Came across this great story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that talks about the value of belonging to associations. The article is targeted at healthcare workers, but the reporter states that professional associations outside your given industry add value to your career too. Laura French's story "Associate with Success" states:

"Training and education is another career track of interest to healthcare professionals. The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) has more than 130 chapters in the U.S. as well as members in more than 100 countries. ASTD offers the only certification in the training and development field: Certified Professional in Learning and Performance (CPLP). Visit www.astd.org for additional information."

Nice to see a reporter making the connection that professional associations add real value! And the reference to the CPLP credential by a reporter indicates that certification is growing in prominence and recognition.

Tags: astd, cplp, training, development, chapters

Categories: ASTD in the News | Chapters

(From investmentnews.com) Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Management last week unveiled a training program to help its 15,000 financial advisers develop a retirement income program for their clients.

As part of the program, the firm has announced a service that will allow its wealth management clients with at least $250,000 in assets to transfer funds from their Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. cash management account into a Bank of America Corp. deposit account on a periodic basis to facilitate their retirement income stream.

Using the service, clients can access their retirement income at a BofA ATM or office. Merrill Lynch advisers will also be able to track their retiree clients' spending habits.

Read more.

Tags: business news, training, financial sector

Categories: The Economy

The chief executive of New York-based Deloitte L.L.P., one of the nation’s largest accounting and consulting firms, said Wednesday that following through with plans to build a $300 million training facility during the worst recession in 50 years is actually "a bullish and smart move."

"Make no mistake, when this recession ends the war for talent will resume, and when it does, Deloitte University will be a big differentiator and powerful draw," CEO Barry Salzberg told the group at the groundbreaking for the firm’s training and conference facility in Westlake.

"It’s almost the perfect time for us to do this," he said. "The whole philosophy of building a learning and development facility like we’re doing is to make sure it’s embedded in our culture in good times or bad."

Read the full release.

Tags: training, recession, new economy, learning, development

Categories: News | The Economy

(From Boston.com) CAMBRIDGE - The students practice networking and hone “elevator pitches,’’ entrepreneurial ideas summarized in under a minute. They don blindfolds for team-building activities. Failure is met with candid critiques about their leadership styles.

This isn’t business school. It’s a new engineering class at one of the premier engineering universities in the world, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tags: colleges and universities, jobs, careers, training, leadership, mit

Categories: News

Austin, TX (PRWEB) -- Profiles International, a global leader in employment evaluation and human resource management assessment tools, has released a report identifying eight signs of incompetent managers. Along with the signs of managerial incompetence, the report also offers practical remedies for management training to help managers achieve greater success. Highlighting information gleaned from its research into America's Most Productive Companies, this report emphasizes that the most productive companies are more proactive than their peers when it comes to identifying and developing effective management.

Read the white paper.

Tags: manager, leadership, training, skills gap

Categories: News | Research

(From boston.bizjournals.com) As unemployment has crept higher, colleges and universities have found themselves working harder to help alumni who have lost their jobs, and the latest wave of former students finding their way back are those who are older.

Bob Wally, assistant director for alumni career services at the College of the Holy Cross, said that when the economy first plummeted, he first was meeting with alumni who had graduated 10 or fewer years ago.

Read more.

Tags: colleges and universities, jobs, careers, training

Categories: News

(From thegovmonitor.com) The Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, today announced that all apprenticeships and vocational education training packages will be reviewed to ensure that they include relevant green skills by March next year, and that all courses will be revised to include the new green skills by the end of 2010.

Read the entire article.

Tags: training, business news, australia, green, green training

Categories: International | News

There will not be enough trained workers to fill the anticipated 1 million vocational jobs available in Illinois in the next years, according to a report released Wednesday by The Workforce Alliance and Skills2Compete-Illinois, not-for-profit job advocacy organizations.  

The report projects that 45 percent of all available Illinois jobs between 2006 and 2016 will be in the middle-skill level, which generally requires education and training beyond high school but does not require a bachelor’s degree. In that period of time the number of these jobs will outpace the number of workers who have the proper training, leaving jobs vacant.

But the report caused at least one local expert to raise a question.

“This [report] does strike me as an accurate picture of where job growth is going to happen,” said Robert Bruno, professor of labor and industrial relations at University of Illinois-Chicago. However, “the projections are somewhat hopeful.”

Read the full article.

Tags: illinois, middle skills, skills gap, training, education

Categories: News

Tags: rapid learning, training, federal government, learning

Categories: Government

Women who own small businesses will be able to use a new online U.S. SmallBusiness Administration training course to learn how to identify and takeadvantage of federal contracting opportunities. The new training course, WinningFederal Contracts: A Guide for Women Entrepreneurs, is part of an ongoinggovernment-wide initiative to promote opportunities for women-owned businessesin the area of government contracting. This free online tutorial is a practical and easy to use guide that walks awoman-owned small business through the contracting process. SBA is committed toensuring that women-owned businesses receive at least 5 percent of federalcontracts and believes better training opportunities are central to meeting thisgovernment-wide goal. Read the full release.

Tags: public sector, entrepreneur, private sector, women, training

Categories: News