Designing training for Fortune 500 companies taught me 24 things about learning design
Learners judge the design before they read the first sentence. Get it wrong and they lose attention before the content gets a chance.
Completion rates prove people clicked through. Nothing more.
Big consulting firms sell the brand name rather than training quality. What you get is junior employees recycling deliverables with your logo on them.
Not every performance problem is a training problem. Sometimes the system is unintuitive. Sometimes the process is broken. Diagnose the root cause before designing anything.
Learning design should start with the learner, not the source material. The closer your training looks to the deck the SME sent over, the less it will change how anyone works.
Most corporate training is designed like school. Heavy on content, light on practice. Adults don't learn that way.
Knowledge gaps and skill gaps require completely different training. Most organizations default to knowledge because it's easier to produce. Skill gaps require scenarios, simulations, and coaching.
Most system training focuses on "click here, then here." It skips the judgment calls: what to do when data doesn't match across screens, a request breaks policy, or the system throws an error.
Every piece of content in a training should connect to a specific moment on the job. If you can't name that moment, the content doesn't belong.
Training cannot be a one-time event. Without reinforcement, people forget almost everything the next week. The rollout, manager scripts, and sustainment after the module ships are where behavior actually changes.
Giving call center reps, field sales, and back-office staff the same training prepares no one. Different roles require different training.
If a module looks like a Word document with a "Next" button, learners will click through it like one.
Orientation is about policies, logins, and HR steps. Onboarding is about doing the job well. Most companies stop at orientation and wonder why ramp time takes months.
Dumping resources on new hires is easy. Building a Day 1 to Day 30 path with clear milestones is harder. Most companies choose the easy option.
Training can be 100% accurate and still get ignored. Accuracy without design and context changes nothing.
Most enterprises suffer from course clutter. They have too much training: hard to find, hard to update, random in quality, and disconnected from business outcomes. Training shouldn’t be built only because someone asked for it.
Training that covers everything prepares learners for nothing. Knowing what to cut is as important as knowing what to include.
Most training misses the hard moments entirely. Map where friction happens in the actual workflow and build training around those specific moments.
Manager support is the highest-leverage intervention after training ships. If managers don't reinforce what was taught, the status quo wins.
An announcement tells people the training exists. Marketing the training gives them a reason to take it. Every training should be marketed.
The training metrics that matter change depending on the business context. Understand the business first to find the right metrics.
AI makes training production faster. But it also makes bad training production faster. What makes the difference is the designer’s judgment.
Every training is by definition a change. If you skip the change management and communication, you're hoping that behavior changes on its own.
Most companies have lived with bad training so long that they've stopped noticing. Refusing that normalization is where better training starts.
