Future Followers, Let Me Introduce You to Yourselves and Us

Future blog followers, let me introduce you to yourselves and us.  Currently, we have one follower (me) but in our defense it is only our second day in business.  Although you haven’t found us yet, we know you will.  Millions of you exist and work in every industry, commercial and public, big and small globally.  You are experts at endless and varying topics and your job is to teach it.  You don’t teach employees though – just everyone else.

Many of you are internal employee training crossovers with responsibilities that now span employee, channel and customer learning.  Many are business professionals in marketing or operations with non-employee training responsibilities and minimal training and learning experience.  Still more of you are dedicated to providing industry and job specific continuing education, professional developments, certification and accreditation programs.  Many of you provide training to segments of the federal, state and local populations or students at any level.  You may be an executive with profit/loss responsibility, an instructional designer using the latest gamification techniques, LMS administrator, e-Commerce expert, virtual instructor, project manager, app creator, LCMS guru, support engineer or anywhere in-between.

You all have something else in common.  Since your training and learning efforts, of any size, shape, language or complexity, are for non-employees, there is always an element of “voluntary” with your user base.  You have to attract users, get them to want to spend time, money or both, and entice them to keep coming back.  This is very different than rolling out a mandatory internal employee compliance program.  In the voluntary scenario, you are no longer good enough to rest on your instructional design background.  You need to be a social media wizard, know that SEO is not an executive position, forget the time of desktops, e-Commerce savvy, mobile focused, Shark Tank kind of training and learning professional.  You should be called Instructional Marketers, Business Instructionalist or something like that.

In the industry today there is no centralized place to go to get help with all that.  The greatest and least of us have to piece the information together from the scant efforts of integrated talent focused vendors, analysts, publications or non-learning industry sources.  We’re here to solve these problems and provide clarity, direction, help and trusted advice.

Welcome to Talented Learning.  Talented Learning is a media, research and consulting organization dedicated to the advancement of all aspects of non-employee, extended enterprise learning solutions.  Our daily blog publishes the latest news, technology, case studies, education and vendor research that is useful to anyone training non-employee populations.    Our research and daily posts help organizations at every stage of the extended enterprise learning technology lifecycle from business case development, requirements and program identification, technology selection, deployment, marketing, advertising and continuous improvement and growth.

We’re the one place on the Internet dedicated to Instructional Marketers in all their flavors. Nice to meet you.

Thanks for reading and see you tomorrow.