What we learnt at AITD 2016: Day 1

Just call me a roving learning reporter – checking in from the final day of the AITD conference!

For those outside of Australia, AITD stands for the Australian Institute of Training & Development. It’s been an action packed few days, which started on Wednesday delivering a pre-conference workshop on “Measuring ROI: Evaluation and Measurement techniques for Learning and HR Professionals” – thanks to the ROI Institute for their support on this.

The two-day AITD conference then kicked off yesterday with Donald Clark’s opening session providing a run down of the last 2,500 years of learning history – fascinating stuff. There were some great break out sessions including one around the innovation challenges and opportunities in learning, a fantastic panel on personal branding that Michelle Ockers hosted, and an interesting session from Simon Terry on Working Out Loud. Big shout out to the Samsung and Learning Plan presenters, bridging the knowing – doing gap. Music to my ears! The final keynote of the day came from Ger Driesen from the Netherlands who shared how Van Gogh has inspired his thinking around learning.

Have a watch of my vlog below for some more detail on the key takeaways from AITD 2016: Day 1.

My keynote session on how to navigate the learning transfer minefield was the opening session today – so I look forward to sharing more with you on this. For now you can check out the #AITD2016 backchannel on Twitter to stay up to date with the latest news from the conference.

Congratulations and thanks to Elizabeth and Neil at the AITD for the conference they have created.

Header photo credit to the talented Blair Rorani (@blairrorani) who has been providing illustrations from the conference on the Twitter backchannel.

Emma Weber is a recognized authority on the transfer of learning. As CEO of Lever – Transfer of Learning, she has helped companies such as Telstra, Oracle and BMW deliver and measure tangible business results from learning. Emma has also been a guest speaker at learning effectiveness conferences worldwide and authored the hugely successful book Turning Learning into Action. Much more detail around the issues and solutions examined in this article are available in the book – please feel free to download a free chapter.