A practical guide to designing effective live training quickly and confidently. We’ve all heard this: “Can you put together a workshop on [insert subject of choice]?” It sounds straightforward. You know the subject. You’ve delivered similar training before. You probably have some useful activities tucked away somewhere, a slide deck you can adapt, and AI…
Apparently, Articulate has just launched Frontline, a product aimed at helping teams such as sales, support and IT turn their existing knowledge into structured online training WITHOUT having to involve the L&D team. Its wider message is that training creation no longer needs to sit solely with L&D or instructional designers. It’s caused quite the…
The link between learning design and other live experiences This weekend, my husband and I solved a murder. Not a real one, obviously. It was a Joy Swift Murder Mystery Weekend, something we first tried 30 years ago. We took a fairly lengthy hiatus while we were busy having and raising children but, since Covid,…
How even doing the right things in the wrong order can negatively impact training design, learning transfer and the results your L&D work delivers. There’s a famous Morecambe and Wise sketch in which Eric Morecambe attempts to play Grieg’s Piano Concerto in front of conductor André Previn. When Previn points out that he isn’t playing…
Design training around problems, not content Problem-centred learning starts with the situations people need to handle at work, then introduces models, theories and tools when they become useful. It sounds obvious when you put it like that, but I’m not sure it’s how we always design training in practice, and why we could be inadvertently…
Why content-led training remains popular, despite it not changing behaviour I’ve been working with L&D practitioners for long enough to see the same frustrations surfacing over and over again. One of them is the pressure to cram in content. There’s a reason stakeholders like to see a packed course agenda. Pages of content, dozens of…
I was at IDTX last Friday, a fabulous event, aimed squarely at practitioners rather than strategy-makers, with real time to discuss and explore ideas rather than just sit and receive them. It was about taking an evidence-based approach to our learning development practice. Very real, very relevant, very applicable. There were concurrent sessions running throughout…
You can teach someone everything about climbing a mountain. They still might never climb one. That image, from Kurt Ewald Lindley’s session at IDTX last Friday, is the one I keep coming back to. This session in particular, brought together a lot of the pieces I already had and helped me to form them into…
Knowing how something works is not the same as being able to do it Sara Farwell and Matt Zatonski’s session at IDTX last Friday was built around a deceptively simple problem: we’ve got very good at helping people feel like they’ve learned something, and much less good at helping them actually change what they do….
Sukh Pabial asked a question that sounds simple but isn’t: when we say a tool or approach is evidence-based, what do we actually mean by that? It’s a question worth considering, because if we’re honest, most of us take things at face value. We adopt models that feel right, that were taught to us by…
Motivation gets people in the room. Then what? Matthew Richter’s session on the Motivation Blueprint focused on the distinction between motivation as a catalyst and motivation as a mechanism for change. They’re not the same thing. Motivation, Richter argued, is what gets people through the door. It doesn’t keep them there, and it certainly doesn’t…
Why shared experience adds more value than the curriculum My husband and I tend to travel independently in Europe. We book our own flights, find our own way around, and generally prefer the freedom of working things out as we go. But, having never ventured to South America before, and unsure of how we would…
Why it matters and how to build it into your training design Let’s talk about motivation for learning. This is partly prompted by my first day back volunteering in the wet and sludgy Mersey Forest, and partly due to the fact that it’s annual objective setting time! See my ‘Musing’ live from the wet, muddy…
Experience should make things easier — but sometimes it does the opposite. This blog explores how doing everything “right” can still lead to frustration, whether that’s in losing weight or creating great learning and development solutions
For nearly four years I’ve been volunteering with Mersey Forest, working with a brilliant group who are helping to restore Griffen Wood. You can learn more about the work of the Mersey Forest, why I started and the value I get from it HERE. When I first joined, the place was dark and crowded. Willow…
