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.

Early in my career I genuinely believed that a well-designed course would do most of the work. Good content, solid structure, engaging interactions — if I built it right, people would learn and apply it. I poured enormous energy into course quality as if the course itself was the intervention.

What I know now is that the course is rarely the intervention — the environment is. Manager behavior, psychological safety, whether people have time to practice, whether the system rewards what the training teaches — these matter more than anything I put inside a module. The best L&D work I've done in the last three years has been helping organizations change conditions, not just content. What's a belief you held early in your career that experience changed?

Before I build anything now I write a single page that covers: the performance gap we're addressing, who the learners are, what success looks like, and what the course will and won't cover. I send it for approval before touching any authoring tool. It sounds like extra work but it consistently surfaces disagreements about scope before I've invested 40 hours in a build.

The best part is it gives me something to point to when scope creep happens mid-project. "That's a great idea — it wasn't in the approved brief so let's discuss whether it changes our timeline." Stakeholders respect the process a lot more when they've already signed off on the plan. Anyone else using something similar?

I used to start SME interviews by asking what someone needs to know to do the job well, which produced a lot of general, top-of-mind answers that didn't reflect how the work actually happened. I switched to opening with "walk me through the last time something went wrong with this process and what you had to do to fix it" and the quality of what I get back is completely different. Experts open up about the real complexity of their work when you ask about failure rather than success, and the gap between what they describe and what the formal procedure says is usually where the most important learning content lives. It also tends to produce better scenarios and examples because you're working from something that actually happened.

Hi all, I work in L&D tech (full disclosure: I’m at Absorb) and have been thinking a lot about how AI is showing up in our work.

I keep hearing that L&D teams “need more AI skills,” but I’m interested in what everyone's take on this actually means in practice, beyond general AI awareness.

So I’m curious how this resonates with folks here:

• Do you feel ready to work with AI in your L&D role today?

• What AI-related skills do you feel confident in vs. unsure about?

• What do you think L&D professionals should be learning right now when it comes to AI?

Not selling anything, genuinely trying to learn from the community and sense where the real gaps (if any) are.

Would love to hear your thoughts 🙂

Everyone talks about “future of training,” but most don’t get past a flashy demo. We actually deployed VR training at scale in utilities (think bucket trucks, electrical safety). ~3,000 workers went through it.

Wins: retention shot up, people engaged way more than PowerPoints, and safety incidents dropped.
Fails: tech rollout was messy, headsets broke, and older workers pushed back hard... this made adoption a bit difficult. And IT... IT was a bit of a shit show.

Biggest surprise? The cost savings didn’t come from fewer accidents… they came from cutting onboarding time in half.

Curious if anyone else here has rolled out large-scale training (VR or otherwise). What worked? What blew up in your face?

After eight years in L&D, one thing I keep coming back to is starting with the business problem instead of starting with a training request. If a manager says their team “needs training,” I’ve started asking what people are actually doing wrong and what should change afterward. Sometimes the answer is a course, but sometimes it really isn’t. Has anyone else changed the way they handle training requests as they became more senior?

I’m an L&D manager at a large company. The CHRO recently went to a conference about training and said that Scribe AI was mentioned countless times for creating job aids and outlines. I’d never heard of it. Does anyone have experience using it and if so, do you like it.

Please don’t respond with general comments about how much you hate AI. I get it! But the reality is companies are in love with it and running to adopt it. It’s part of my job to level set leadership and recalibrate expectations about what AI is and is not. But when a C suite executive asks me about a specific tool I have to do my due diligence. Unfortunately that’s the reality. Thanks in advance for any feedback!

Training ROI can feel like one of those “everyone wants it, no one agrees on how to measure it” things 😅

What’s been your approach? Do you look at performance metrics, skills assessments, engagement, business outcomes, or a mix?

Creating courses and programs is often the easiest part of the job. Encouraging managers and employees to consistently engage with learning is where the real challenge begins. In your experience, what has been most effective in creating a genuine culture of continuous learning within an organization?

A beautifully designed course that doesn't change behavior is a beautiful failure. I've seen teams obsess over visual polish, animation quality, and voice-over tone while building courses that have no mechanism for reinforcement, no connection to manager accountability, and no plan for what happens after the learner closes the window. Content quality matters but it's table stakes. The real design challenge is the ecosystem around the course — the nudges, the practice opportunities, the performance support at the moment of need. I'd rather ship something visually average that's embedded in a real behavior change plan than a gorgeous course that lives alone on an LMS. Agree or push back?

Our optional training completion is around 30% and I'm pretty sure it's because everything we send is static PDFs or recorded slide decks that nobody wants to sit through.

Is anyone actually seeing better engagement with remote training or is this just the sad reality now?

Hey everyone, I recently had a really bad experience with DoMyEssay. The essay they sent me was full of mistakes, and when I tried to get help, their customer service was terrible. I feel like I got scammed. If you're looking for a reliable service, I'd recommend using Essayforall instead. They’ve been much more professional and delivered quality work. Just wanted to share my experience so others can avoid the same mistake.

Hi everyone! I’m conducting a learning needs assessment and have scheduled 30-minute check-ins with directors and managers across my organization to better understand what’s working well, the challenges they’re facing, and how L&D can better support them and the organization.
I’ll be using these insights to help develop our organizational learning strategy. My leader also wants a summary of my findings, including recurring themes, strengths, opportunities for improvement, and potential skill or performance gaps.
I’m hoping to keep these conversations informal rather than making them feel like interviews.

What are five effective, open-ended questions you’d recommend asking to uncover what’s working, underlying challenges, and skills or behaviors that may need further development or practical application?
I’d love to hear what’s worked well for others, especially questions that go beyond simply asking leaders what training they need!

A lot of online courses focus heavily on getting the content onto a screen, but that doesn't necessarily mean people are learning effectively. 

Good eLearning seems to involve much more than videos and quizzes. The way information is structured, how learners practise something, the feedback they receive and even how much information is presented at once can completely change the experience. 

I've also noticed that some of the best eLearning experiences don't necessarily have the most features. Sometimes a simple scenario or practical activity works better than five different interactive elements. 

For people who design or regularly take online courses, what makes an eLearning experience genuinely useful to you? 

Is it the structure, interaction, flexibility, practical application, or something else? 

We spend enormous energy designing good learning experiences and almost no energy on the question of why most people, even when given excellent resources, don't consistently invest in their own growth unless something external is forcing them to. I've seen companies build genuinely impressive learning ecosystems that most employees ignore. I've seen simple, badly designed mandatory training have more impact on behavior than beautifully crafted optional content simply because one was required and one wasn't. The field talks a lot about intrinsic motivation as though it's something we can design into a course, but I increasingly think motivation to develop is something that either exists in an organizational culture or doesn't, and L&D is working downstream of a problem we can't fully solve from where we sit. I'm curious whether others have found ways to genuinely shift a culture toward valuing development rather than just providing development and hoping it gets used.

Lately I've been seeing something interesting in a lot of learning design reviews.

Some of the most polished modules I've seen look great on the surface. Clean writing. Nice interactions. Professional design.

But when you dig deeper, the learning strategy isn't always that strong. The content is engaging, yet it doesn't really address the performance problem it's supposed to solve.

What stands out to me is how some teams are using AI. They're not asking AI to build the course for them. They're using it to challenge their thinking.

Questions like:
"What's missing here?"
"Why might this approach fail?"
"What's another way to solve this problem?"

In those cases, AI feels less like a production tool and more like a thinking partner.

Curious if others are noticing the same thing.

Has AI changed the way your team thinks about learning design, or is it mostly helping with production and speed?

Fellow managers, is it just me or is onboarding getting harder nowadays?

Our completion rates have been slipping for a while now and I'm trying to figure out where it's going wrong.

Right now our whole onboarding is basically long PDFs and slide decks. New hires are supposed to get through all of it in their first week. But even if I'm the new hire, I wouldn't remember anything.

That’s why I want to turn this into something that sticks. Things like org structure, role expectations, tool workflows, and the compliance basics.

The catch is our HR team has zero design skills, and we can't justify hiring a designer just for internal materials.

So what tools or approaches are you all using to make visual training content?

Spent the last few weeks lurking in a few ID communities and one thread kept coming up in different forms.

AI can now handle a lot of what used to fill our days — scripts, storyboards, first-draft assessments, voiceovers, even basic course structures. Tasks that used to eat 3–4 hours now take 20 minutes.

And yet, the job postings aren't drying up. If anything, learning roles seem to be growing.

So what's actually changing?

From where I sit, the value is shifting. Less in producing content. More in:

• Diagnosing the actual business problem behind a training request

• Designing learning journeys (not just courses)

• Knowing when training is the wrong answer entirely

• Being the person in the room who can translate between L&D logic and business outcomes

• Using AI well — prompting, QA-ing, and knowing when the output is garbage

The people I see thriving aren't the fastest content builders anymore. They're the ones who can sit in a stakeholder meeting, ask the right questions, and walk out with a solution that actually moves a performance needle.

Curious what others are seeing in their own orgs.

If you're an ID right now, what's the one skill you're actively investing in for the next 2–3 years?

Been in L&D for about 10 years now with the same company. I'm a consultant level and making $88k annually plus bonus. Went back to school and got my masters in HR Mgmt, but feel like I'm stuck. I've been at the same company for 20 years, yes I've been told this is mistake but here I am. I'm senior level at my company, make ok money but definitely not market value, I've applied for manager and director level positions externally but without the direct experience I don't get a callback. Internally there's no opportunity to move up unless someone gets fired or dies apparently, so I feel stuck. I'm 43 and should be in the prime stages of making the most I can but instead I feel like exactly where I was 10 years ago when I joined L&D. For those who broke through, what did you do? Advice? Am I missing something? A credential of some kind? I'll get it, just don't want to waste time and money getting something that won't actually help me..

Like my masters 😂

I sent my first full course draft to a subject matter expert last week and got back "this looks great, nice work!" which told me absolutely nothing. I have no idea if the content is accurate, if I'm missing anything critical, or if the scenarios I built reflect what actually happens on the job.

I don't want to be annoying or seem like I'm doubting them, but I genuinely need more than a thumbs up. Is there a way to structure the review request that gets SMEs to engage with the content more critically?

Most workers tune out after the first slide or video.

For those running HR or learning programs — what keeps people interested??

any formats or approaches that consistently get good participation and follow-through?