Interesting Training...

Pinnacol has a strong Learning and Development team that facilitates and provides all sorts of training opportunities for our employees. As Amy, one of our current Business Directors, has said, "We are a continually learning organization." This is something I also stress as new employees come on board.

I try to attend as many of the training sessions as my schedule allows, and yesterday I attended one that was a take-off on our Pinnacol Book Club format where we read a business-related book and then discuss what we think and what we learned. Rather than a book though, the session yesterday presented two inspiring TED Talk videos. Immediately after the training I was interviewing a candidate and mentioned the session I had just come from and she was unfamiliar with TED Talks. It struck me that some of you may also not be familiar with them. TED Talks have been around since the mid-80's and feature all sorts of interesting and inspiring speakers.

TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences -- the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh UK each summer -- TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and TED Conversations, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize.

The TED Talk videos are usually short, less than 15 minutes, and I have yet to see one that doesn't make me think. TED Talks presentations are also available in Denver through Denver University (TEDxDU) and other locations. I've seen enough of the videos by now that I look forward to being able to attend one of these local sessions in person. One of the employees at yesterday's training went earlier this year and he thought it was incredible!

Here's one of the videos presented at our training: