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Congratulations, Wendy Gates Corbett and Buckeye Power Sales

  • 14 Aug, 2026
  • 8 min read

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The Brandon Hall Excellence Awards recognize the best work in HCM and learning, and yesterday they announced 2026’s HCM Excellence Awards winners.

Big congratulations to Wendy Gates Corbett of Signature Presentations, who took Gold for Best Custom Content with The Energy of Belonging®. And congratulations to Buckeye Power Sales, recognized for Best New Hire Onboarding Program for the Power Systems Academy.

We are grateful to have been the design and development partner for both of these fantastic programs — and we are absolutely delighted for the winners. So well deserved!

Congratulations, Wendy Gates Corbett and Buckeye Power Sales

Gold, Best Custom Content

The Energy of Belonging® — Wendy Gates Corbett, Signature Presentations

The Energy of Belonging® is a 45-minute self-paced course that turns three decades of Wendy’s research into behaviors people can use the same day. Her framework, Connect, Respect and Protect, gives every employee specific actions to practice. Belonging often gets treated as a leadership topic and delivered to a room of forty people at a time. This course is built for everyone, at every level, in any industry.

Wendy set one rule at the start: a course about connection and psychological safety can never feel like a compliance module. That shaped everything about it — the warmth of her live sessions had to survive the move to self-paced, so her stories became video, discussion became scenarios, and every module closes with the learner naming one behavior they will practice and where. Organizations can adapt the language and branding to their own culture, and it drops easily into any LMS.

Best New Hire Onboarding Program

Power Systems Academy — Buckeye Power Sales

Demand for backup power keeps climbing. The supply of qualified generator technicians keeps shrinking, and 42 percent of new technicians leave the field within two years. Buckeye stopped waiting for the labor market to sort itself out and built its own talent pipeline. The Power Systems Academy takes people with no generator experience and turns them into certified, field-ready technicians in about ten weeks.

Buckeye made a smart call to begin right at the beginning. New hires start out in the field alongside an experienced technician, so they understand the job before anyone sits them down to teach it. From there the program blends online learning, classroom sessions led by working technicians and hands-on lab time, with three quarters of the 200 training hours spent with tools in hand.

Seven years on, the Academy holds a 90 percent completion rate, retention above 62 percent in an industry that loses people fast, and a 525 percent return on the training investment in a technician’s first year. We are proud to have helped develop the interactive online modules that are used throughout the program.

Thank you

To Wendy and everyone at Signature Presentations, and to Jon and the team at Buckeye Power Sales: thank you for trusting us with work that matters to you. We are honored to have played a part.

Got a program you want to build? Book some time with us and let’s talk.

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