20 Ways for L&D Professionals to Spend Use-or-Lose Budget Before December 31

The holidays are fast approaching, which means the Train Like A Champion 1-word resolution post will soon be here. Before we get to resolutions, however, we have some ideas for you in the event you find yourself with some extra funds that need to be spent before your finance team can close out the books for 2019.

Books for Your Professional Library

While you can always browse our list of must-read books for any L&D professional, a few more have come to my attention in the past year, including:

Microlearning: Short and Sweet (Karl Kapp and Robyn Defelice)
Interact and Engage: 50+ Activities for Virtual Training, Meetings and Webinars (Kassy Laborie and Thomas Stone)
Dare to Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration in Work and Life (Allison Holzer, Sandra Spataro and Jen Grace Baron)
The eLearning Designer’s Handbook: A Practical Guide to the eLearning Development Process for New eLearning Designers (Tim Slade)
Digital Kindness: Being Human in a Hyper-connected World (Lauren Hug)

Handy Gadgets

There are a few little gadgets that can make any trainer’s life a little more fun, including:

A basic PowerPoint remote to advance your slides without standing behind the podium
A fancy PowerPoint remote that does some cool tricks
A Bluetooth/wireless speaker for playing video or music during a session
A really good power bank to re-charge your devices when you can’t find an outlet
A good travel backpack for your computer
Mr. Sketch Markers (I know they’re not really an electronic gadget, but I had to sneak them into this list somehow!)

Cool Online Tools

Snagit for screen capturing and more
Camtasia for video editing
Soapbox for creating your in-person training sessions in about 5 minutes
Storyline for rapid authoring of elearning

Professional Development Opportunities

Take an employee out for a cup of coffee and some informal coaching (formal training isn’t always the answer!)
Join your local ATD chapter
ATD TechKnowledge (February 5-7, 2020)
Learning Solutions 2020 (March 31, 2020 – April 2, 2020)
ATD 2020 International Conference and Expo (May 17-20, 2020)

What did I miss? If you have extra use-or-lose money budgeted for this year, how would you spend it?

Brian Washburn

administrator

Brian is an author, a sought-after speaker, and an experienced instructional designer who has been a passionate member of the learning and development field for more than two decades. His work has been published in TD magazine, and he was named a Top Young Trainer by Training Magazine in 2011. Brian is the author of two books: What’s Your Formula? Combine Learning Elements for Impactful Training and Instructional Design on a Shoestring.
He is the visionary behind Soapbox, our automated instructional design tool that creates instructor-led training programs in under 10 minutes.
Over his career, Brian has designed and facilitated numerous training programs for a wide range of organizations, including a global training program for a Fortune 500 company and a global train-the-trainer program for Management Sciences for Health.
Brian holds an MA in Organizational Development from Antioch University.
Brian is always available to chat about learning & development and to talk about whether Endurance Learning can be your training team’s “extra set of hands”.

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