I just arrived in Denver and have checked into my hotel in preparation for the 2012 American Society for Training and Development International Conference and Exposition, better known as ASTD-ICE. This is a huge conference with 8,000 attendees from 70 different countries. This year’s program has about 330 sessions. These sessions are distributed across 8 content tracks and 3 industry tracks.
Here are the tracks as outlined by ASTD’s:
Eight content tracks:
- Career Development—includes both organizational and individual career planning.
- Designing & Facilitating Learning—covers both core and new, innovative approaches to design and facilitation.
- Global Human Resource Development—focuses on cultural diversity, globalization, localization, and best practices by region.
- Human Capital—encompasses coaching, mentoring, performance improvement, change management, managing the learning function, and talent management.
- Leadership Development—covers both individual and organizational development approaches.
- Learning Technologies—includes a range of core and new approaches to using technology tools for learning.
- Measurement, Evaluation, ROI—focuses on measuring the effectiveness of all types of programs (e.g. social learning, leadership development, etc.) as well evaluation strategies and ROI.
- Trends—covers the latest trends in the learning field.
Three industry tracks:
- Higher Education— directed at university faculty, deans, and education leaders.
- Government—sessions by and for government workers at all levels of government: Federal, State, and Local.
- Sales Enablement—programming for sales enablement professionals including sales trainers, coaches, leaders, and executives covering best practices, thought leadership, designing and developing, selling skills, and competencies.
Before I left for this conference, I promised that I would post as much as I could about the experiences I was having. This is the first post of a series of many more.
Tomorrow, I will be participating in a pre-conference workshop that I am very excited about. It is Interactive Techniques for Instructor-Led Training facilitated by Sivasailam Thiagarajan and Tracy Tagliati. It is intended to teach the principles and procedures of interactive training techniques and apply them to create and conduct learning activities that meet your training objectives, audiences, needs, and constraints. From what I understand, we will be exploring 60 interactive activities to be used in learning events. This will be a great series to follow up on the training Wyoming Extension recently had in Sundance.
On Sunday morning, I have the honor to attend the Chapter Leader Day. This is an opportunity to network with other chapter officers and benefit from their best practices. Just getting started in my new position as VP of Membership, I am eager to learn as much as possible. I will report out what I have learned.
Starting on Sunday afternoon, I will be fully engaged in the breakout sessions. I have already selected the sessions I wish to attend in the wonderful iPad application that ASTD has put together. Last year, I downloaded and used the application, and was thoroughly impressed. The first thing I looked for this year was this application. I am glad I found it, it is a tremendous time saver. Other organizations could really benefit from using this application to support their conferences.
For each session, I plan to faithfully log my notes in Evernote. If you are not using Evernote, you should. It is one of those powertools. The great thing about Evernote is that I can also capture and search through text on images.
Finally, once my trip is done, I will take the time to knock out a trip report to share with my coworkers. It helps me pull all my thoughts together as well as help me set my future direction.
Man, am I excited about this conference.
I hope you tune in for the rest of this series.
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