Paul started with ATD-Orange County as the Vice President of Communications some years ago. Since then he’s been the VP of Technology, Chapter President, Programs VP, and now VP of Marketing. He’s already activated an aggressive plan to ensure our Chapter Members remain informed via our various social media channels (“Like! Share! Comment! We’d love to hear from you!” he tells us). We asked him about his plans for the Marketing position.

Why did you join the ATD-Orange County Board?

I had some ideas for the Chapter and I wanted to see if they would make a difference.

Like what?

When I started with ATD-OC, we had a newsletter that shared the thoughts and ideas of our members with our membership, as well as promoted Chapter events and the other Chapter business. I think that was a special part of ATD-OC, a means of connecting our community by tapping into and spreading the expertise of our members. The idea of ATD-OC has always been to leverage a strong community of learning and development professionals with each other so that we can be better than the sum of our parts. I’m seeking ways to bring that back.

What did you get out of your role?

I’ve always viewed ATD-OC as a sandbox in which I can test my ideas and the best practices that I glean from ATD research. ATD National promotes some exciting ideas and best practices, but I need a place to pilot those ideas before I try to roll them out at work or with a client. ATD-OC is willing to let me try stuff like that here, although they may have to tamper my exuberance a bit.

What is your proudest accomplishment of the past year?

I spent the latter half of 2023 trying to resurrect the https://atdoc.org/tech-trainingTraining and Technology Special Interest Group. I’m pleased to say that it's coming back strong this year with a chance for our members to experience some mixed and virtual reality training applications (you can read a brief summary what our members experienced here). We’ll be following that up with a panel discussion on the impact of AI in L&D. We just lined up our third panelist. Following that, we’ll be returning to our roots, tapping into finding ways for our members to apply the stuff everyone’s talking about.

Paul Venderley's Member Profile