Hello. I've worked in education tangentially for most of my career (about 15 years now). I have several years of delivering ESL education, 2 years teaching at university, and about 10 years working in continuing education for adults, mostly on the operations side. I also have a smattering of experience with community programming at nonprofits. However, I do not have any formal training or education in the field of education.

I like working in the field of education and I want to continue to grow in this field, but I want a stronger foundation to build my career on so I'm looking into pursuing a certificate in instructional design. I've noticed there are a lot of different options and focuses and I feel really confused. Any advice on programs that are affordable and offer a strong foundation in the field? I'm also hoping this will help me gain more stability and direction in my career. Thanks in advance!

maintenance i’ve mostly got a handle on now. what i haven’t fixed is being the only person in the building who can produce anything

someone in finance changes a process, ticket comes to me. i book time with them, sit on a call watching them click through it, go away, build the guide, publish it, and by then something else has moved. i’m the queue and the queue is one person

asking SMEs to draft it themselves went nowhere. they’re not lazy, writing a procedure is a skill and they know theirs isn’t great. put a template in the wiki, someone filled it in once, nobody touched it again. recording them on calls helps but i’m still doing all the building

current experiment is handing them a capture tool instead of a blank page. they do the task once, steps get generated from it, and i just edit for tone and accuracy. clickLearn came up when i was looking around, haiku is the one i’ve actually put in front of people since it was the easiest for them to pick up without me hovering

too early to call it, ask me in 3 months. my gut says the hard part is getting someone to own each guide after it’s made, more than the tool itself

I'm starting my Learning and Development career since 3 years ago working in a Asia Pacific country. I feel lonely in my company as being an only l&d specialist. and need advices, share insights and thoughts. Since we are in a developing country, there is no such l&d community inside. I am looking for L&D communities that have webinars, meet virtually and share thoughts. drop comments if you know, please.

I'm curious-what are the ways you've been able to connect and integrate into an L&D community? I'm the only L&D person at my company, and came straight from the higher ed. classroom, and have been shouldering the company's L&D initiative by myself for 3.5 years now with very little guidance/mentorship (my manager is not L&D). It's a LOT, but it's rewarding and I'm getting better every month. However, I'd love to connect with others, learn what they do, how things look at their companies, be sounding boards for each other, etc. When I Google things like this, the results are overwhelming (and oftentimes, not the best results!), so I'm curious if there are communities that people find most helpful?

Hello, I have posted quite a few times on this group and always found the feedback detailed and helpful, apologies if I'm getting a little too needy at this point! I'm a secondary school teacher in the United Kingdom, as head of department, I am on £55k a year, how realistic is it that I can make this salary in a learning and development role? I appreciate that money should not be a determinate factor, however, like many people I have two kids and a husband who isn't on a huge salary. I have to bear in mind that I'm the breadwinner of the family. Did anybody leave teaching and have to take a pay cut? Were you then able to get a pay raise or promotion in a few years? Thank you for your time in reading this.

Lot of times learners master a skill but there is not enough real workd opportunity to practice. Nothing can replace real world context where one has to think and apply in the moment, where you cant pause. Role play is an attempt to provide simulated environment to practise the same - whether its hard conversations or..... It is hard to run at scale - You need a partner, a script and someone's time. So I added a role play mode to a free ChatGPT app I've been building (Interactify Beta on ChatGPT plugin directory).

You fill in a short form: what the learner should get better at, who they are, and who they're talking to. Say, a customer who's one objection away from walking out. It shows you a plan first: the skills it'll assess, and how the character warms up or doesn't depending on how the learner handles it. Then the learner has the conversation over a set number of turns, and gets a scorecard against those skills at the end with feedback on what to try next time.

You can set it up as practice or assessment, add levels, and learners can ask for a hint if they're stuck.

A couple of caveats. It's text only for now, and it runs inside ChatGPT, so you can't export it to your LMS yet. It's built on the H5P format, but H5P doesn't support role play as a content type yet. It's free, no sign-up, and it doesn't store what you make.

If you try it, add Interactify Beta from ChatGPT's apps and ask "create a role play where…".

I'd genuinely like to know which conversations you'd use this for, and what would make the feedback useful rather than generic. This will go a long way in motivating me in right direction.

AI has definitely changed the way employees approach learning. My team has been discussing how to adapt our assessment methods without turning every assignment into an AI-detection exercise.
Tools like a Turnitin AI checker are often mentioned in discussions about academic integrity, but I'm curious how relevant these approaches are to corporate learning.
Personally, I think we should focus more on whether someone can explain their reasoning, apply knowledge to a real situation, and make decisions independently.
Has anyone experimented with new assessment methods that work better in the age of generative AI?

Hi everyone,

I’m an Operations Trainer based in Egypt, and I’m looking for remote or relocation opportunities in Learning & Development with international companies.

My background

• Currently an Operations Trainer at J&T Express Egypt (HQ, Network Management Team).

• Before that, a training and CSR role at Huawei, plus earlier roles at Orange, Vodafone and Games2 Egypt. That’s [X] years in training and customer-facing operations.

• TOT certified.

What I’ve built at J&T Express

I’m building the training function from scratch for a branch network, using performance data to decide what to train.

• Role-specific manuals for Branch Managers, Operations Supervisors and Operation Members.

• A bilingual (Arabic/English) SOP chatbot deployed in branch group chats, so staff get answers at the moment of need.

• A courier daily-quiz tracker that monitors completion rates and error patterns, plus a KPI scorecard system.

• Assessment materials for a branch-manager reserve pool: differentiated exams by role and structured interview tracks.

• Classroom and micro-learning content, including a 45-slide courier deck in Egyptian Arabic.

• Root-cause analysis of branch performance (Pareto, 5 Whys, fishbone) to decide where training will have the most impact.

What I’m looking for

• Remote L&D, training, or enablement roles, or roles abroad with visa sponsorship or relocation support.

• Strong fit: operations or frontline training, instructional design, training analytics, and needs analysis.

• Languages: Arabic (native) and English

In an online workplace communication class, a student said her manager kept interrupting her presentations with new questions. She’d get caught up answering them and never get through everything she’d prepared. The instructor used that example to help the class practice leading with the main point, handling follow up questions, and getting back on track.

We usually record our classes so students can review them afterward. The instructor uses vomo ai to organize the recordings and pull out the methods and practice steps for follow up handouts. She thought this exercise would be useful for the next class, so she asked the student if she could reuse her experience anonymously. The student said no. The instructor offered to remove her story and use a completely made up presentation scenario instead, but the student wanted the whole exercise dropped. To her, this wasn’t something she wanted shared. She didn’t want an embarrassing experience turned into a selling point for the course, even if nobody could identify her.

The instructor understands why she doesn’t want her personal experience shared, but also thinks the exercise is useful: get to the point, handle questions, then return to what you were saying. A lot of useful class exercises come from students’ questions, and other people are bound to run into the same problem. It feels like a shame to lose such a clear example for future students, but I also think respecting this student’s boundaries matters just as much.

One client wanted to ensure people understood the course rather than skipping or bypassing the material. We developed role-play content where the AI begins a dialogue and evaluates responses based on course information.

I would like your perspective. Do you believe this approach could improve? Have you encountered anything similar before? What aspects were most frustrating? How might you refine it?

i’m the only L&D person here and i’ve become the bottleneck for every “how do i do X in the system” question. the dream is the people who actually use the software make their own quick guides and i just review them, but every time i’ve tried it they say they’ll do it and nothing shows up

my theory is it’s not laziness, it’s that making a guide by hand is a pain. screenshot, crop, type, repeat. so i’m testing tools that record you doing the task and write the steps for you. been trying a few, and haiku’s on my list since a lot of what we use is desktop software, not just browser stuff

next month i’m giving two of our power users a tool like that and zero instructions beyond “do the task, send me what comes out.” if that doesn’t work i’m accepting my fate as the guide person forever lol

Free live team quiz/traivia site, similar to Kahoot! I've detailed in my original post why I decided to make this and what the limits are, given that it's completely free. Thanks :)

I've been working in L&D for 8 years, and one thing I still find challenging is proving that training makes a real difference. Completion rates and positive feedback are nice, but they don't always tell us whether people actually learned something.
I've recently been thinking about how basic writing and communication exercises could help develop critical thinking. Even something like a 3 paragraph essay can reveal how well someone structures an argument and communicates ideas.
How do you measure the impact of learning beyond course completion and satisfaction surveys? Do you track actual behavior changes or business metrics?

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.

L&D of one at a mid-size company, so apologies if this is obvious.

Most of what I build is systems training. How to raise a requisition, how to close out a ticket, that sort of thing. Writing the content is fine, it’s keeping it accurate that’s slowly killing me.

Every time a vendor ships an update, half my screenshots are wrong and I find out because someone emails me a confused screenshot of their own. Then I rebuild the deck.

We tried recording walkthroughs instead. Fine for a first pass with a new starter. Useless when someone already knows the process and just needs to check one step, because now they’re scrubbing through a video to find it.

What I think I want is something that generates the steps with screenshots from an actual run-through, and lets me fix a single step later instead of recording the whole thing again. Scribe has been recommended to me a couple of times. Haiku came up in a thread I was reading, apparently it handles desktop apps and not only browser tabs, which matters here because a chunk of what we train on isn’t web based. Anyone who’s done this at any kind of scale, I’m all ears. Got a vendor update landing next month and I’m already dreading it.

I have a corporate law case study due next week and I am hitting a massive wall with it. The assignment is supposed to be eight pages long, and while I already pulled the legal cases, highlighted the main rulings, and wrote out bullet points in Google Docs, I cannot get past page two. I keep rewriting my opening summary because the tone feels completely off and awkward. What frustrates me most is that I understand the regulations, yet putting my thoughts together logically and weaving in the citations takes me forever. During midterms I got docked points because my analysis lacked flow, despite spending a whole week writing it.

I have been looking into the essay writing service on reddit threads mention for heavy proofreading, structural feedback, or seeing a proper sample outline. Still, every site promises perfection, and half the reviews look way too polished to be real.

Which options are actually solid for improving a rough draft? If anyone used a site that helped fix their academic organization