IACET Blog

Ken Brown shares his strategy for quickly identifying a partipant's individual teaching style in only 99 seconds!

Virtual reality is sweeping the nation and savvy executives are already seeing it as an innovative tool to train their workforce. Almost every article concerning enterprise use cases for virtual reality lists training as one of the easiest ways companies can use this exciting new technology to improve their business.

The shift to blended and online training has become a fixture in most organizations and the next generation of death by PowerPoint has emerged... death by voiceover PowerPoint. This type of training is often seen in the form of animated PowerPoint slides with limited opportunities for interaction. As a tried and true classroom facilitator, I would cringe at the voiceover PowerPoints that would come my way and long for the days of facilitator-led interaction. I would ask myself if this was truly learning or just a means to crunch the budget and check the box that training was delivered. If it’s the latter, why even expend resources at all?

Born after 1996, our newest generation is on the workforce horizon: Generation Z. Also called GenZ, iGen, and the Cloud Generation, these post-millennial teens were the first to conduct childhood friendships on portable devices. They’ve mastered the art of achieving an entire conversation with an image (emojis). Independent, pragmatic, stubborn and always in a rush, Generation Z will bring a new challenge to corporate professional development. That’s if they arrive as workers on the corporate scene at all. Most reports say over 75 percent of GenZ wants to start their own company and not work for others. How will they want to be trained?

A wise teacher once said, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink no more than you can lead a student to knowledge and make him think.” Motivating students is one of the great challenges any teacher faces in any educational environment whether online or in the classroom. In this article, we will explore five keys to unlocking an adult student’s motivation to learn. Those keys are expertise, empathy, enthusiasm, clarity and cultural responsiveness. ¹ This article will explore empathy.