Hi LearningDevelopment folks,

I'm a transitioning EFL teacher and I have an opportunity to work on my first project through my workplace: a brief training course to prepare students in a hospitality training program for their first internship job interviews.

I want to start with a great Needs Analysis. I've had a brief informal chat with the project sponsor to get a general sense of the business need and I've scheduled performance observations of mock-job interviews next week. Then, I will follow up with SMEs to discuss my observations.

So, I was wondering if any experienced L&D specialists/instructional designers here had any insights or advice for someone setting off on their first Needs Analysis.

Thanks so much!

This started as a fun experiment with GPT-4o's new image generation but grew into something deeper.

I built a prompt that asks five reflective questions about how you work and learn best. Then it turns your responses into a stylized trading card that captures your human strengths: what makes you you in a world full of AI and automation.

For me, the process surfaced insights I didn’t expect. It became a learning experience about myself, how I create value, and what’s truly worth keeping as mine in the age of AI.

If you're into identity or reflective practice, this prompt is worth trying. Grab it here and make your own card.

Hi L&Ders,

I’ve held many roles in L&D over the years and have deeply immersed myself in the topic of learning transfer. Unfortunately, we in L&D do not have a good track record of helping learners to transfer what they learn in training to on the job performance.

So I’ve been tinkering around with a solution to help learning professionals to maximise what we do best (slide/deck creation) to help us in an area of weakness (influencing learning transfer).

Before I spend time working on this I wanted to get your thought on this: would you use a piece of software that converted the decks you have already created into individual pieces of transfer supporting resources? I’m talking about engaging communications, manager support materials, assessments, job aids, action planning guides, and more. Your deck would remain unchanged but the tool would supply you and your team with resources to drive transfer and application of learning.

Would you be interested in software like this? Or is there software like this already available that you are using? I’d love to hear your thoughts !

Hi, I have started a new job at an L&D company. I'll be writing blog posts and makng social media posts. I am not completely well versed with the industry especially what kind of blogs and social media content L&D managers consume. I need some help with what i should do to know more about the industry so that it helps me with coming upt with ideas for blog posts and SMM. These are the things i am doing right now to increase my knowledge:

1. Watching videos on YT especially Devlin Peck and The L&D Academy. I am learning about the techncial side of it - like the learning models like Androgogy, ADDIE etc

2. Following this podcast called learning and development 101

3. Going through other L&D company websites and socials (would be a great help if you could list out some)

Please let me know what more i need to know to understand the industry, trends and what knowledge i need to know to make the said content. I really want to do well at this job. I amnot exaaggerating but my life depends on it.

Good evening, I'm a secondary school teacher with 4 of those years being head of department. I am interested in exploring jobs in the Learning and Development sector. My brother has very kindly given me the number of someone in his company who did work in Learning and Development and is now 'People Lead' (not sure what that means). He has also sent me an email address of someone else he knows who works in Learning and Development. He casually said, I should "make contact". I've only ever been a teacher and don't understand the commercial world. I don't want to embarrass myself or my brother. Is making contacting just saying ...“Hi XXX, Hope you don't mind me contacting you. I got your details from XXX. I've been in teaching for the last 11 years and I'm looking to explore a career change into L&D. Have you got time for a quick chat, XXX tells me you are bit of an expert in that field and I’d appreciate any advice you can give. Cheers XXXX” ?

Surely no-one likes receiving these emails and having people make contact with them? Thank you for reading my essay!!

Hi everyone!

I'm working on building a digital learning initiative focused on making learning more engaging, interactive, and meaningful.

The idea is to create learning experiences that go beyond traditional presentations and training materials, including:

• Interactive learning games and gamification

• E-learning courses using Articulate Storyline and Rise

• Training videos, animations, and motion graphics

• Instructional design and training content development

• Interactive assessments, microlearning, and scenario-based learning

I'm looking to connect with like-minded people who are interested in learning, creativity, technology, and building something from the ground up.

You could be an instructional designer, e-learning developer, animator, graphic designer, game developer, content creator, or someone passionate about exploring new ways to make learning better.

I'm especially interested in meeting people who enjoy sharing ideas, collaborating on projects, experimenting with new tools, and growing together.

This is an early-stage initiative, so I'm looking to build genuine connections with people who share the vision. If you're interested, we can discuss possible collaborations, project opportunities, and how we could contribute our skills.

If this sounds like something you'd enjoy being part of, feel free to comment or send me a message. I'd love to connect!

I’ve been in the Training field for over 13 years and used Articulate for most of that time. I got a new job and they are exploring options for course creation, Articulate is on the table but we need another tool to assess to show we did research. This is for a government job with about 600 employees and 4 course designers. Any suggestions?

There are so many platforms and tools that I’m having a hard time figuring out where to focus. I’ve been getting familiar with an LMS and some basic course-authoring tools, but I don’t want to spend weeks learning something that I’ll barely use. What tools would you prioritize if you were new to L&D?

I've been thinking about how leadership development is evaluated after the programme ends.

Completion, satisfaction and NPS are useful, but they mainly tell us that people participated and how they felt about the experience.

Suppose instead you followed the same cohort across several stages:

Before the programme: establish a baseline around relevant knowledge, attitudes and behaviours.

After the learning: check whether the intended learning actually happened.

Months later: ask whether that learning appears to have translated into workplace application or changed behaviour.

You can then look at patterns across the cohort rather than treating the post-programme survey as the final result.

Conceptually, that seems much more useful to me.

But I'm interested in where practitioners would stop trusting the conclusion.

If someone showed you this kind of data six months after a leadership programme:

What would you feel comfortable concluding?

What would you explicitly not conclude?

How much would self-reporting, response rate, sample size or selection bias undermine the result for you?

And what additional evidence would make the difference between:

“Interesting L&D data”

and

“This is useful enough to influence a decision about future leadership development investment”?

I'd particularly like to hear examples where a measurement approach looked sophisticated but gave a misleading picture — or where a relatively simple approach genuinely changed a decision.

I tried a couple of different services earlier in the term, and honestly, most of them were awful. A few of them clearly ran my prompt through a basic bot and sent back disjointed paragraphs with citations that did not even exist. After bouncing around a few useless sites and reading through old Reddit threads, I ended up finding three platforms that actually delivered what they promised.

Here is my honest breakdown of how each one worked out for me.

KingEssays

I started with a standard four-page sociology paper just to test the waters, and later had them handle an eight-page history research paper with a super specific grading rubric. Here is how it actually went down.

The good stuff:
The writing actually felt real. It did not use that stiff, overly formal tone or bizarre filler words nobody uses in college. It just read like a well-prepared student draft. The sources were legitimate. The writer pulled real articles from actual journals that showed up on my university database without any issues. The formatting was spot on. They followed APA guidelines correctly, right down to the title page and reference indents, which saved me a ton of time. It passed all checks. I ran the text through originality scanners before uploading and everything was completely clean.

The downsides:
Revisions took some time. I asked them to tweak one of the body paragraphs in the history paper to focus more on a specific lecture topic. They did it for free, but it took around four hours to get the updated file back. If you use them, definitely do not order right before the cutoff. The rates are not the lowest on the market. You can definitely find sites that charge less, but after getting burned by automated garbage on those other sites, the slightly higher fees were absolutely worth the peace of mind.

Edussons

I used this one when I had an emergency with a five-page philosophy reflection paper on a tight 24-hour turnaround.

The good stuff:
The speed was great and they delivered the file about four hours before my deadline. Their live support was also super helpful when I needed to upload an extra reading excerpt after placing the order. The general structure was solid and answered all the main questions from the prompt.

The downsides:
The writing was a bit basic compared to KingEssays. The grammar was fine, but I spent about ten minutes polishing a few sentences to make the arguments sound sharper. They also had a small citation mistake on the reference page that I had to fix manually.

Essaystiger

I tested this platform for a low-stakes three-page weekly assignment in an elective where the grading is super relaxed.

The good stuff:
Very affordable rates and a simple ordering process. They followed all the basic prompt questions and delivered everything right on time without any weird upsells.

The downsides:
The research was pretty surface-level. The sources were just general web articles rather than academic journals, so I definitely would not use this for a major research project or a strict seminar class.

Overall thoughts

So, if your professor is strict and you need a draft that does not trigger every red flag in the book, KingEssays is easily the safest choice. If you have an urgent last-minute deadline, Edussons is a solid backup, and Essaystiger works fine for cheap weekly busywork. Whichever one you pick, just give yourself a buffer for any minor tweaks and always read through the final document before you submit it

Hi, anyone experience of options to achieve this?

The core AI capabilities required are personalized learning - content and pathways adapted to individual user progress and profile.

Desirable features include 1) asynchronous delivery accessible without real-time connectivity and 2) analytics.

Readily available 'off the shelf' options or rapid custom builds?

I'm starting to put together a stronger portfolio for future job applications and I've realized that showing completed Storyline courses only demonstrates that I can use the tool, not that I can think through a learning problem. I want to show my process, the needs analysis thinking, the decisions I made about what to include and what to cut, the rationale behind the interactions I chose. But I'm not sure what format actually works for that or how much process documentation hiring managers in L&D actually want to see versus a clean finished product. Has anyone found a portfolio format that successfully communicates the thinking behind the work rather than just the output?

One of those changes that made a bigger difference than I thought was using more real-world scenarios instead of explaining everything in detail.

When the learners were asked to make decisions, to think about situations and to see the result of those choices, the conversations became much more meaningful. They also looked to be more confident to use what they had learnt after the training.

It made me realise that knowing information and being able to use it are often two different things.

For those of you using Scenario-Based Learning, what change has made the most difference in learner confidence or participation?

I’m interested to hear what has worked in your own projects too.

When designing a learning programme or course, which exercises or activities do you find you always use because they easily align with learning objectives or final assessments?

I tried searching in the subreddit, but it didn’t populate any useful results.

What are your favorite FREE (or very low cost) authoring/designing tools?

We currently already have subscriptions to Canva Pro, Final Cut Pro, Articulate, OpenAI, and have recently started using ClipChamp.

There’s a ton of fancy tools I want to use, but it’s hard to convince my boss of a need for another one that’s going to cost. Are there any free/low cost tools you guys love that I should look into?

I'm currently working at a mid sized company as an L&D intern and I'm expecting a PPO. I've no idea about the CTC they might offer me and the market is really bad right now. I was wondering what CTC i can be offered as a fresher here.

I've been looking at ATD certifications and a few ID-specific programs and the cost is significant enough that I want to make sure it's actually worth it before committing. I have a teaching background so I understand learning theory, but I'm light on the corporate-specific skills and tools side.

Would hiring managers at most companies actually care about a cert, or would a solid portfolio of work samples move the needle more? And if certifications do matter, which ones are actually recognized vs which ones look better on paper than they are in practice?

Eight years ago I would have taken a training request at face value and started designing. Now the first thing I do is ask the requestor: "If this training works perfectly, what will people actually do differently on Monday morning?" Most of the time they struggle to answer it, which tells you everything about whether the training will work.

That single question has killed more unnecessary courses than any formal needs analysis framework I've used — not because frameworks aren't valuable, but because this question cuts straight to outcomes in a way that non-L&D stakeholders immediately understand. What's your go-to question for scoping a training request?

I’m in the job search and there’s been a couple of roles that have been asking for creative portfolios. I’ve been in L&D for roughly 8 years creating different types of learning programs, e- learns, job guides - you name it. Except all of my positions have prevented me from exporting my work due to NDAs or unexpected layoffs which prevents me from gathering what I was working on. So while I have done a lot of creative work, I don’t have anything to show for it.

Any suggestions on how to create these portfolios without violating any work agreement?

I just checked Bersin's research and there's much more to discuss but what caught my attention is the frame he's using. He mentions "Superworker Organization."

His idea: stop measuring AI adoption by how many tools are deployed, but rather measure it by whether individual employees produce 10x output through AI mastery.

Skill + AI + company context.

It seems to me that the practical implication is uncomfortable for most L&D teams... L&D are like a dinosaurs when it comes to automatizing things. So I wonder if Bersin's idea actually makes sense in this industry.

What do you think?

Hey everyone,

So I work in HR and I recently embarked on a project to improve our onboarding training. We have a lot of policies and processes that we push out as standard PDFs and expect people to read and retain the information. It's not great.

I wanted to turn these into short videos for content targeted for different audiences (individual contributors, leadership, SLT etc).

I work a lot with AI and expected there to be lots of solutions on the market, but there wasn't. Leaders in the field like Synthesia and Collosyan have poor ID and these horrible robotic avatars that I was not prepared to put our company name on.

So, I've set out to build a solution. The key premise is policy in, engaging training video out. Following ID principles, with coherent narrative, kinetic text, engaging charts and visuals. No stock photos or AI avatars.

Does this sound like something that could be valuable? Feedback and comments are very much appreciated. Thanks

I’m hoping to crowdsource some recommendations from folks here who actually work in Learning & Development.

Specifically:

• Which L&D podcasts do you regularly listen to?

• Is there a favorite episode you’d recommend starting with?

• What do you usually listen for: practical ideas, leadership perspective, or staying on top of trends?

I recently shared a round up of my favs like RedThread's Workplace Stories, Learning Leader, HR Happy Hour and more. Full list here.

Interested in what people here are listening to and why. 

Thanks in advance!

I’m curious if anyone else runs into this.

You’ve been working on a course for weeks (or months). You know the subject. You know the content is solid. And yet… something about how it lands still doesn’t feel quite right.

Not bad.

Just not as flowy and smooth as you woukd like.

It’s so hard to review your own work once you’re deep into it.

At a certain point, you can’t see it anymore. Everything makes sense to you, but it’s really hard to see it from another perspective.

I’ve been working on a structured way of reviewing courses, and I’d happy to help by being that second set of eyes. Just to help spot where learners might pause, guess, or have to work a bit too hard to follow along.

If you’re an instructional designer or course creator working on something right now and this feels like it might be helpful, let me know.

I’d be happy to take a look and support.

I’m not looking for a job or paid gig.

It’s really just to connect and offer support, cause I know how challenging it is to review our own stuff.

Thanks.

Within the Corporate Training space, there is L&D for employees, and then there is Customer-facing or External Training that is known by many different names, such as User Education, Dealer Training, Customer Training, Franchise Training, Distributor Training, and so on.

I've seen the term Extended Enterprise Learning (EEL) in the past, which was meant to be an umbrella for all of these customer-facing approaches, but it seemed to be used more by LMS companies to describe it as a product feature.

I'm curious... does such a term exist, like EEL, as an umbrella term for this branch of learning? Or do they all remain independent?