Following up on last month’s post of thought leaders, this time we shine the spotlight on five female thought leaders in the learning and development space. 

1. Jane Hart

Jane Hart is the founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies through which she offers access to various learning and performance resources. One of her key online resources is the Modern Workplace Learning resource to promote continuous learning and development. This is provided in the form of three useful guides for individuals, managers and L&D. 

Based on her research in the field, Jane states that there are 4 D’s of Learning - Discovery (informal learning), Discourse (social learning), Doing (experiential learning) and Didactics (formal learning). 

Jane is quite active on Twitter where she constantly shares her latest views on learning and development. She is also available on LinkedIn.

2. Patti Shank

Having started out as a trainer, Patti Shank is currently a well-respected L&D leader. She describes herself as a ‘workplace learning practitioner who cares deeply about good outcomes.’ Last year, she published a book ‘Write Better Multiple-Choice Questions to Assess Learning’ which focuses on measuring the right things and not trying to trick test-takers so one can accurately assess learning outcomes. 

Most recently, she is working on an article series for eLearning Industry about ‘Creating better video for learning’.

Patti has a website that offers information and access to her courses, books and other l&d services she provides. She updates actively on Twitter and is also available on LinkedIn. 

3. Jane Bozarth

Jane Bozarth is the Director of Research at The Learning Guild. She has authored multiple books from ‘e-Learning Solutions on a Shoestring’ to ‘Show your Work’, and has shared other thoughts and ideas on her blog. She also constantly contributes to publications and articles at The Learning Guild, where she has recently published a report on LMS usage and selection in 2022. 

Jane is very active on Twitter as a moderator of a weekly Twitter event #lrnchat that aims to help people learn from one another. She is also available on LinkedIn. 

4. Laura Overton

Laura Overton is the co-founder of Emerging Stronger, with a mission to empower learning and development professionals to take BOLD (Business first, Open minded, Leading & Learning, Deliberate) action to ensure meaningful business outcomes.

Laura was earlier the founder and CEO of a not-for-profit organization, Towards Maturity that provided a learning benchmark to measure improved performance through learning. Towards Maturity is now part of MindTools, which provides learning solutions for businesses.  

In a recent podcast interview, Laura described herself as a learning explorer and said that “learning explorer is about feeding on that curiosity that I have for driving change in the industry and looking for practical opportunities and ways of doing that.” To follow Laura, you can find her on Twitter as well as LinkedIn. 

5. Megan Torrance

Megan Torrance is the founder and CEO (Chief Energy Officer) of Torrance Learning, where she helps design and develop custom learning experiences. Megan is passionate about xAPI and the potential for extracting meaningful insights from the data collected. She has written multiple books on instructional design and project management for learning. 

Her thoughts on adult learning are that it can be intimidating to learn topics within one’s own industry because it’s akin to admitting not knowing something. She believes that relevance is essential to workplace learning and should be focused on each learner’s own work rather than made-up case studies. 

To keep up with Megan’s work, follow her on LinkedIn or Twitter.