Training 2025 Conference Recap

Last week, I attended the Training 2025 Conference in Orlando. I always try to review my notes shortly after an event like this to identify key takeaways while my memory is fresh. As is always the case at conferences, it’s great to catch up with folks I haven’t seen in a while and meet folks I previously only knew online. I also met lots of new people and had worthwhile conversations.

I know not everyone can attend these in-person events (and even if you do, it’s impossible to attend all the sessions that look interesting). But I hope that you can get a little taste of the Training 2025 Conference from my notes.

Don’t Forget the Magic Sauce: 5 Crucial Ingredients for Unforgettable Training

Katie Greenman and Jon Gordan

Katie and Jon’s work focuses on live training, both in person and virtual. They shared five crucial ingredients for creating memorable training experiences. These ingredients emphasize the human aspects of training, particularly in live and virtual settings, focusing on belongingness, clarity, challenge, joy, and authenticity. One key point was that every 5-7 minutes in a training you should have a connection point for people to connect with others or reflect and connect the content to their own experiences.

Keynote: Curiosity, Compassion, and Change: Leading with Stories

Kandice Cole and Lee Keylock

In this keynote, they demonstrated the concept of a “Story Exchange”–telling someone else’s story as if it were your own–as a tool for building empathy and transforming perceptions. The keynote speakers modeled telling each others’ stories, and then we tried it ourselves to get first-hand experience. It was an interesting experience, and it did help make some new connections. I can see how their organization uses this to increase empathy, especially within a longer program and more active facilitation.

Unlock the Magic of Storytelling: Enchant Your Learners and Transform Your Characters

Meredith Singleton

I sometimes attend other sessions about storytelling and scenarios just to see how other folks are talking about this topic, rather than with the goal of necessarily learning anything new myself. One thing I found interesting about this session was how much she emphasized iteration to refine the characters, plot, and other story elements. Her organization uses a longer time frame to create stories in order to allow more time to gather feedback and repeatedly iterate to improve their designs.

Creating Custom Learning Interactions Without Writing Code

Jeff Batt

Jeff Batt is often on the leading edge of using AI in L&D work, and this session was no exception. He demonstrated how to use AI tools like Cursor and Lovable to create custom learning interactions without extensive coding knowledge. Even though you don’t need to know how to code, you’re still the director with AI tools. It’s important to take it step by step. Don’t try to build a whole app from a single prompt. Start with basic functionality, then add features and components one-by-one. Jeff showed some practical examples like portfolio sites, interactive videos, and custom to do list apps.

I think this is too complex for the typical user (you need to really break down the user experience and describe what you want explicitly). But it’s interesting to think about the possibilities to create an app or interaction when you can’t find exactly what you want in existing tools.

Dine Around Mixer

These conferences include an opportunity to go out to dinner with a group from the event. I participated in this at TechLearn previously, and I would definitely register again. I was in a group led by Amy Morissey of Artisan Learning. We had six people for a dinner in Disney Springs. The food was good, and the conversation was great. I appreciated the opportunity to have longer informal conversations over dinner.

Keynote: Collaboration, Communication, and Leadership: Orchestrating Excellence

Sarah Hicks

Tuesday started out with a keynote by Sarah Hicks, a conductor with the Minnesota Orchestra. The keynote used orchestra conducting as a metaphor for leadership and collaboration. She highlighted the importance of individual roles within a collective effort and how different conducting and leadership styles affect the performance. She also brought in a string quartet to show how conducting leads without words and had several volunteers try conducting themselves. I heard multiple people talk about how much they enjoyed this keynote, and I think she did a great job breaking down the topic of conducting in a way that people with no experience could understand and relate to it.

Accessibility Testing for Non-Testers

Chrisanna Paxton McMillin

I was fortunate to get to spend quite a bit of time with Chris at this event, and it was lovely to have a longer conversation with her over a meal. In her session, she shared a 5-step process for improving accessibility with important features to check.

• Color
• Language
• Media
• Structure
• Testing

One tip: Use the alt text as the file name for images you will reuse. That lets you save the alt text right with the image even without more complex media library. Plus, some authoring tools pull the file name in as the default alt text, saving you time.

Fast, Focused, and Flexible: AI-Enhanced Video Creation from Camtasia

Matthew Pierce and Ryan Eash

I hadn’t actually looked at the AI features in Camtasia much, so I appreciated this overview of what’s possible. I’m not really interested in the AI avatars (personally, I think they’re mostly a solution in search of a problem). However, the AI background noise removal is a genuinely useful tool. I’ll use the AI dynamic captions sometimes for social media posts too.

Celebrating Judy Hale

On Tuesday, there was a smaller reception celebrating Judy Hale’s decades of contributions to the field of L&D and the Training conferences. She shared some stories from early in her career and talked about how she has persisted through challenges. Judy was very clear that she’s not retiring, even if she will be reducing her travel schedule. She has two more books coming out this year, and continues to write her email newsletter and do other work.

Cultivate Connection, Belonging & Engagement in Virtual Training

Kassy LaBorie

Kassy had lots of energy for her session, which was a great way to start Day 3 of the conference. She talked about combining engagement and technology to “create an experience worthy of [your audience’s] engagement.” It was helpful to me to see how she used Aha slides for different interactions. She also showed several activities that could be used in virtual training. One activity I’m sure I can use is “Image Connect”: showing a series of pictures and asking people to identify which one they are and why. This would be a more fun warmup activity than the typical “what’s the weather like where you are” that I often use at the start of webinars.

My session: Set the Stage: Make Training Relevant and Authentic with Scenarios

I had a great turnout for my session. The room was long and skinny, as you can see in the top image above. I hate having to speak when the back of the room is so far away. But overall, the session went well. We did some group brainstorming for specific details in scenarios using Slido, and it’s always fun to see what ideas people come up with to bring a story to life.

AI for ID: AI-Supported Instructional Design for Elearning

Garima Gupta

Garima is doing all sorts of cool things with AI, so I picked her session for the 3-hour hands-on clinic. She shared ideas on how we can use AI at each stage of the ADDIE process to support our work.

A few standout ideas:

• Create a fillable needs analysis template in ChatGPT. You can actually generate an HTML form in ChatGPT, not just the text and questions that you have to build yourself in another tool.
• NotebookLM has an interactive mode now. Instead of just listening to the podcast, you can interrupt it and join the conversation. Use your voice to ask questions, and the podcast voices will answer with just a slight lag.
  • If you haven’t seen NotebookLM before, I have a sample NotebookLM podcast in my recap from another conference.
• Use AI to impersonate stakeholders or learners based on a persona or description. When you can’t get access to your learners directly, this might be helpful. It’s clearly not a full substitute for actual conversations with real people, but it can help you examine things from other perspectives, especially for general topics where the AI likely has more training data.

Travel challenges

Lots of travel plans were thrown off by weather both coming and going from the conference. I know those of us from North Carolina were all anxious to fly home into the winter storm. My own flight was delayed, so I didn’t get home until after midnight Wednesday night. It made for a very long day! But overall, I’m really glad I could attend this conference and make so many valuable connections.