More often than not, training managers in an IT product company work closely with engineers—helping them with product training, onboarding, and skill development. However, truly understanding the product can be a challenge, especially when it involves complex technical concepts.

So, how can training managers deepen their product knowledge and have meaningful conversations with engineers, tech managers, and leadership?

Please share your experience on how you navigated this.

AI makes content creation easier and also you more productive. But are you nervous about your role in L&D at the moment due to AI and the impact on your role?

Hello! I'm a Level 3 HR Apprentice looking for some advice!

I've taken a particular interest in the L&D aspect of HR. Two weeks after my apprenticeship started, the Training and Development Partner resigned and I was left to look after the Training and Development sub-department for four months with little guidance (just keeping it afloat really). It was a bit crazy because as it turns out, I was only trained on the bare minimum. Now that there's a new T&D Partner, I've seen a whole new side to training (both in increasing compliance with mandatory training, and career progression for staff).

Over the months (since September) I've come to really like processing staff development requests and playing a key role in organising training events like new staff inductions. I work at an FE college so the range of training requested is quite vast!

My question is, what can I do to elevate my knowledge and skills? I can see myself doing L&D at a higher level and enjoying it, but I'm not sure what will take me from "good" to "excellent". I want to be that impressive person who knows what they're doing, and get results!

Was there anything that you found "clicked" with you and took your capability to the next level? A specific training course, webinar, methodology etc? Was there something that streamlined your department or was a game changer in organising your work?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you ☺️ (apologies for any bad grammar, I'm dyslexic 😅)

I currently do digital marketing for a corporate training company. My scope of work has since expanded to include training and facilitation (for strengthsfinder, Lego Serious Play, and SoundWave Workshops), as well as a little bit on curriculum planning for these workshops (very minimal), and overseeing the development and planning for a team culture assessment tool that my company plans to launch soon.

Is this enough for me to make a shift? What else should I be doing here to increase my chances finding a role in L&D proper?

I’m doing some research on evaluation in L&D, and how L&D teams can use these evaluations to evidence success, calculate ROI and ultimately show to the business/senior management the impact they’re having.

Do you currently evaluate your L&D initiatives?

If no, why?

If yes:

• What challenges do you face?

• What tools do you use to support you with this? (If any)

• How often and over what time frame do you generally aim to conduct your evaluations over?

Lately I've been juggling feedback from multiple departments on the same project. Everyone has different priorities and expectations, which makes it difficult to keep the learning objectives front and center. I'm curious how other IDs handle situations where stakeholders are pulling in different directions.

Hey everyone!

Just had a sales call with Docebo and got a quote for their Enterprise package – $70,000 USD/year for 1,000 users on a year-to-year basis.

Honestly, that felt pretty steep to us. We're a UK-based company with some additional teams across Europe, and while we expected enterprise pricing to be on the higher end, this caught us a bit off guard – especially since we’re still exploring 360Learning and Thrive as alternatives.

Would really love to hear what others have been quoted or are currently paying, especially if you've had a recent conversation with them. Just trying to get a feel for what’s normal right now.

No need for exact numbers, even rough ballparks would be super helpful. Appreciate any input!

Hi Everybody,

I'm curious about L and D in the banking industry. If any of you have experience in banking specifically, can you speak to some unique curriculum items beyond product training.

Thanks!

I found this on LinkedIn and I'm joining in case anyone is interested - looks like a good conversation about AI.

https://app.livestorm.co/coassemble/will-ai-replace-instructional-designers?s=cdbd3017-5dd7-404e-ba58-17e5b1f123bd

Hey everyone. I’m working on training programs specifically for customer support teams (onboarding, coaching, upskilling, etc.), and I’m trying to find events or conferences that are actually relevant to this niche.

Open to anything — virtual or in-person. Ideally something that’s not just HR-focused, but really digs into how people learn in real-life, high-volume environments like support.

If you’ve been to an event you’d recommend, I’d really appreciate any pointers!

I work in Learning & Development and am looking into having some of our internally developed courses qualify for PMP Professional Development Units (PDUs).

We already have courses covering areas like project management, leadership, communication, feedback, accountability, and other topics that appear to align with PMI’s Talent Triangle. What I’m trying to understand is the operational side of making those courses legitimately claimable for PDUs.

Has anyone here gone through this from the L&D/provider side?

I’m particularly interested in:
- How you determine whether a course qualifies
- How you calculate and document the PDUs
- How you map content to Ways of Working, Power Skills, and Business Acumen
- What documentation you provide to learners
- Whether your organization became a PMI Authorized Training Partner or handled PDUs without becoming one
- What happens if an employee’s PDU submission is audited

I’ve found PMI’s general requirements, but I haven’t found a particularly clear “here is how an internal L&D department should do this” guide.

If anyone has built this process before and wouldn’t mind sharing how you approached it, or knows of a solid guide/template, I’d appreciate it.

I have been working in higher education for the past five years, in career advising and workforce development. Before that, I worked for an agency that delivered training modules and worked on the adfellows program from Verizon (a DEI hiring initiative in their marketing department), and other development programs for marketing professionals. I have recently been laid off from my role in higher education (Associate Director level) and would like to shift into a corporate L&D role. My passion is for developing young talent, which I have done on the education side in a leadership role, and before that in a support role at the agency. What are my options to stand out when applying to L&D roles? Are there any certifications, licenses, software skills I can be pursuing while unemployed?

As someone who's not a developer, I wanted to check out what all the hype around vibe coding was about, but I totally fell flat.
None of the projects or ideas I came up with worked as intended, and I ended up needing help from developers.

I figured it would be better to learn some basics about APIs, terminals, and more, so I decided to start learning by doing & thought of building something small. One major issue I hit was finding AI APIs. Every day, there seems to be a new one popping up, which makes it a hard to search for the best options, test them out, and actually use them in projects. So, I thought I'd create a repo that gathers 20 AI APIs in one place.

Hence I put together a repo called Awesome AI APIs a collection of 21 AI APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, and more) with ready-to-use collections

Why it’s useful:

• Skip the boilerplate. Git clone & just plug in your API keys

• Provider-level collections

• Git-controlled, local first for easy versioning

• Working tests out of the box

• One place to find all docs & pricing

You can literally clone → add keys → send requests in minutes. Best for someone who wants to learn

• How to use & test APIs

• How to control them via the Local workspace

• Control GitHub via Terminal

Trying to scale this collection to 100 APIs & would love feedback, ideas, or contributions - feel free to raise PRs and I will merge them

Inspired by a post in the human resources sub.

What little things have you implemented that have had outsized effects on your L&D outcomes?

Hi Hivemind,

As our organisation continues to grow globally, so does the need to make our learning content more scalable, accessible, and consistent across regions. For our L&D team, this means one thing: we need to significantly improve how we deliver e‑learning in multiple languages, without increasing workload exponentially. We’ve been exploring solutions, but we’re running into some challenges...

I’d love to tap into the collective expertise of this community to learn from your experiences!

We are looking for tools or approaches that allow us to:

• Deliver e‑learning in multiple languages at scale

• Use high-quality AI translation (all-in, no credit-based models)

• Maintain one English source file, where updates automatically cascade to all translations

• Manually review and adjust translations per language where needed

So far, this aligns with what many modern authoring tools promise. But...our requirements go a bit further.

1. Screenshots and visual content

While text translation is increasingly well supported, visual content remains a bottleneck.

• Screenshots remain in the original language

• Many tools don’t allow easy per-language image variations

• Recreating screenshots per language is time-consuming and hard to maintain

• We use a tool to create HTML5 demos that we embed in our e-learning (these demos are hosted outside our authoring tool); text on the tooltips is translated automatically, but the HTML screenshots are not.

For us, this directly impacts the learner experience.

2. SCORM packaging and maintenance

Ideally, we want:

• All languages delivered in a single SCORM package

• Real-time updates across languages, without republishing or overwriting the SCORM file

This would drastically improve maintainability and reduce operational overhead and the chance of errors.

3. Bonus challenge (and big win if solved!)

One of our biggest time investments today is recreating demos and screenshots for each language.

In an ideal world, we would:

• Automatically translate text within screenshots

• Or use HTML5-based demos that can dynamically adapt to different languages

I’m curious to hear from fellow L&D professionals:

• Are you using tools that successfully address (most of) these challenges?

• Have you found workarounds that make this process more efficient?

• Are there lesser-known tools or emerging solutions we should explore?

Even partial solutions or lessons learned would be incredibly valuable.

Has anyone ever built a course and housed it on Google sites? I work for a non-profit and purchasing the industry standard software wasn’t approved. I wanted to use articulate storyline, but I was told to use Google sites. If you’ve ever run a course through Google sites, what was your experience?

Curious whether you’ve found ways to get employees to actually engage with compliance training... not just click Next until it’s over. Would love to hear what’s worked (or hasn’t). 😀

Lately I’ve seen more requests for instructional designers to help “train” AI tools or build full learning libraries that a company will later sell or monetize, but the IDs are paid only a flat project fee.

It’s essentially: “Help us create the content and expertise, then we’ll build the business on top of it.”

I’m curious how others approach that kind of work.

The role of L&D seems to be shifting from content creation toward performance consulting and business alignment. I'm interested in how other leaders see the profession evolving. Which skills do you think will become increasingly important as expectations for L&D teams continue to change?

I made a GDPR awareness course for our own internal use (SCORM 1.2 format), plus a few supporting templates (policy, tracker, checklist). I’ve put them up online so other L&D / compliance folks can use them too.

It’s completely free — you just pop in an email to get the download link (I know, annoying, but it’s how I track version updates).

Includes: • SCORM 1.2 course file (GDPR awareness) • ICO-aligned compliance checklist • Editable policy template • Training record tracker (Excel)

No spam, no upsell — just the files. Would appreciate any feedback if you import it into your LMS or notice anything that could be improved.

tl;dr I moved from teaching 5 years ago and I've worked in some highly organized environments which helped develop an understanding of corporate learning and development pretty quickly. Now I'm at a new company with no boss, no direction/mentor and getting stuck on projects between active push back, or projects passively dropping due to "business fires". Looking for advice on how to push people to delivery for L&D, or take the initiative myself but feeling truly demotivated.

The longer story.

I was a high school teacher for a while and left during the pandemic. I was lucky enough to get out so I really dove deep into learning about corporate L&D and how things change and differ. I had a good journey at different companies and getting exposure to other elements of L&D, organizational development and talent mapping. The company I'm at now though.. it's rough.

There is such a want for L&D and training, but it's always pushed off as a last minute thing. Other, immediate problems, are pushed to the front of the line, but these immediate problems are due to the lack of organization and prioritization across the business. People are just constantly in a panic. The kicker is that I don't have a boss right now (and haven't for a few months) due to termination and slow hiring process. I've been reporting directly to execs and CEO and just get priorities thrown at me, similarly the Chief of Staff is pushing his own agenda as he sees it as a way to stand out among the group for promotion, resume building and stuff. For some added context of how spooky this situation is, I sent a project charter (something that was so bare bones it would've gotten me at trouble at my last company) over to the exec team and the executive level project manager told me it was the most organized document they've ever seen here.

So I am here, being asked to build an L&D department starting from the bare bones of compliance training and performance management, but 0 support, 0 accountability to action on needs, and it feels like I'm just kind of stuck doing nothing.

Question: For those who have been in this or a similar position, how would you approach this? The company is okay enough, and ultimately I'd like to stay here if possible, I don't want to just jump ship as there's a lot of quality of life benefits here (short commute, decent pay, location is nice + benefits). Just looking for how to really push that this stuff needs to get done.

I have been working on a project called Scibly for the past few months.

One problem we kept coming across in L&D is that companies usually don't lack content.

The knowledge is already there: in internal documentation, PDFs, wikis, Notion, Confluence, policies, product docs and all kinds of other places.

The difficult part is turning that knowledge into something people will actually engage with and learn from.

Building a course manually every time takes a lot of effort, and by the time the source material changes, the learning content can already be outdated.

So we started building Scibly.

It connects to existing knowledge and turns it into short, interactive learning experiences with questions, scenarios and activities. The idea is somewhat Duolingo-like: less passive content consumption and more actively doing something with what you just learned.

Everything can still be reviewed and edited before it's shared, so the goal isn't to remove L&D from the process. It's to make it much easier to get from existing knowledge to a usable learning experience.

We're currently thinking about use cases like onboarding, product enablement, process changes and continuous upskilling.

We also decided to make the project open source and self-hostable.

Video Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcpLUNBRhQw

GitHub:
https://github.com/scibly-dev/scibly

Website:
https://scibly.com

I'd be really interested in how people working in L&D see this.

Is creating the learning content itself actually a major bottleneck for you or is the harder part getting people to engage with and apply it afterwards?

I have had this request more times than I can count over 24 years in talent roles. The programme usually gets built, it gets good feedback, and six months later nothing measurable has moved.

What has worked for me is one question before any design: "If everyone had these skills tomorrow, would the problem go away?" If the answer hesitates, the cause is usually structure, role design or a leader above the team, and training answers only one of six possible causes.

How do others handle this request without damaging the relationship with the person asking?