The 2020 Winners: Honoring Innovation & Excellence

MEET THE WINNERS – By Tim Sosbe

While this year forced everyone to shake up their thinking, including how in-person events are handled, at least one thing remained the same: LTEN members continued to produce incredible, memorable and innovative work. And that work deserved to be rewarded.

On June 10, LTEN members came together at the LTEN Connect virtual training forum for the 6th annual Excellence Awards ceremony. Ranieka Weston of United Therapeutics and a member of the LTEN Board of Directors emceed the program as we honored Members of the Year and revealed the winners in eight competitive categories.

We’ve already introduced you to the 2020 Members of the Year – Carole Gins and Jim Page – and now it’s our pleasure to tell you more about the other winners. Or rather, to let them tell you more about themselves.

For this year’s Excellence Awards program, we invited all winners and finalists to submit posters detailing their work. The work was then displayed in a special poster session at LTEN Connect. (You can still register to attend the virtual forum on-demand and review the poster session and 19 hours of training content by visiting www.LTENconnect.com.)

This 2020 award issue of LTEN Focus on Training is proud to present the 6th annual Excellence Awards winners, in poster form. Over the next pages, you’ll meet the innovative, the emerging, the team members, the efficient and the change makers. We hope you’ll be inspired in your training efforts and that next year, we’ll be honoring your work.

Before you start flipping pages and reviewing the posters of winning work, here’s a quick look at what lies ahead, in order of appearance:

All-Star Teams (Practitioner) – The Amgen Global Learning & Performance Team for a project that worked across four business units and utilized a storytelling approach and The Sysmex Center for Learning for scaling training during a rapid growth period using streaming technologies.
Emerging Leaders (Practitioner) – Richard “Brad” Rzendzian of The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, for engaging crossfunctional partners to increase quality, save time and save money.
Innovation (Practitioner) – Tara Leahy of Daiichi Sankyo and Vernon Watt of AstraZeneca, who partnered to utilize an innovative multi-modal approach to product launches.
Training for Change (Practitioner) – Terah Benjamin of Takeda Pharmaceuticals, who executed a product launch in the middle of a merger.
New Award! Non-Commercial Training Efficiency (Practitioner) – Kelly Rebmann of Sanofi Pasteur, who redesigned curriculum to minimize travel while still achieving objectives, is the first winner of the newest honor in the LTEN Excellence Awards.
Innovation (Provider) – CMR Institute, for its comprehensive, year-long leadership development approach, and Matrix Achievement Group, which innovated microlearning for virtual training.
Learning Content (Provider) – Tipping Point Media, which used virtual reality to enable the patient perspective in training.
Industry Partnership (Provider) – ACTO, Axiom & AstraZeneca all came together to support a new indication that transformed physician perceptions.

Be sure to check out the winning initiatives and people on the pages here and through the LTEN Connect portal. You can also use the LTEN On-the-Go app to connect with and congratulate this year’s honorees.

Tim Sosbe is editorial director for LTEN. Email Tim at tsosbe@L-TEN.org.