During and following my early 2024 brush with death, reflecting on my hospitalization and being again sidelined for awhile, I discovered that "productivity anxiety" was one reason I had continued to retain stress, despite making numerous lifestyle changes to slough it off. Then, a few weeks ago, Paul and I attended a Village Square event called "Lost & Found: A frank conversation about a generation of struggling young adults."
While the panelists discussed opinions on why many young adults are so anxious, a couple of things were clear to me:
Many adult parents feel pressed to work harder to get ahead but earn relatively low salaries or hourly rates.
Parents also face inflationary trends and a diminished value of their dollars, while also feeling increasingly diminished in value as human beings.
As a result, parents often absorb the beliefs that to be of value, they must do more and do it better with less time. They then transmit these beliefs to their children, which perpetuates the cycle and imprints anxiety as the familial and societal norm. It becomes a vicious cycle.
In the rapidly evolving field of instructional design, staying ahead of the curve requires leveraging the latest technological advancements. Have you ever wondered how much more efficient your design process could be with the help of generative AI? Generative AI (genAI) is emerging as an important new tool in our design toolkit, offering unprecedented opportunities to enhance the instructional design process. We’ll go through each step in the ADDIE model—Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation, and discuss how genAI can assist in your goal of making effective and efficient instruction.
In August, I attended the Annual Conference of the American Society of Association Executives in Cleveland, and was particularly struck by keynote speaker Adam Kinzinger's remarks about his experience as a U.S. Congressman.
When he voted to impeach former President Trump and subsequently expressed ongoing concern to colleagues, Kinzinger was censured by the Republican National Committee and eventually resigned. Kinzinger talked about how difficult it was to be abandoned by his tribe, especially when eleven of his extended family members sent him a certified letter telling him he no longer was a part of their family. Kinzinger also spoke of his desire to be a good father and strong example for his young son, all while enduring death threats towards his family because he persisted in standing for what he believed was right. Whatever one's opinion might be about his stance, standing for his truth in the face of such personal rejection is certainly an act of courage.
Layout is one of the most basic, fundamental and elementary skills for graphic designers. That’s because the same content can be arranged in a nearly infinite number of permutations. As a result, you have an incredible amount of latitude in determining the best approach, depending on the goals you are trying to achieve visually. Optimizing the proximity, relationships, spacing and hierarchy of visual elements to the numerous considerations like learner audience, emotional context, industry relevance and learning objectives, requires a careful, but deliberate balancing act by instructional designers and training professionals.
At a minimum, when you apply consistent spacing around objects, between lines of text, and throughout a course (or series of courses), you convey a higher level of professionalism. But there are even more important benefits. Things like the gains in curriculum efficacy, the reduction of cognitive dissonance among learners, or the increased confidence for project funders. Read on to learn how to improve your instructional design products using these techniques.
As I've spent time recently in physical therapy and occupational therapy, partnerships have been on my mind. Kelly, my occupational therapist at Be Strong Therapy, has two partners. And she's talked about how a partnership is a lot like a marriage. If that's the case, I reasoned, then perhaps there are similar principles with marriage that can help or hinder a partnership. Ever the scholar, I went outside of personal experience, and back to a literature source to revisit this concept more deeply about informal vs formal partnerships.
A new hiring strategy has emerged over the last year that has attracted the attention of many large companies like IBM, Dell, Bank of America, Walmart, Toshiba, Liberty Mutual and Bristol-Myers-Squibb. Skills-based hiring is a hot topic right now, because of the tight labor market. Businesses and nonprofits, including associations, are searching high and low to find alternative pools of qualified new hires outside the traditional four-year degree and “years of experience” that populate so many current job descriptions. Read on to learn how to better fill your candidate pipeline and avoid pitfalls with non-credentialed professions, by properly harnessing skills-based hiring.
