Opportunities don't come from résumés alone; they come from being seen. Whether you're exploring freelance work, positioning yourself for consulting, or simply want to amplify your voice, your expertise deserves to be visible. In this interactive session, you'll learn how to build a social media presence that highlights your strengths, builds credibility, and opens doors. Best of all, you'll practice putting yourself out there by creating a simple, authentic post you can share right away. You don't have to go viral for social media to be a valuable tool. 

Learning Outcomes:

1. Identify ways to use social media for building your professional brand.
2. Evaluate which social platforms align best with your professional goals (LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.)
3. Practice at least one action step (posting, updating, or engaging) to strengthen digital presence.

Learn how to move beyond vanity metrics to show the tangible impact of your work to key stakeholders. Vanity metrics are things like number of people served, satisfaction scores, and referral rates. These metrics are important (as we do need to capture how many people our programs and services support). However, this data is not sufficient to tell stakeholders the impact of the programs and people served. Impact is not defined by “how many” and “how much.” It’s defined by “so what.” Workshop participants will work through a 4-part process to tell their impact story using credible data.

In this session, you will:

• Share stories of measurement challenges and successes in a guided icebreaker.
  
• Explore the impact hypothesis framework and how it connects learning initiatives to business outcomes.
  
• Identify the right business questions: The impact hypothesis helps you focus on the business problems learning is intended to solve—before jumping to metrics—so your measurement strategy is grounded in what stakeholders actually care about.
• Apply the impact hypothesis to a real-world case study to see the framework in action.
• Identify the right data to collect based upon the metrics outlined in the hypothesis.
• Translate data into compelling stakeholder narratives. The impact hypothesis gives you a ready-made structure to communicate impact clearly—strengthening your credibility, influence, and career positioning with leadership.
• Troubleshoot and refine your impact hypothesis during a closing Q&A session.
  
  

About our Speaker

Alaina Szlachta, PhD, is an academic-turned-entrepreneur and founder of By Design Development Solutions. She helps teams and businesses optimize their programs and services using original data. With a PhD in education and human behavior and experience conducting original research studies for universities, small businesses, and for her own firm, she offers expertise in the art and science of data. She is also author of "Measurement and Evaluation on a Shoestring" (ATD Press, 2024) and host of Measurement Made Easy, a free community for anyone eager to leverage the benefits of data science.

Connect with Dr. Szlachta on LinkedIn