Get online professional development from IABC On Demand

Speakers: Edward Lundquist, Publisher and Editor in Chief, The Job of the Week and Mary Hills, Business Principal, HeimannHills Marketing Group  No matter what your job is, or how satisfied you are in your position, you owe it to yourself to keep your fingers on the pulse of the communication profession.    Learn how to monitor the current career opportunities and job openings.  Learn how to read and understand position descriptions to know what employers want, and see what skills are in demand today. Find out where you are on the IABC Career Roadmap, and figure out where you want to go, and how to get there. about the IABC Career Path Learn how to network with other professionals and why it's so important.   All attendees will receive helpful tips for job hunting and a list of job search sites.   Read more

Speaker: Brittany Barhite, Strategic Advisor, SocialChorus Time is running out...change your communication ways before it is too late.   Do you recognize these subject lines from marketing emails? Do your internal communications have similar clickbait messages to break through the noise and help employees pay attention to your content? The way employees want to receive information today has been shaped by their experiences as consumers. As internal communicators, we need to update our communications to resemble their consumer experience. Communication needs to happen in an easy to access, targeted, personalize, and relevant way. This session will help you start thinking like a marketer and adjust your internal communications strategy to be more effective. It's a consumer's world and it's TIME your employee messages reflect this. Read more

Speaker: Leslie Krohn, Chief Communications Officer/Director of Communications & Public Affairs, Argonne National Laboratory Working remotely is not a new concept, but now so many companies and organizations are making it a permanent work solution. While this is a welcomed shift for people who are use to conducting business online, it can be challenging for communicators who focus on shaping culture, especially when that type of work was usually for employees who everyday reported into a work location. Leslie's presentation will focus on ITS ABOUT TIME TO RETHINK how to change and influence culture in a remote environment. Read more

Speaker: Colin Ellis 2020 will be forever remembered as the year that organizations around the world finally embraced technology, which for too long had been held back by the behaviours and scepticism of senior managers.  However, embracing technology is one thing, ensuring that it enhances the communications channels in place to improve the way that people work together is quite another issues.  We have more communication tools at our disposal than ever before. We communicate more than we have ever done. Yet the quality of these communications has diminished with millions of emails and direct messages going unread every single day. Great leaders understand that effective communication is not one approach for all. It is nuanced and tailored to the needs of the individual.  This informative, engaging and entertaining speech introduces the principles and practicalities of variable communication and how it can enhance the way that people work together. Read more

Speaker: Kirsten Major, Communications Strategist, Josh Walker Digital Strategy Over the past decade, starting with major players such as Slack, Yammer, and Salesforce, there has been a movement to adapt and offer social media engagement-style platforms for enterprise communications. With Covid, the trend has accelerated. With this comes an unspoken, fatal-flaw level problem. Today's employees want a whole-person approach to work life. They expect engagement, recognition, stimulation, even recreation. New comms tools and intranets meet those needs with social media-style elements that mirror online life outside of work. Social media is paid for by advertising. The longer users spend on the platform, the more money can be made. Social media sites are built to circumvent executive-level decision-making brain function and appeal to our more survival-level brain directives. Everything we know about social media and effective focus tells us that their use causes catastrophic wastes of time at work...so why are we bringing them into our workplaces? Read more

Speaker: Catherine Ducharme, Co-Founder, Fluency Leadership Massive disruption and pervasive uncertainty vaulted the communications role and contribution right on stage, under the brightest of lights, in 2020. Never before have communicators been so valuable to their organizations, earning new equity as connectors, trusted advisors, employee advocates and thoughtful communicators. It has handed us a once-in-a-career opportunity to leap from strategic advisor to influential business advisor. The question now is how do we sustain and maximize this opportunity?   To be fully expressed business leaders, we can’t simply focus on the craft of communications, instead we need to seize the broader opportunity of leadership and what it means to lead through this new distributed, tumultuous reality. It’s about time to embrace a new language of leadership and build a heightened sense of self-awareness, clarity, curiosity and empathy.   This session outlines the leadership fluencies required to grow into this new space and multiply our influence as business leaders. Read more