Tony Bingham delivered the annual ASTD report for 2012. He highlighted the dynamic changes recently taken by the organization. The first that I noted was the organizational vision, mission, and strategies
ASTD Vision
Create a world that works better.
ASTD Mission
Empower professionals to develop knowledge and skills successfully.
The ASTD Strategies
Extend ASTD’s Reach and Influence
Care for our People
Care and Nurture Community
Achieve Operational Excellence
Drive Engagement
Create, Collect, and Deliver Relevant and Useful Content
Deliver an Enriching Customer Experience
Bingham spent time discussing each of the strategies in detail. For example, content is essential to the ASTD mission. Our members and customers expect vetted content. Content is important in community context.
Bingham took time to discuss the new model of ASTD that was rolled out in 2011. One of the core pieces of this new model is the communities of practice. ASTD has nine communities of practice:
- Career Development
- Government
- Higher Education
- Human Capital
- Learning and Development
- Learning Technologies
- Sales Enablement
- Senior Leaders and Executives
- Global HRD
Each community of practice has a community of practice manager responsible for engaging the community, enriching the content, ensuring relevance, and ensuring endurance and scalability. Communities of practice include tools for collaboration such as wikis and blogs. Centers of interest are subsets of communities of practice and will focus on special topics for the community. Members are encouraged to go to the Communities of Practice Website and join communities they are interested in.
Bingham touted the ASTD Job bank, a great place for finding training-related jobs.
He also introduced the Next Level too to help chapters succeed. We will certainly be examining it as we set our vision for the future.
Here is a video, so you can learn more about ASTD.
