Maine Association for Talent Development has a very active board! We meet once monthly for 2 hours to ensure all our plans go off without a hitch! Many members of our active board have either moved positions or are brand new to the team. Help us welcome the current board of 2025! Huzzah!
Photo taken from our January 2025 Board Retreat
President: Jae Allain
Past-President: Dawn Walker-Elders
Vice President Communications & Marketing: Araminta Star Matthews
Vice President Events: LeeAnn Black
Vice President Finance: Melody Pierce
Vice President Membership: Dave Dec
Vice President Operations: Dana Fadel
Vice President Programs: Andrea Gossels Maguire
Vice President Technology: Jennifer Blair
Vice President Volunteering: VACANT
Interested in serving as our VP of Volunteering? Reach out today at info@tdmaine.org for more info!**
**Did we mention that Board Members' membership fees are covered during their term-served? True story! Reach out today!
by VP of Communications and professional Author, Araminta S. Matthews, MFA, GCDF, DC, SrID, Consultant, Owner-Operator of HIVE-Wise, Artist, Developer
Araminta is a lifelong learner with a Rennaisance series of certificates in Digital Curation, Art Education, Life Coaching, Death Doula, Teaching, Global Career Development, Web Development, and so much more! Check out her website (currently under development with the help of her new literary agent, Savvy Arts!)
Summer in Maine is the time to kick off your shoes, squish beach sand between your toes, listen to the waves crash against the rocky shoreline, crack the spine of a great new book, and soak up the sunshine that perhaps only Mainers really earn. After all, they say Maine has four seasons: Winter, Mud, Construction, and Black Fly (or Tick) Season! Don't we deserve a little Rest and Relaxation? And what better time to maximize those extra hours of daylight than to mix and mingle our relaxation with a little professional development. Summer in Maine is more than just a season for vacations—it's the perfect window to pause, reflect, and invest in developing your talents! Whether you're an Learning and Development professional, a corporate trainer, or exploring new leadership pathways, this summer can be a launchpad for fresh skills, deeper insights, and stronger networks.
Here are six practical tips (and three highly recommend, Go-To reads from yours truly) to help you maximize your professional development goals this summer—and carry that momentum into fall and beyond.
Ever try to set a goal for yourself only to find it dwindles to dust before you even manage to finish scribbling it on a notecard and pinning it to your bathroom mirror? What if I told you the problem might not be your willpower or your ability to meet goals? What if I told you that maybe--just maybe--it's the goal itself?
A SMART goal is a way you can avoid the trap of vague ambitions. Instead of a loosely worded aspiration to lose weight or eat healthier, learn to write a SMART goal. Choose one professional development goal that’s Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Reasonable, and Time-Centered. Do you want to lead your first workshop? Become certified in instructional design? Start with that and reverse-engineer the steps so that your goal is specific enough that you'll know when you've met it and time-centered and measurable enough that you'll be 100% sure you reached the aspiration without a doubt in your mind. Clear goals help you stay focused, motivated, and accountable. Use tools like SMART goals or OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to stay on track. Learn more about writing SMART goals from ATD here.
2. Read to Grow—Not Just to Know
Now we all know that down-time and self-care are SO important that you should be making sure your daily to-do list of work and household items always includes at least one or two items just for you! Self-care is just as important (if not moreso) than developing our talents, and what better time than those hot, sunlit months than to hear that delicious sound of a spine cracking on a brand new beachy, summer read? What if a couple of those Summer reads were maximized to expand your thinking through fresh perspectives. Here are three standout books I recommend for your Summer 2025:
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff (Penguin Press, 2018) – Brilliant, frighteningly accurate review of how and why an entire generation is developing maladaptive learning habits--and most helpfully, how we can break those habits before they roost.
Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Be Ready for Anything by Jane McGonigal (Transworld Digital, 2022) – This book empowers learning professionals to think proactively in rapidly changing environments.
Design for How People Learn (2nd Edition) by Julie Dirksen (New Riders Press, 2015) – One of my required textbooks in the graduate course I teach for up-and-coming Instructional Designers and Project Managers and written by my acquaintane, Julie Dirksen, there is no better book I can recommend to help you develop your learning experience design skills. Appropriate for all levels and skills' sets!
Set a goal to read one book a month—or better yet, start a summer book circle with colleagues to spark discussion and insight!
Traditional learning tends to take a break in summer while the children pause their daily school-routines and adults decide whether to head home for the summer months or tough it out for an accelerated summer-term at college. While everyone else might be gearing up for Summer Break, that doesn't mean you have to! Host a microlearning sprint with peers or join an online learning cohort. Many platforms like EdX, Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, and ATD’s own Talent Development Body of Knowledge offer bite-sized, high-impact learning experiences that can fit into your summer schedule. Focus on one competency—coaching, evaluation, DEI, or tech stack fluency—and go deep for four to six weeks. Consider taking a free EdX or Coursera MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) with a friend or colleague, picking away at one lesson a week and getting together to talk shop and expand on what you've learned. Personally, I'll be expanding my art education skills this summer with a MOOC from the Museum of Modern Art to help reinforce the graduate course I teach via SNHU for the Maine Educator Consortium: Methods of Teaching Art in the K-12 Classroom. What will you explore in your summer sprint?
Summer events—virtual and in-person—tend to be more casual and open--but casual and open doesn't mean it has to be meaningless, too! Use this as a chance to build meaningful professional connections. Instead of collecting contacts and business cards, invest in conversations. Use the long line at the ice cream stand to strike up a conversation with the person next to you. Look for someone with a similar car or similar attire to your own at the amusement park, and ask them what brings them to Vacationland--then bridge that into a conversation about career, life, and goals. You never know who you might meet or how each new meeting might lead you to your next big thing! In career development theory, we call this Happenstance.Learn more about Planned Happenstance at our ATD site here. Meanwhile, spend your summer doing fun things! Attend Maine ATD meetups, webinars, or community forums. Follow up with LinkedIn messages, share resources, or even schedule a virtual coffee to learn from someone’s path. Real relationships grow when there's mutual curiosity and follow-through.
You don’t have to wait until the end of the calendar year in December to reflect on your growth: Mid-year is the ideal time to pause, acknowledge what you’ve accomplished, and adjust what isn’t working. In learning experience design, we sometimes call this a "Mid-course Correction." This is when we ask our learners or our inner selves what's working, what's not, and what needs to evolve for us to meet and reach our goals. Keep a professional development journal. Celebrate wins—big or small—and refine your goals based on what you’ve learned about yourself. Progress is built on reflection.
You could begin by exploring your Core Values, which LCSW, Shellie Cook of Cornerstone Wellness, advises we should do once every six months or so to see how our values are growing, evolving, and changing as we grow, evolve, and change ourselves. This Online Values Card Sort is a great activity to help pinpoint what you really care about in life and make sure you're directing your time and energy--your personal resources--toward those talents you wish to develop.
Consider exploring your Professional Blind Spots--areas you may not know you are misgiving or misrepresenting about yourself. This Questionnaire can help you spot areas about yourself you may wish to evolve with the support of a good coach of talent developer. If you're feeling very proactive, consider putting out a blind survey to ask your peers to offer up what they consider to be your blind spots as an anonymous survey and use a word cloud to identify what may need your attention. Just remember! Not everything someone identifies as a blind spot is an area you need to change or improve! Sometimes what one person considers a weakness is actually the very wellspring of our greatest strengths. Proceed with caution.
Lastly, consider taking some time to explore your Implicit Biases with Harvard's now nearly 30-year study into Implicit Bias (the biased or discriminatory beliefs we hold about which we are not even consciously aware) and use the results to strengthen your ability to include everyone in the room in your talent development, to diversify your learning experience designs, to help ensure you create an environment conducive to belonging, and to bridge the gap between equity and equality in your talent development goals. Project Implicit offers up a variety of self-evaluations to explore your biases. Use these to unlock areas of reflection and personal growth to become a better, stronger, more adept and nimble leader, colleague, ally, and friend.
Summer 2025 offers a unique opportunity to step back from the daily grind and reinvest in your personal and professional growth. By setting focused goals, diving into insightful reading, engaging in targeted learning sprints, cultivating meaningful connections, and pausing to reflect, you can turn these warmer months into a powerful season of transformation. Professional development doesn’t have to wait for a new year or a formal training—your growth starts with small, intentional steps today. The Maine Chapter of ATD encourages you to seize this season, challenge yourself, and carry the momentum into the months ahead.
by VP of Communications and professional Author, Araminta S. Matthews, MFA, GCDF, DC, SrID, Consultant, Owner-Operator of HIVE-Wise,
Araminta is a professional author and lead author of the recent article, Pay Attention to the Chatbot Behind the Curtain when AI 'Is No Place Like Home': A Framework and Toolkit for Integrating Critical Thinking & Information Literacy in Educational & Professional Studies (freely available in the peer-reviewed journal, Advances in Online Education with a free subscription with Henry Stewart Publications, here).
Generative AI has been around for a long time, but it seems like it's only become a subject of conversation in recent months. Suddenly, everyone is talking about Large Language Model chatbots and their impact on the world. Most of these dialogues seem to focus on fear of AI taking over our work, or people getting lazy and using AI to cheat or do work for them when their own sweat and rigor is well-warranted (like in a classroom or drafting a screenplay with powerful human emotions at the epicenter of the storyline).
Whether AI concerns you is frankly, irrelevant, because the bottom line is that AI is (and has been) in every person's pocket, located in many living rooms ready to operate with a voice-ordered command, or just the first thing a person sees when asking a question of a search engine. AI is unavoidable, so why not embrace the many ways AI can make our lives easier? This list, adapted from the work in the article and toolkit listed above, is designed to help Maine professionals use AI to improve efficiency, streamline workflows, and foster innovation. By harnessing the power of AI, employees across various sectors can elevate their productivity and achieve more in less time--as long as we remember a few basic rules of the game.
AI is based on an algorithm designed to deliver what is statistically likely to be true (not what is actually true), meaning that you can ask AI to generate an answer to the question "Are 2 pounds of feathers heavier than 1 pound of lead?" and AI can get it wrong for months because it is statistically more likely to be asked about the density or mass of those two objects (a feather or lead) than the irrefutable weight of 2 pounds to a single pound.
AI does not yet provide accurate or credible sources for the content it curates into the answers to the questions we ask of it. This means we cannot yet reliably determine that the data it gives us is true, factual, or real. What's more, because AI is a bit dodgy about its source material, we likewise cannot tell if what AI generates for us is perhaps unintended copyright infringement. As they say, buyer beware--or in this case, AI-generator, be careful not to plagiarize.
And lastly, just as with any other media you might reference in work you produce, AI-generated material must also be cited. Given how you can't be sure your AI-generated content is someone else's potential Intellectual Property as indicated above, it's also just in your best interest to clearly indicate when you've used AI to create text, design an outline, or generate an image you plan to use in your work.
Below are 15 practical ways generative AI can enhance productivity for Maine's workforce.
1. Create and Triage a Good To-Do List:
One thing AI is very good at is ordering and sequencing content based on frequency (and just popularity) of content it has analyzed. If you are faced with a long to-do list at work, consider feeding everything you have into a tool like Gemini or ChatGPT and ask it to organize and triage your task list. Be sure to read it and adjust it with your own judgment before implementing, of course!
2. Personalized Customer Support:
One thing AI is particularly good at is analyzing the "patterns" of people's behavior. As such, AI-powered chatbots can be used as entry-level virtual assistants to manage basic customer inquiries, providing instant responses 24/7. This reduces the workload on customer service teams while maintaining a high level of client satisfaction. Just remember--there is no replacement for human interaction.
3. Summarizing Meeting Notes:
Instead of manually writing meeting minutes, AI tools can transcribe and summarize meetings in real-time, capturing key points and action items efficiently. With a few quick touch-ups, a meeting can be succinctly turned into a set of clear action-items for attendees along with a list of events that occurred during the session.
4. Improve Your Decision Making:
Generative AI is programmed to work with enormous data sets, so data-modeling is perhaps one of its strongest capabilities. Improve your decision-making and feasibility-analysis by using AI to help generate data-driven scenarios, simulations, or predictive models regarding your potential outcomes, risks, or results. Just feed the AI tool the information you have and ask it what is the most statistically viable solution to your problem.
5. Help Interpret the Language of Something a Little Wordy:
Generative AI is pretty good at simplifying language. Ever read an email or article and think, "Wow, this is really complicated, and I'm not clear on what I just read?" Why not ask AI to simplify things for you. Write a prompt akin to "Simplify the following article or email into language appropriate for a fourth grade reading level to help ensure clear understanding of nuances" and then paste in the complicated material you are seeking to understand. Just remember to cross-reference with the original material to make sure it's close to accurate.
6. Enhanced Creativity:
As long as the creative person is planning to produce the final product on her own, AI can be very helpful in that classic of all problems--breaking writer's block! Creative professionals can use generative AI for brainstorming and ideation. AI-generated suggestions for ad campaigns, product names, or marketing strategies can spark new and innovative ideas. Logos or tag lines can emerge from AI-support, and outlines or creative ideas to solve problems can be quickly generated--just be sure you analyze them yourself before implementing any.
7. Translation and Localization:
In Maine's increasingly diverse work environment, AI tools like Google Translate can instantly translate documents, emails, or web content, allowing for smoother communication with global partners. It is very important to remember that AI doesn't understand nuanced human language, so be careful in translations to check for the "untranslatable" concepts of another language (like the French concept of "ennui" or the German idea of "schadenfreude").
8. Writing Code and Debugging:
Ever develop a website using CSS or HTML? Ever have to create a database with MySQL or write a Python script? Any language used to make a computer perform a task or look a certain way is not only for a computer, but perhaps even best done by a computer. Generative AI tools like GitHub Copilot or even the Stacks generated by ChatGPT can assist developers by writing code snippets, detecting errors, and suggesting improvements, which can dramatically reduce time spent in the coding and developing process. In 2025, most web and app developers start with a preset and build from there--few code/script from scratch anymore.
Incorporating generative AI into daily operations is no longer a luxury but a necessity in today’s fast-paced work environment. Maine's employees can benefit significantly from the enhanced efficiency, creativity, and accuracy that these AI tools bring to the table. By adopting these technologies, businesses as well as professional individuals of every variety can not only improve productivity but also stay competitive in an ever-evolving marketplace. Just remember to use AI within its appropriate context and succeed, exceed, and proceed swimmingly!
(original content by Araminta S. Matthews, 27 March, 2025, 6:33PM EST. Copyright to author. All rights reserved. Permission to use and reuse within all Maine-ATD publications and resources).
Meet the Board
This month’s featured board member is our talented and dedicated VP of Finance. Suzanne Joined the ATD board 4 years ago. Suzanne would attend the ATD trainings that intrigued her and sit and talk with other chapter members. Having a background in finance, she originally offered to audit the books, and as they say, the rest is history.
What Suzanne enjoys most about ATD, is getting to meet and work with like-minded people toward a particular goal.
Suzanne currently works as the Senior VP of Mission Delivery for Girl Scouts of Maine where she oversees six departments, one of which is the adult learning department. She ran the adult learning team for several years before moving into the Senior VP role and says she still enjoys finding opportunities to develop and facilitate training.
For anyone who has had the pleasure of working with Suzanne when she’s wearing her facilitator hat, it is evident that she embodies the role. She is inquisitive and really listens to participants.
When talking about her experience transitioning from the learning team to her VP role, Suzanne emphasizes that it’s important to think about what you might miss and look for new opportunities. Any time you’re facing a big transition like that, she says it must be something you believe in, and you must be willing to put the effort into it. “It has to give you joy or it’s not worth doing.”
When Suzanne isn’t working, she enjoys spending her time reading and she loves to be outside. It’s no surprise that she loves to sit on the rocks at Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park and read.
If you would like to connect with Suzanne, find her at an upcoming in-person ATD Maine meeting, or reach out to her at finance@tdmaine.org.
Written by Jill Tabbutt-Henry
Any of us who have been involved with any kind of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) work are all too aware of the resistance that our efforts encounter—from token gestures of one-time staff trainings, to hiring a DEI coordinator and then not providing the support needed for that person to be effective, to the Supreme Court decision against Affirmative Action in college admissions undermining DEI in education.
What is behind this resistance? Is it a fear of change? Something deeper? Should we even dare to ask these questions, or should we focus on program strategies and organizational issues?
A recent event in Maine brings these questions even more to the forefront of our thoughts. In December, the DEI coordinator for the South Portland School Department, an Iraqi immigrant, received a threatening email from a man in New Hampshire. His superintendent described the email as “the most vile email message I have seen in my 35 years in education.” The ultimate result of this incident was that the employee resigned from his position and left the state of Maine with his family.
Last year, the Harvard Business Review (March 1, 2023) published an article—”To Overcome Resistance to DEI, Understand What’s Driving It,” by Eric Shuman, Eric Knowles, and Amit Goldenberg. In this article, the authors describe three types of psychological threats that some people experience in response to DEI initiatives and three types of resistance that they engage in, depending on the type of threat.
• Status threat—when people perceive that if anyone from a minority group gains status in an organization, someone from the majority group will have to give up their status.
• Merit threat—when people worry that, if their value to their organization is assessed purely in terms of merit, there may well be people from minority groups who are better qualified or will perform better in their position.
• Moral threat—in the authors’ words, “the sense that if you acknowledge your privilege, you tarnish your moral image by linking yourself to an unfair system.”
• Defending—justifying the status quo to prevent changes that are perceived as harmful to the existing staff (driven by status threat)
• Denying—rejecting DEI initiatives as unnecessary because there’s no bias, or very little (driven by status and merit threat)
• Distancing—acknowledging that some discrimination may exist in the system, but arguing that they themselves never benefited from it (driven by merit and moral threat)
The authors provide some simple and concrete approaches to addressing these forms of resistance. One strategy is to emphasize the “win-win” aspects of DEI initiatives, to reduce status threat and counter the “zero-sum” scenario about power within the organization.
Another approach is to use self-affirmation to identify positive aspects of the organization and its employees prior to addressing problem areas.
The moral threat can be minimized by “highlighting how DEI efforts present an opportunity for majority-group members to demonstrate their commitment to universal moral principles [e.g. fairness and equality], and in doing so ensure that they are not automatically associated with discrimination and privilege.”
These strategies require an assessment of what kinds of threats people are experiencing and what forms of resistance they are demonstrating. Considering these different kinds of threats and different types of resistance before initiating DEI efforts may give us tools for introducing and sustaining DEI efforts.
What do you think? Join the discussion in the comments below and join our chapter’s next DEI SIG meeting on April 4th, 10-11:30.
This month’s featured board member is our talented and dedicated VP of Technology. Jae describes herself as someone who has always “been a club person” so it’s no surprise she’s found a place she belongs here at ATD Maine.
Jae joined the board in 2020, just as the world transitioned to virtual everything and she has been doing all things technology since. Something she appreciates most about being a part of ATD is having a community of people who all speak her language and who offer advice and shared experiences.
Jae has worked in the corporate world, as part of HR, in K12 and Higher Education. Much of the focus of her work over the years has been technical training and instructional design. She enjoys the dynamic environment of L&D and being able to do all sorts of roles. She currently works for the University of Maine Augusta.
Jae enjoys taking big, complex topics and breaking them down into digestible chunks. She takes trainings and makes them better to expand the audience they reach. Over the years, she has spent a lot of time focused on e-learning and teaching instructors how and why to integrate technology and use LMS.
When Jae isn’t working on L&D projects or volunteering with ATD, you might find her working on something for her sorority board or working at Sephora or snowboarding. She dosen’t like to sit still.
Whether it’s through making the learning experience better for students and employees or helping a customer find a new lipstick, Jae has the same goal: to make people feel good about themselves.
If you would like to connect with Jae, find her at an upcoming in-person ATD Maine meeting, or reach out to her at technology@tdmaine.org
Next week is Employee Learning Week 2023.
Employee Learning Week is celebrate each year during the first full week of December and is a time to highlight dedication to talent development.
Is your company doing anything to celebrate Employee learning?
It's a great time to remind employees about all of the resources available to them for learning and development.
If your company does something to celebrate, they can be recognized as a champion of learning! visit this link to see how.
This month’s featured board member is also our newest board member. Dan Cox told me the running joke is he’s worked in every industry- and that’s not much of an exaggeration. Dan is a problem solver and a lifelong learner. We’re excited to have him as our VP of Membership.
Dan currently works as a trainer for Gant Travel, which seems fitting given one of his favorite things to do is travel. He’s been to 43 of the 50 United States.
As a corporate travel trainer, Dan trains travel agents. He brings years of training experience and a robust understanding of instructional design and training technologies to his team.
Dan is the only member of his work team who wasn’t first a travel agent. Instead, Dan traversed a circuitous route to the corporate world. He told me he comes from a family of teachers, and as he moved through roles in the military, healthcare, and education he always found himself in informal instructional roles. When he eventually found himself in the corporate world, talent development was a natural fit, and he took the opportunity to earn a master's degree in Instructional design.
Dan has a vision and goal to increase the role of ATD in the state of Maine. He loves to have conversations and learn about what members want and need. He believes in being part of the solution.
When Dan joins meetings, you might catch a glimpse of his Zoom background image of Horseshoe Bend, just one of the many iconic locations he has visited. He has stood on both rims of the Grand Canyon, and recently, he got to take advantage of a work trip and traveled to Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks.
When Dan talks about travel, you can hear the excitement in his voice. There’s no doubt his work aligns with his passions. Dan brings his appetite for exploration and his dedication to the Talent Development community of Maine to his new VP position, and we have no doubt that he will work to make our chapter even better.
If you’d like to connect with Dan, you can find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-cox-8343a978.
Program Recap Alert!
Did you join us for our panel discussion last week?
We kicked off our learning season with a panel discussion about Future-Proofing Talent
Our panel of experts discussed Artificial Intelligence in the workplace, cross-generational approach to technology, telling stories with data, and supporting our teams in this time of seemingly constant change.
Dan Cox kicked off the day with a demonstration of Chat GPT and discussed its use in creating written material in the workplace, ranging from resumes to training materials.
Our moderator posed the thought-provoking question of how can Chat GPT make us more efficient in our work and what are the impacts on our business initiatives or for our customers?”
We also dipped our toes into the waters of the regulatory discussion, acknowledging that with new technology new regulations are arising, and these changes come with potential training needs.
As technology often does, the discussion was prompted around cross-generational trends in technology use, comfort, and adoption.
One of the big takeaways of the discussion was that showing the benefits and capabilities of technology is a great place to start. The analogy was made of leading the horse to the water and then letting them drink.
When it comes to digital literacy, the consensus was that we need to make it meaningful.
As our use of technology increases, we have so much more access to data.
Molly Lindberg discussed the need for employees who are able to to speak to both sides- they can walk the walk and talk the talk on the technical side, and they can translate that into meaningful information for the business leaders. This is so important as we advocate for training needs and technology tools.
Richard Parent expanded on this to emphasize that we need to be focused on teaching people how to consume data and think critically about that data. He emphasized the need to skill-up storytellers and skill-up story readers.
All of our panelists chimed into the discussion about supporting people in this climate of rapid change. We briefly discussed the trend of employees retiring rather than adapting as well as the obstacle of younger employees intentionally resisting technology.
While we didn’t find all of the solutions in our training session, we had an interesting discussion about setting internal standards and policies, managing risk, and building psychological safety in the workplace.
This was the first training of the season, and it was our way of opening the door to our training year theme of Future Proofing Talent: Navigating the Skills Revolution. We hope to see you at our future trainings!
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