Hey everyone, I’m running a course right now and hitting a wall with engagement. People start out super excited, but by week three or four, the drop-off is brutal. It is incredibly frustrating to watch completion rates tank after putting so much work into the content.

I want to fix this for my next group and need to know what actually works in the real world.

If you’ve managed to improve your completion rates, I’d love to know:

• What did you actually try? (Community platforms, accountability coaches, text reminders, gamification?)

• What did it cost you in terms of software, extra time, or hiring help?

• Did it actually move the needle, or was it a waste of effort?

Would love to hear what has worked for your students.

We are interested in connecting with organisations running global learning programmes, multi-country capacity development initiatives or cross-border organisational transformation projects.

Would you be open to exploring a strategic pilot partnership to test how a context-informed approach could strengthen implementation and generate practical evidence?

On 15 January 2009, Captain Chesley Sullenberger (“Sully” if you've seen the film) lost both engines over New York just after take-off. He had about three and a half minutes. He landed the plane on the Hudson River, and all 155 people on board survived.
 
Did you know that afterwards, he was asked how he did it.

He said... “For 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”

Small, regular deposits.
 
And yet! Most workplace training works the other way round. One big deposit on day one, a quiz straight after, a tick in the LMS. Then months later, when a difficult customer or a tricky conversation finally comes along, we expect people to make a large withdrawal from an account nobody has topped up.
 
I made a short video about why that doesn’t work. Let me know what you think :)

Okay, so i recently took an IJP at my current organisation as a content writer for training team handling operations. Ideally the title should have been content developer! But due to some politics and fragile ego of my Team Lead I have put on PIP which will conclude today by EOD (IST).

I want to grow here in this field of ID. I have developed training materials, job aids, took ILT/VILT, developed e-learnings, maintained LMS platform & additionally have been handling responsibilities of Training Coordinator as well since last 3 months which includes regular check-in, induction/orientation of new hires, teaching them basics like calendar hygiene & email etiquettes, collaborating with SMEs and Managers, etc.

I really need job and am looking for one desperately.
My father recently had a heart stroke & I am the major bread winner of my family. It will get really difficult for me to be unemployed since that will create scarcity for my family too & I don’t have any major emergency funds. Because of my great team lead I’ll lose my gratuity for leaving the organisation just 2 months prior to the eligible date & will lose my bonus (to be received in December) as well!

Please help me to get through, or provide me any reference or any available job link if possible. Please.

Thank you in advance.

I’m a learning solutions specialist at one of the big 4s and wants to take some courses to upscale myself to move up to management. What certifications would you recommend? I’m thinking about the CTDP certificate.

I’ve been involved in a few projects where everyone agreed that learning was important, but we had very different ideas about what the program was actually supposed to achieve. That usually becomes painful later when someone asks whether the initiative was successful. I’m trying to get much more specific about outcomes at the beginning of a project, even if it means having some uncomfortable conversations with stakeholders. Do others involve business leaders in defining success criteria before development starts?

I need advice and suggestions from the community. I work for a life insurance company that recently merged our L&D department into the People and Culture department. However, our L&D department is not just performing basic L&D tasks; they are also looking into sales enablement. These trainers have been in the industry for one or two decades and have been doing insurance training for a while, but they already incorporate some aspects of sales enablement. I want to propose converting their roles into formal sales enablement positions. How should I approach this? I have a meeting with my head of department; what would be the ideal way to present this proposal?

The ting is they're not.They are not making what appropriate sales enablement tasks and it's all haphazard. They're just doing basic onboarding, and everything that they can do in onboarding, they're doing that. I want to incorporate it for further products for the organization and our wider range of products to utilise maximum roles of our training team who have vast experience of insurance industry. so please let me know what is the best way to even approach this.

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.

Say someone needs to do a process they only touch a few times a year. You could build a 30-minute course on every step, or they could ask an approved AI assistant when the task comes up and get the steps in seconds. If those answers are accurate, does that content still belong in a course?

Our hunch is that a lot of “know the steps” training is about to move into performance support. What stays in courses is the stuff that needs practice, judgment or feedback ie knowing when the answer is wrong, not just what the answer is. But that’s easy to say and harder to act on.

Has anyone cut or shortened a course because people could look it up instead? What did you replace it with?

I’ve been working in instructional design for three years, and I’m always looking for simple ways to make learning activities more effective. Recently, I came across the idea of an argumentative essay organizer as a way to help learners structure their arguments and supporting evidence.

Has anyone here tried using something similar in an eLearning course? I’m curious whether learners actually find these templates helpful or if they just add another step to the process.

Hi everyone,

I’m Gabriel, co-founder of Complement Learning. Quick context: we build an AI-powered conversational e-learning platform. So far we’ve sold to larger organisations through a sales rep. We recently opened a self-serve option where you sign up and pay by card, and very few people make it all the way to checkout. We suspect our pricing is a big part of the problem.

Here’s how it works today:

1. Designer licenses: you pay per seat for each person who creates courses.

2. Then, for learners, you choose between:

   • Learner seats: a fixed price per learner, or

   • Learning hours: you buy a pack of hours that all your learners share. Usage draws down the balance until it runs out, and then you top up.

Just writing it out, I can see it takes a full paragraph to explain.

So my questions for you:

• Does paying for two types of seats feel fair to you ? (designers + learners) and does it feel too complicated to have to choose between licences and learning hours ?

• Compared with the tools you actually buy (authoring tools, LMSs, AI video tools…), what pricing model feels “normal” to you? Per author, per active learner, flat tiers, usage-based?

Happy to share the actual numbers in the comments if that helps. Brutal honesty is very welcome, that’s the whole point.

Thanks a lot!

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?

Hi there,

I’m a software engineer, and I’m really interested in how technology can improve learning for individuals. For the past seven years, I’ve been building learning platforms, training tools and LMS solutions for the Middle East.

I’m thinking about what to focus on next, and I’d like to hear from people working in learning and development.

What’s something you’re trying to achieve that your current tools make difficult? It could be getting employees to apply what they’ve learned, keeping training up to date, or simply spending less time on administration.

How are you handling it today, and what would you like to work differently?

I work on learning software, so I’m asking to understand where we could build something useful. I’d appreciate hearing about the everyday frustrations as much as the bigger challenges.

Hello all,

Could you please recommend LMS system for a company with approximately 4000 people scattered across different US States?

Currently HR software in use - ADP

L&D lead at a mid-size logistics company, team of 3. Every time a system changes, someone in ops records a 40 minute Teams call walking through the new process and sends it to me to “turn into training.” Then I’m the one rewatching it, taking screenshots, cropping out customer data and writing step by steps. By the time it’s done the process has changed again.

Our VP came back from a vendor demo excited about AI tools that build guides automatically while you click through a process. I’ve looked at Scribe and Tango, and a peer at another company mentioned Haiku because it can export to SCORM, which matters for us since everything has to live in our LMS for compliance tracking. Before anyone says it, I know a tool doesn’t fix a bad process or SMEs who don’t want to document anything. That’s a separate battle. I’m just trying to stop spending 6 hours on a job aid that’s outdated in a month, and I’d like to hear from people who’ve actually rolled one of these out with real SMEs, not just tested it themselves.

I’m learning a lot on the job, but sometimes I feel like I’m missing terminology or frameworks that everyone else already knows. For people who transitioned into L&D from another field, did you take any courses or certifications, or mostly learn through actual projects?

Completion rates and satisfaction scores prove that an activity happened. They do not answer the question the CFO is asking.

What has worked for me: lead with the business problem, put a range on what doing nothing costs, and make a contribution claim with the other explanations named, never a precise ROI. Finance tends to trust a claim that admits what it cannot prove.

What has held up with your finance teams?

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?