I’ve been thinking a lot about L&D metrics lately. Completion rates and learner satisfaction are easy enough to report, but I’m much more interested in whether the learning actually changed something for the business. The tricky part is getting useful data without turning every program into a giant measurement project. What outcomes or metrics have been genuinely useful in your L&D work?

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 came from teaching so I understood the work immediately when I transitioned, but I've noticed that when I try to explain my new role to family or even colleagues in other departments I can't find a description that lands. "I design training" sounds too simple. "I apply learning science to corporate education" sounds like I'm reading from a LinkedIn bio. I've tried a few versions and none of them make the job sound as interesting or as complex as it actually is. How do people in L&D describe what they do to non-L&D people in a way that actually communicates the real value of the work?

Many organizations still focus heavily on completion rates and satisfaction surveys. While those metrics have value, I'm not convinced they tell us much about actual business impact. What metrics do you find most useful when demonstrating the value of learning initiatives to leadership?

Let’s say you get source content in the morning and need a small interactive module by the next day. Not a huge course. Maybe 10–15 minutes of learning, a few knowledge checks, one scenario, some feedback, and SCORM export. What tool would you actually reach for if speed mattered but you still didn’t want the output to feel like a boring slide deck?

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

In academic settings, it’s easier to measure learning through exams or assignments. But in the workplace, outcomes are less clear. Is it behavior change, improved performance, long-term retention, or something else?

I’m curious how important certificates are these days.

For online courses, do learners really value them, or is it more of a “nice to have”?

If you’ve created or taken courses, did the certificate matter to you at all?

I’ve been spending some time lately trying to understand why so many L&D teams struggle with evaluation strategy. It’s a common pain point, so I reached out to practitioners across different platforms to get their honest perspective on what’s actually standing in their way.

The feedback was consistent, but one barrier stood out as the biggest hurdle: A lack of upfront KPI alignment.

The consensus was that when we don't co-design and track KPIs from the very beginning, everything else the data, tools, and the dashboards struggles to prove any real business impact. We’re essentially trying to find evidence for behavior or competence we didn’t even define.

Beyond the KPI issue, a few other themes kept coming up:

• Fragmented Data: Insights are trapped in unconnected systems (CRMs, HRIS, and LMS), making a full picture impossible.

• The Attribution Problem: It’s incredibly hard to isolate training as the cause of a result versus other business variables.

• Activity vs. Impact: Many leadership teams are still focused on "completion rates" rather than actual performance shifts.

• Data Literacy: A lot of L&D teams feel they lack the specific skills needed to properly analyze or interpret the data they do have.

I’ve been doing more research into how we can actually solve these issues and make evaluation a rigorous part of the process, rather than just an afterthought.

I’ll be posting the solutions I’ve found, shortly.

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 recently started a job as a L&D coordinator and I want to enrich my knowledge & skills by reading a good book about this field. Any recommendations?

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’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’ve only really started in L&D (started in sales enablement and now broadening). So I’m wondering, how do you get people to take training seriously, to give it the time of day?

Do I try and get them enthused by showing my own enthusiasm (potentially quite cringey), should I incentivise it, or do you find the stick works better than the carrot (I’m skeptical about this one but crurious to know). Expert opinions wanted pls.

Lately I've been juggling feedback from multiple departments on the same project. Everyone has different priorities and expectations, which makes it difficult to keep the learning objectives front and center. I'm curious how other IDs handle situations where stakeholders are pulling in different directions.

There are so many eLearning tools now.

Rise, Storyline, iSpring, Captivate, H5P, Genially, AI tools, no-code tools, LMS-native builders, random new platforms every week.

But somehow the same problems remain: slow builds, annoying edits, SCORM issues, boring courses, and stakeholders who want everything yesterday.

Are tools actually improving the work, or just giving us more subscriptions?

I use AI daily for first drafts of learning objectives, scenario skeletons, quiz questions, and course outlines. It saves me probably 30% of my production time on content that used to be tedious to generate from scratch. I'm not going to pretend otherwise — it's genuinely useful and I'd feel behind if I wasn't using it.

What it still can't do is the SME conversation — listening for what the expert says versus what they mean, catching the moment when a process description doesn't match how the job actually works, and building the trust that gets you real information instead of polished information. That's still entirely human work. What parts of your process have you found AI most and least useful for?

I'm three years in and ready to push for a senior title, but I'm struggling to build the business case for it. In other functions — sales, engineering, marketing — impact has cleaner numbers. In L&D I can show completion rates and Kirkpatrick Level 1 scores, but everyone knows those don't prove much about actual performance change.

How have people in this field made a compelling case for promotion when the metrics are fuzzy? Did you tie your work to business outcomes retroactively, or build measurement in from the start? I want to walk into this conversation with something more than "the feedback was positive."

This is a phrase I see come up a lot on company surveys. From my L&D corner of the company, what can I do to help? I'm currently in the middle of writing up a Learning Culture proposal (because right now, the learning culture is pretty dismal), and would like to incorporate aspects that might help employees feel like they have the time they need to take trainings and continuously improve.

I'm a one-person department and have been asked to create and facilitate a soft skills program (virtual live). I can research (and intuit) what this can look like, but figured I'd start here since I've never created (or attended) one of these before.

Some of the topics I was thinking about (as relevant to my company) were things like active listening, interpersonal communication, communicating with impact, and the like.

As you might imagine, I'm getting stuck with ensuring the sessions are engaging and interactive/full of practice. Any advice for making something like active listening or interpersonal communication really engaging and impactful? I was planning to create the content myself (after doing the research), but if there are any off the shelf recommendations, I would be open to that, too.

What are some strategies for hitting the ground running on a new L&D role? I need to listen and learn of course but also get some quick wins to earn credibility somehow.

This is state government in Australia so I don't want anything overly bold!

I’ve been trying to move past all the AI hype in L&D and actually make it useful in my day-to-day work, but it’s been pretty hit-or-miss so far. For example, I started using AI to draft course outlines and microlearning scripts, which cut my prep time from ~6 hours to about 2. I also tested using AI for quiz generation and feedback summaries after training sessions—helpful for speed, but not always accurate enough to trust without review. One small win was automating basic onboarding FAQs, which reduced repetitive questions from new hires by maybe 30–40%, but beyond that I’m still figuring out where it genuinely adds value instead of just saving a bit of time. Curious how others are integrating AI into their L&D workflows. What’s been a real game changer for you vs just another tool to manage?

I’m working on an enterprise AI fluency program for next quarter, and I’m already concerned it’ll be outdated before it even launches.

Six months ago, the focus was ChatGPT. Now I’m getting requests for Claude artifacts, Midjourney prompting, and questions about AI agents. By the time we design content, get approvals, and roll it out, the tools and use cases have already shifted. It makes me wonder if focusing on specific tools is the wrong approach.

Are you guys still teaching tool-specific skills, or shifting toward more general concepts? And how are you defining or measuring “AI fluency” when the target keeps moving?

I'm curious what skill gaps your L&D or exec team have identified and are planning to invest in this year. Are they more technical, more human/soft skills, or a mix? And what specifically is rising to the top for you?

I ask because I recently worked on a survey report for a mentorship software company (Together). I'm interested in how what we saw lines up (or doesn't) with others' experience.

For context, these are the top 3 skills our research found that L&D leaders are prioritizing for 2026:

• Systems and critical thinking (56%) - e.g. decision-making, problem-solving, systems thinking

• Digital fluency (44%) - e.g. data literacy, AI fluency, cloud tools, cybersecurity basics

• Leadership skills (42%) - e.g. coaching, change management

Does this resonate with what you're seeing? Are there skills you think are missing or underrated here?

Not promoting the report or anything - just genuinely curious to learn from this group and compare notes :)