more demands than ever, modern organizations are now looking to microlearning as their most effective learning solution to re-engage their workforce.

Here are 6 reasons why microlearning should be at the top of your learning agenda:

1. No more memory loss

Microlearning supports self-paced training and also overcomes the challenge of knowledge retention. Short, concise and agile material allows learners to quickly consume content immediately before it is needed, rather than trying to recall past training sessions from months before.

2. Increased relevance

Microlearning is usually 2-3 minutes in length, which means it has to be concise and specific. By breaking large topics up into targeted content, learners are able to easily search for information that is directly relevant to their needs.

3. Your learners use this learning strategy already

70% of employees make up the the ‘Google Generation’ who turn to search engines to get the information they need. As people increasingly access learning in small chunks, there’s an opportunity for L&D professionals such as you to make this a part of your ongoing training strategy.

4. Optimized for on-the-go learning

Give learners control by offering them the ability to train on the device of their choice, anytime, anywhere.

5. Let your learners take responsibility

Encouraging learners to take on the responsibility of recognizing their knowledge gaps is an essential part of creating a productive learning pathway. Microlearning encourages learners to define where they need help and gives them the ability to access useful content as they assess how efficient they are at delivering against certain tasks.

6. Learning that’s great to look at

Animation is more engaging than traditional forms of learning, increasing learner engagement and retention rates. This is what makes microlearning such a unique and exciting way to learn.

So, how would this look in practice?

The post Why Microlearning is the Hottest L&D Trend in 2017 appeared first on OpenSesame.