Research Council

 Listen to the Chapter's new Employee Learning Week promotional Public Service Announcement. Thanks to Scott Melanson and Debi Green for their work in producing it. (PS. This is the "long" version.)

Congratulations to Pierce Transit, and to our own Kelly Johnston, winners of one of the coveted National ASTD BEST Awards. "The ASTD BEST Awards recognize organizations that demonstrate enterprise-wide success as a result of employee learning and development. We are looking for organizations that get it: They use the learning function as a strategic business tool to get results."

I encourage every ASTDps member to read Tony Bingham's open letter, "Does Training Work," currently posted on the National ASTD home page. The letter comes after three major -- and negative -- articles have appeared, each questioning the effectiveness of training, in three major national newspapers, USA Today, the New York Times (I posted an earlier blog on this article), and the Washington Post. Links to the three articles are embedded in the letter.

If the news wasn't depressing enough already, Nesweek magazine recently reported the United States has experienced its first-ever recorded decline in creativity scores since the data began to be collected. Read the complete article here.

Today's New York Times features on the front page, above the fold, an article on "Factories Ready to Hire, But Employers Find Skill Shortage." It looks like our Nation's Newspaper of Record has finally discovered the skills gap, something ASTD, including this Chapter, have been talking about for quite some time now. While you can read the whole article by clicking the link above, here is a key passage:

At the risk of saying I told you so ... I told you so!  And now I have mighty IBM backing me up. Via the Innovation Network, we learn that the recently released 2010 IBM Global CEO Study, based on interviews with 1500 top global business leaders, finds that "CEOs now realize that creativity trumps other leadership characteristics. Creative leaders are comfortable with ambiguity and experimentation.

 There is a great article about "Finding Profit From Investing In People" on the New York Times Econmix blog. The entry summarizes a study done by the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University entitled "Profit at the Bottom of the Ladder." (There is a link to the summary report embedded in the Economix entry.)