About Adele Sommers

Adele Sommers, Ph.D. is recognized by colleagues and clients for her ability to rapidly identify core issues with deep insight, compassion, and enthusiasm. An independent consultant since 1996, Adele has devoted over two decades to helping small companies to large aerospace firms boost their profitability and effectiveness. She specializes in:

Presentation and multimedia design
Information design and technical communication
Training, e-learning, and online learning development
Organizational performance-improvement consulting, and
System and process optimization for companies of all sizes

Adele has developed or co-created a variety of successful e-learning and workshop-based programs for organizations in a wide range of industries. The domains include manufacturing, financial services, insurance, project management, leadership development, trust building, presentation design, process improvement, quality assurance, and systems management. (See more under “Training Philosophy” below.)

As an internationally recognized business author, Adele has granted many requests to reprint her articles, which have appeared in publications in the U.S. to Singapore to Dubai.

As an expert meeting facilitator and workshop leader, Adele designs and delivers award-winning presentations for online and in-person training, as well as for customized e-learning and multimedia projects based on client needs. For example...

[Icon for 2011 APEX Grand Award] Adele has won a 2011 Grand APEX Award for a recent instructional design effort. This is the highest recognition possible in the annual APEX Competition for Publication Excellence, and is conferred on only three percent of the thousands of entries submitted.

Client Approach

Adele’s company, Business Performance Inc., helps organizations “discover and recover” the hidden potential they could be missing or overlooking daily because of misaligned marketing, product, or service objectives; undetected obstacles; inadequate training; and inefficient processes.

To accomplish these goals, Adele focuses initially on an audience analysis and requirements gathering before recommending any solutions. This systematic approach enables Adele's clients to expose and analyze gaps between current and desired states of effectiveness before committing resources to a specific course of action.

Adele has consulted in, designed and delivered training for, or completed other professional projects for large corporations such as GM-Hughes, CUNA Mutual Group, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), BHP Billiton, and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center; and international business consultancies such as Strategic Profits, The Abraham Group, and the Reina Trust Building® Institute.

Training Philosophy

Adele’s overarching approach to training involves improving and supporting performance in the workplace. In so doing, learning gains become durable and make the best use of the enterprise resources invested. Especially in the case of e-learning, learners can return to the training environment for “just-in-time” reinforcement that supports their ongoing work assignments.

Since new knowledge fades quickly without reinforcement, implementing a support framework is as vital as presenting new information. Putting the proper structure in place enables learners to revisit and practice what they need to without incurring the cost and inconvenience of re-training.

Additionally, wherever it’s possible to support learners in doing the actual work required to complete job assignments, building in these mechanisms typically receives a top priority. Note that this layer goes beyond “training” and enters the realm of performance support.

Those mechanisms might include step-by-step guidance on how to complete a task combined with fill-in-the-blanks forms that produce the real-world output needed. (This is similar to the way an electronic tax preparation system helps a typical non-expert complete income taxes without having to understand, much less memorize, the tax code.)

Adele begins by helping the organization align its needs and desired outcomes with its real-world performance goals. She works with clients to identify the skills, actions, and behaviors that performers must master to achieve those goals. The training programs she designs focus as much as possible on realistic scenarios and job-related problem-solving activities based on actual work assignments.

Especially when combined with performance support mechanisms described above, the resulting multifaceted approach multiplies the organization’s return on investment (ROI) by:

Decreasing the learning curve for new employees
Lowering the overall cost of training with just-in-time job support
Enabling people with less expertise to perform at a higher level, and
Preserving and leveraging the organization’s intellectual assets

Additional Qualifications

In addition to the above, Adele’s achievements also include the following:

Author of the following award-winning publications: “Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance” success program, “Meeting Success Kit,” “Project Success Kit,” and “Customer Success Kit”
Doctorate in Education with a focus on Performance Technology; Master’s Degree in Management; Certificate in Human Performance
President of the five-time award-winning San Luis Obispo, California chapter of the Society for Technical Communication (STC), 2002–12
Published author on various performance improvement topics; Adele’s articles have appeared in the Performance Improvement Journal of the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) as well as in a variety of international business journals
Over a decade of service at GM-Hughes Corporation, earning awards for excellence in leading projects and guiding process improvement teams
College instructor specializing in configuration management, project planning, and systems thinking

Contact Adele directly at Adele@LearnShareProsper.com

Learn More Here...

About Our Principal Associates - a listing of the core strengths of our extended team; profiles of our primary business development experts
Testimonials - sample comments from clients, associates, and others regarding Adele’s e-learning and training design services, performance consulting, business coaching, presentations, and training workshops
Contact Us - our mailing address, e-mail address, phone and fax, hours of operation, and “Contact Us” Web form