By Monique Donahue

Workplace trainers frequently rely on quizzes and tests as a measure of the success of their training programs or to certify employees, but are your tests as effective as they could be? Are they really measuring the knowledge and performance areas that matter the most? Are you making common test writing mistakes? In this essential primer, author Monique Donahue draws on her extensive instructional design background and workplace test writing experience to guide you through the do’s and don’ts of effective test writing.

By Bryan Wempen

Author Bryan Wempen had career success, a family, and twenty-seven years of drinking when he began to question whether he could stop. Finally in May 2010, after years of dry and drunk periods, he couldn’t hide from himself any longer. He asked a longtime sober friend for help. He has been successfully sober since then.

Bryan is a leading voice for addiction and health recovery, sharing how messy, awkward, and beautiful life can be. His latest release, Sober Is Better, is the second book in his well-received Note to Self series.

By Bryan Wempen

Author, speaker and Mobile Assessment CEO Bryan Wempen likes getting to the bottom of tough questions, and in his latest research mission he tackles the timely topic of “Big Data” and its impact on the field of HR.

In Dancing with Big Data: Conversations with the Experts, Wempen shares a collection of 15 interviews from his popular data intelligence podcast, Thug Metrics. Guided by Wempen’s practical and insightful questions, experts from companies such as Facebook, Jibe, HP, Echovate, eQuest, Quantum Workplace, Simply Measured, Modern Survey, Glassdoor and many more open up about their experiences with big data, how it applies to the HR function, and where the future of data science is heading.

By Bryan Wempen

When do you feel that enough is enough and something has to change in your life? It can happen anywhere—for me it was in a taxi in Chicago. Since that moment, I have been working on self-awareness, discovering lessons about myself and developing tools to live a better life on life’s terms.

The lessons in ‘Note to Self’ are what I use every day to live my life. I live imperfectly with an open mind and heart, discovering happiness, self-awareness and serenity.

By Monique Donahue

Perennially victimized Olive(r) had big dreams for the future, but life threw the unfortunate olive a curve ball when a health-conscious patron stumbled on the stairs, sending the olive careening off a fresh lunch salad onto the floor of a bleak office stairwell. Abandoned and alone, the olive began a diary to express misery over its lot in life and outrage over its new living conditions. On Day 12 of Olive(r)’s dismal, involuntary residence, a sympathetic bystander took it upon herself to begin transcribing the gender-ambiguous olive’s innermost thoughts as it withered into obscurity. Those faithfully recorded diary entries are presented here for comic posterity, in Olive(r)’s own tragic words.

By Kent Donahue

For a short period of time, the water skiing world was not centered around the professionals at Cypress Gardens. That honor belonged to a small group of friends, cousins, and an attorney who crafted a show that would rival the decades-old tourist attraction that television personalities and Hollywood stars routinely visited. The attention and the imagination of spectators throughout Central Florida and tourists alike were redirected away from Winter Haven and fixed upon the Halifax River in Port Orange, Florida.

By Paul Nichols

Question: What do Geronimo, Amelia Earhart, Pancho Villa, Wyatt Earp, Amy Semple McPherson, Gene Autry, John Philip Sousa, Rex Allen, John Slaughter, Thornton Wilder, Eleanor Roosevelt—and the Nichols family have in common?

Answer: All of them left footprints in Douglas, Cochise County, Arizona.

By Monique Donahue

Reflections by blogger Monique Donahue as captured in her online blog. This collection of lovingly crafted stories provides an alternately humorous and contemplative look at family, current events, childhood memories, personal faith, and other life experiences, both trivial and profound, that inspired Donahue’s virtual pen.