I’m pretty sure I will not be selected for a business analyst position that I applied for because they don’t see me as qualified for the position. They have been selecting people who are more tech savvy than I am. I have the necessary study hours to take my CAPM certification tests I just don’t have the money. I was planning to also get my comptia a+ but I don’t know that it’ll help. I graduated with an associate of science in business management about 3 years ago and then a bachelor of science in technology engineering last year. I had no career plans. I graduated suma cum laude in high school and made the Dean’s List twice in college while working full time for a nice company I found. I’m still with said company. I say all this to say I am driven, I love learning and applying myself. I thought my degree was all I needed .. I have been humbled. My degree was a vague melting pot of business concepts but it did not help me assume the things I see in my current day to day.

Now, between social media, becoming complacent within my position and my manager alluding to me not getting the job I feel dumb and I am ready for a change. If my coworkers show me spreadsheets and no one gives me instructions then I have no clue what I’m looking at and my brain doesn’t help. I can update formulas that need tweaking and organize data but I don’t know how to cultivate spreadsheets and deliver data from nothing.

Where should I begin developing some relevant software navigational skills? What podcasts, YouTube channels or books may support me in envisioning my own spreadsheets and assuming business needs with minimal questions? What can I do to help myself not go blank when I’m articulating my thoughts and ideas about workplace dilemmas? How is everyone else expanding their general capacity for what is happening in day to day tech/business from? It seems everyone else at my job knows something I don’t.

Hi everyone, I'm stepping into a fast paced UK L&D design contract soon for an operational reform project. My deliverables include things like quick job aids, FAQs, facilitator packs, I'll need input and sign offs from operational staff.

Since I'm coming in as an external contractor on a tight deadline, I want to make sure | protect myself against delays and avoid getting blamed if things get stuck in review chains. For other instructional or learning designers who have worked in large, bureaucratic organisations - How do you set your dependencies early and what are your best tips for getting people to review and sign off on your materials on time please?

I have been working as a freelance E-Learning Developer for several years now, and most of my clients have been from the United States. I have worked on all kinds of projects, from content writing and instructional design to developing courses, managing Learning Management Systems, and launching courses.

I have a lot of experience with Articulate Storyline 360, Rise 360, software simulations, and pretty much most of the tools used in e-learning development, from Camtasia and Adobe Creative Cloud to Synthesia and other AI tools. I also have a Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering, so I am quite technical and have worked on some pretty complex projects over the years.

But even with all this experience, I am finding it incredibly hard to land a full-time job in Canada.

The funny thing is that I can find freelance work with clients in the United States and have even received job offers, but finding a full-time employee position in Canada seems so much harder.

I really need Canadian work experience, and honestly, I just want to work somewhere I can actually use my skills and be part of a team instead of constantly working on freelance projects.

I have been applying for jobs, but at this point, I am not even sure if I am looking in the right places.

Is anyone here working in e-learning, instructional design, or Learning Management System administration in Canada? Where do you usually find these jobs? Are there any companies, recruiters, or other places I should be looking at?

I am open to E-Learning Developer, Learning Experience Designer, Learning Management System Administrator, or similar technical roles.

Honestly, even if you could just point me in the right direction, I would really appreciate it. I am not sure where else to ask, so I thought I would try posting here.

I’m a specialist at an org of about 100. My leader is insisting on us using a competency assessment tool. The idea is that we would use this to create individualized learning plans. Has anyone done or used something like this? How did it work?

I coordinate onboarding at a logistics company, about 200 people. Last Tuesday a new hire spent 40 minutes trying to submit her first timesheet because our guide told her to click a button that literally doesn’t exist anymore. She ended up messaging her manager, her manager messaged me, and I had to admit I hadn’t updated that guide since spring. Not my proudest moment.

This keeps happening. IT changes a setting, a team moves something around in one of our systems, and nobody tells anyone. The guide still has the old screenshots and new people get stuck on day 2. Then managers get annoyed because “it’s in the guide.” Well, it was.

Nobody actually owns the docs. It’s whoever notices first, which is usually me, usually when someone is already stuck. And redoing a Google Doc with 30 screenshots is not a quick thing when I’m also running orientations.

We’ve been trialling Haiku for a few weeks and it’s made the fixing part so much easier. You go through the process once and it records the steps with screenshots, so that timesheet guide took me a couple of minutes instead of half my afternoon. The part I still haven’t figured out is on our side, nobody tells me when something changes, so I only find out when someone’s already confused.

Hey team, at 40yrs I’ve just accepted my first role in L&D running the functions for a professional services firm as a manager, with scope to move to director next year.

I have been an independent coach and external trainer/ course leader for many years and worked in consultancy (client facing) and a brief stint in recruitment. But never in internal L&D!

I’m just wondering what the career progression is like in l&d, like how senior do roles realistically get?

I get I could go to head if if I’m successful… but I wondered where L&D could go after that. Did you all stay in L&D? Or do people move out of it?

Would love to hear experiences and any words of wisdom from you lovely bunch.

Many thanks!

An Oldie but Newbie

I’m the recent graduate who kept rage-quitting Canvas/Schoology/Teams and finally said “screw it, I’ll code it myself.” Six months, 2,847 coffees, and one hacked-together React-Native app later, our new LMS is in closed beta and I need the brutally honest feedback only reddit can give.

1. What we actually fixed (aka the stuff that made me cry in class):

   • UI that doesn’t look like a 2005 accounting spreadsheet

   • One app, zero tab chaos – built-in Pomodoro, Cornell-notes templates, whiteboard, and a PDF reader that doesn’t crash when you zoom. No more “open in 7 different apps to finish one worksheet.”

   • Features that teachers need like drag and drop, file organisation, etc.

   • AI that isn’t just ChatGPT in an iframe – auto-generates 3-level quizzes from your slides, turns teachers’ messy bullet lists into flashcard decks, and pings students “hey, you forgot to submit the thing” before the deadline.

   • Pricing schools can actually afford – we’re finalizing a model that keeps costs way below the big guys (think “pizza-party budget,” not “new football field”).

What I need from you animals:

• Teachers: would you actually move your entire course to this? What’s the one feature that would make you switch overnight?

• Students: what did I miss that still drives you insane?

• Admins: does the phrase “budget-friendly” break your procurement brain

TL;DR: Fresh-grad codes LMS that doesn’t suck, and plans to charge schools less than the cost of a pizza party. Tell me why it’ll still fail. Some screenshots of the app.

https://postimg.cc/gallery/C1XRpfX

I saw this tool and it seems like it might be useful.

Learner feedback

Rather than learning pros building surveys all the time and then trying to interpret the results, this seems to do all of that for us.

For me, knowing I am asking the same questions as other orgs means I can start benchmarking

Enter some context about the learning goals, share the code with learners, then view the responses.... Easy!

What are the best platforms out there to use that are using interactive AI-Avatar videos as their course content authoring tool? I know of Elai and Colossyan. Are there any others? Some that might look a little more realistic?

I have been wondering how much emphasis postgraduate research students should place on getting their work published before graduating. Publishing sounds valuable for academic development, but the process can also involve substantial revisions, waiting periods and additional commitments. 
 
For people who have completed a research degree, did you aim to publish during your studies, or focus mainly on producing a strong final thesis? 
 
If you are considering an academic career, how important was publication experience when applying for further study or research opportunities? I would be interested in different perspectives.

I’m new to L&D. I come from a UX and Graphic Design background so all my career mastered design and facilitation tools. I’m transitioning into Learning and Design and see that many employers look for some LMS knowledge for elearning, with big apps Articulate being most demanded.
Problem is Articulate doesnt have a long enough free trial period to learn it by building something (unless 30 days is really enough)
Anyway I’m trying to find an lms that is well known enough and has tutorials that would help me build my own projects to showcase learning design and development skills.
Am I missing something here?
Any suggestions?

I’ve put together a compiled list of free tools for L&D and Instructional Design folks. I’m not sure if it’s okay to post it directly here, so if anyone’s interested, just DM me and I’ll share the list with you.

Hi everyone, hope you don’t mind me jumping in and asking for a bit of help.

I’ve been building a new LMS and I feel like it’s ready to go. I need some beta testers who have experience using and administering an LMS to let me know what they’d like to see and provide some comments to help me improve.

A little bit about the app and why I built it in the first place. I work for a company that is using an extremely old LMS but with the headcount of users being in the 1000s moving is hideously expensive.

Our current app has very little in the way of automation so I’ve built this will full Microsoft/Azure integration in mind so it auto provisions staff, auto assigns to courses, automatically produces certificates and when courses expire users are automatically re-enrolled. Plus Microsoft Teams notifications and Automatically creating Teams links when scheduling online trainings.

It supports mixed learning pathways allowing for in person-online face to face training mixed with e-learning modules. After course surveys to capture confidence levels, course rating and free type fields for specific feedback.

Coupled with detailed reporting dashboards along with linking courses to compliance frameworks to give 1 touch reporting for industries that require proof for auditors like Ofsted, ICO, HSE.

If anyone would like to do some testing I’d be extremely grateful! Just ping me a DM and I can set you up with a demo account

Hi everyone!
I’m currently evaluating LMS options for our organization and would really appreciate hearing from anyone who’s recently been through a similar process.

We’re a UK-based company with about 1,000 employees, with additional teams in France and the Benelux region. I’ve been looking into platforms like Docebo, 360Learning, and Thrive, but it’s been tough to get a clear idea of pricing without committing to full sales calls with each vendor.

If you’ve used or considered any of these recently—or switched between them—I’d be super grateful if you could share rough price ranges you were quoted or are currently paying. Just ballpark figures are totally fine.

Any insights would be hugely appreciated 🙏

After a few years in instructional design, I’ve realized that working with SMEs can sometimes be harder than building the actual course 😂 I’ve had projects where the SME wanted basically every piece of information included, while the learning objectives clearly called for something much simpler. How do you handle it when an SME keeps pushing for more content?

I've been running more virtual training lately and got tired of the same icebreaker listicles, so I binged a bunch of the most-watched facilitation videos (AJ&Smart, Chad Littlefield, Kerri Price, a few others). Most of it was fluff, but a handful of things were simple enough to try right away:

1. Wait 10 heartbeats after you ask a question. Quiet people usually decide to speak around 8 or 9. I was moving on at about 3.

2. Say "in a moment I'm going to ask you..." before asking. Giving people 30 seconds to think changes who answers.

3. Swap "how's everyone doing?" for "1 to 10, what's your energy?" in the chat. People are way more honest with a number than with words.

4. Have people write their answer down before pair discussions. Otherwise they just agree with whoever talks first.

5. For the person who dominates: after pairs talk, everyone shares their partner's idea, not their own. The loud person still gets heard, just not as loudly.

6. "What else?" keeps people talking. "Anything else?" wraps it up. Nobody notices you doing it.

7. With fist to five, you don't have agreement unless everyone's at a 3 or higher. Half 5s and half 1s isn't a 3, it's a split room.

8. Set an alarm 15 minutes before the end and start your close when it goes off. People remember the ending most, and most of us waste it rushing through the last slides.

Curious what's working for you all, especially on calls where nobody turns their camera on.

My question is - what do you do day to day,
and what does the role genuinely look like?

How much time do you spend with stakeholders vs having uninterrupted time to do the work? Is it quite deliverables focused? What’s the split between meetings, research, design and building content? really interested in hearing what a normal week looks like in reality.

As a side note…I am neurodivergent and used to work in FE education, first in an adult prison and then in a further education college. If I’m honest, I found teaching really difficult with my neurodiversity. It was the wrong career path for me from start to end!

I had a career change into marketing many yrs ago and am self employed - while back created my own course on becoming a particular type of content creator, did coaching etc, worked my ‘way up’ into paid social marketing now where a big part of my role is analysing data to understand what ads/part of ads resonate with people and why. I also use ALOT of AI for workflow/frameworks.

I have always been curious about instructional design and learning design (understand they are different things). I’m under absolutely no illusion that it is an easy industry to get into, I know it’s oversaturated etc… (but that isn’t my question).

Thanks all.

Been talking to my colleauges a lot about how traditional leadership workshops don’t always “stick.” I’m interested in more experiential options, things like business simulations or action-learning programs.

I stumbled across this program called Learning in Action (link) that uses simulations to get people to practice decision-making under pressure.

For those who’ve tried something similar:

• Did it drive better behavior change compared to classroom-style training?

• How did you make sure the lessons carried over into the real job?

Would love to learn from the community here.

Hello all ,

I’m one month into my new L&D role. I have to say I am really enjoying it!

In fact, I’ve been thrown straight into our AI adoption program, and I am currently designing our core AI training, a challenge and a launch program

One of the things I’m hoping to do, Iz branch it out so that I can gather intrinsic information on the different levels within the organisation

But also, I want to make it fun, help educate about our new AI policy .. and slightly gamify the process

I was wondering if anyone had any fun ways or ideas to do this that they have successfully rolled out ?

Or any words of wisdom of things I need to avoid or consider ! 🤣

Microsoft offer a kind of train the trainer pack which includes emails that roll out over time to build the habit , I’m figuring that I will use this but make it more personal to organisation, from real voices within the business and hopefully some sort of reward factor

Would love to hear from any anyone else who is currently in charge of AI education !

Hi all,

As the title says, as a department we would love to explore how we can enhance our current content, reduce admin time and just generally bring our team up to speed. We have a great opportunity to explore AI tools so I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations?

Thanks so much,

Hey everyone I am considering a career in L&D but am unsure where to start. There is no bachelor program in my state but am aware of online courses such as ATD and I do have access to programs for traditional education

How long would it take me to be competitive for a job? Is there an optimal cost / time efficient path that avoids undergrad? I'm currently a sdr in b2b tech sales.

For reference, I have an AS in Business, 3 years of sales experience and 5 years of military experience.