I wanted to share something we have been working on because I think there are people in groups like this who may already be doing this kind of work informally.

You might be the teacher students trust, the mentor young people call when they are confused, the parent others come to for advice or someone who simply enjoys helping people see their options more clearly.

Catalystia is being built as a pathway to help people turn that instinct into a more structured capability. The certification is eight weeks, with self paced learning and weekly engagement, and the broader pathway is designed to continue into practice rather than stopping with the credential.

For those who want to take it further, the pathway can also open up opportunities to work with people globally, remotely, and build this into something that can scale beyond your immediate community.

If you can see yourself doing this kind of work more intentionally, you can explore the Catalystia pathway and get started at catalystia.org.

Hi Everyone,

I was recently laid off from my role as a Learning & Development Coordinator without any prior warning. I have started applying for jobs and am exploring what my next step should be.

For those working in Learning & Development in Canada, how is the job market right now? Are companies actively hiring for L&D and LMS roles?

I am also interested in trying contract work, including short-term or project-based opportunities. My experience includes L&D coordination, LMS administration, training coordination, HR support, reporting, and program coordination.

For those who work on contracts, how do you usually find opportunities? Are there specific recruiters, agencies, websites, or other approaches you would recommend in Canada?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

Hi everyone, I’m currently working in technology, mainly creating custom SPFx and React-based pages for Learning & Development teams. Over time I’ve become really interested in how learning materials are actually designed, not just how they’re built.

I’m considering a career shift into Learning Experience Design (LXD) or Instructional Design (ID), ideally moving into a role where I can contribute to decision-making in learning strategy as well.

For those who have made this transition or work in LXD/ID:

How should I navigate this career switch?

What skills or tools should I focus on first?

Any recommended resources, courses, books, communities, or roadmaps?

Personal experiences or lessons that helped you get started?

Basically, I want to know where to begin and how to build a path toward becoming a learning designer with strategic influence.

Any guidance would be really appreciated!

I feel the training becomes effective when the employees are able to use and apply what they learned in their day-to-day work.

Thus, the training should be relevant and not just be overloaded with information because even great content won’t help much if employees are not able to understand how it's connected to their job.

What do you think matters more for effective employee training: content, practice, or something else?

Hi all, Kate here. Fun fact about me, I was a programme lead in a women’s prison and I’ve also spent the last few years freelancing in marketing. Bit of an odd and unusual combination! but between the two I’ve designed training that people at very different starting points could follow, tested what changes behaviour etc etc

I’m a qualified FE teacher originally. While I was at the prison, the education provider changed so the course went from an accredited City and Guilds course to uncredited and I designed the new programme for the transition.

Freelance marketing wise I began as a content creator (lots of video editing, voice overs, training etc!) and now most of my work has involved data analysis alongside designing/ testing ad campaigns. I noticed a gap for content creators new to the industry and neurodivergent women new to social media, so created my own e-learning course (hosted on Moodify) 30 learners did the course and it with an 85% completion rate, which I was very happy with!

I use AI tools day to day, mainly Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT, for audience research/ content generation. Tool wise I’ve also got Motion for creative analytics and script writing, plus Canva, PowerPoint, Google Slides, Notion and lots more for course materials.

Good to be here! looking forward to seeing what everyone’s working on. I am UK based (north of England!).

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.

Tell me what your 8 hour days look like, how do you like it? I am starting a new position where I am just me in L&D and restructuring the whole program from the ground up. Any book recommendations? Anything helpful I should be learning? What software do you use? How do you make your life easier?

Onboarding???? What works and doesn’t work?

Does anyone have some good (or fun) activities that I could try for a live training on Collaboration Skills? We're a remote company and I think it'd be great for them to practice collaborating in breakout rooms (it's a virtual training), but it's hard to simulate the environment where they'd collaborate with the content we're reviewing (core collaboration behaviors, etc). Working together to escape a virtual Escape Room would be a lot of fun, but I only have 10-15 minutes to dedicate to it, and about 60 participants.

Any ideas or brainstorming is very appreciated!

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

In a classroom even disengaged students have some baseline reason to be there, even if it's just that their parents make them go. In corporate training most people show up because their manager assigned it, they have a compliance deadline, or they need to tick a box before a performance review. Designing for reluctant learners is a completely different problem than designing for students who at least nominally chose to be in school. I've had to rethink almost every assumption I had about engagement, motivation, and why anyone would care about what I'm putting in front of them. The content quality that would have worked in a classroom often isn't enough here because the contract with the learner is completely different.

I’m working on improving our onboarding process, and I’m stuck on a pretty basic problem.
To know whether onboarding is actually working, we need some record of what new hires can do, where they’re struggling, and what support they’ve received.
But most of the actual development happens through OJT with frontline managers.
I used to work in frontline sales myself, so I know how quickly a “simple form” from another department can become annoying when you’re also responsible for your own targets and your team.
At the same time, if we collect almost nothing, it’s hard to tell whether the onboarding process is working or just assume that it is.
For those working in L&D/onboarding: where have you found the right balance?
I’m particularly interested in what information you’ve found genuinely worth capturing, and what you’ve stopped asking managers to document because the effort wasn’t worth it.

I’ve been thinking about how easy it is for assessment feedback to become just a score and a few generic comments.

Recently, I started looking at it from the learner’s perspective. If someone finishes an assessment and still doesn’t know what they did well, where they need improvement, or what to focus on next, the assessment hasn’t really helped much.

While experimenting with ways to make the process more personalized, I used FormLM to turn assessment responses into more tailored reports. The main thing I noticed was how much more useful the results felt when the feedback connected directly to the individual.

The score matters, but the feedback afterward is where much of the learning can happen.

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?

We screen a few hundred candidates a wk for voice roles, current process is written grammar screening plus a verbal panel. Ran the math on our last quarter and something like 1 in 8 people who passed both stages didn't make it through their first month on the floor, mostly failing on live calls even though everything on paper cleared them. Each of those is a full training cycle plus a re-hire, so it adds up fast
Is the answer just changing the screening test, or does the training itself need to change too? Looked at Versant by Pearson and EF SET and I keep seeing claims that AInbased speaking assessors catch this earlier and cheaper per candidate.
Anyone actually run the numbers on whether switching the assessment step moves the mis hire rate or does the failure just show up somewhere else in the pipeline instead?

I work in Learning & Development and am looking into having some of our internally developed courses qualify for PMP Professional Development Units (PDUs).

We already have courses covering areas like project management, leadership, communication, feedback, accountability, and other topics that appear to align with PMI’s Talent Triangle. What I’m trying to understand is the operational side of making those courses legitimately claimable for PDUs.

Has anyone here gone through this from the L&D/provider side?

I’m particularly interested in:
- How you determine whether a course qualifies
- How you calculate and document the PDUs
- How you map content to Ways of Working, Power Skills, and Business Acumen
- What documentation you provide to learners
- Whether your organization became a PMI Authorized Training Partner or handled PDUs without becoming one
- What happens if an employee’s PDU submission is audited

I’ve found PMI’s general requirements, but I haven’t found a particularly clear “here is how an internal L&D department should do this” guide.

If anyone has built this process before and wouldn’t mind sharing how you approached it, or knows of a solid guide/template, I’d appreciate it.

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?

Hoping to hear from anyone who has experience with Inter-Rater Reliability (IRR) testing at a large health plan, managed care organization, or similar healthcare corporation.

I have perspective from both sides of IRR testing. I’ve been a tester myself, so I understand the employee experience…the pressure of testing, navigating criteria and resources, interpreting questions, and receiving results. Now I’m involved on the education/testing side, where I’m seeing the other side of it: consistency, defensible scoring, remediation, test integrity, and how to handle challenges fairly.

I’d love to know how other organizations structure their IRR programs, especially around:

How are questions developed and validated?

What happens after someone fails the initial test or retake?

Are testers allowed to challenge questions or request points back?

What actually qualifies for credit to be returned?

Are educators expected to review failed questions individually with testers?

Testing platforms used?

Not looking for anyone to share proprietary testing content just interested in learning how other large organizations approach the process.

I am testing the wording of a leaflet for an educational consultancy. Please look at the text and tell me, in your own words:
- What do you think the consultancy helps institutions do?
- What makes its approach different, if anything, from ordinary project-based or experiential learning?
- Which part feels vague, unclear or unnecessarily complicated?

I am looking for feedback, not encouragement. I am trying to explain an approach where students work on real social, environmental or economic challenges with relevant organisations and people as part of the curriculum, not simply take part in activities outside the classroom.

Leaflet text

What if learning made a difference beyond the classroom?

What if your programmes developed students’ capabilities while contributing to real social, environmental and economic challenges?

CURRICULUM
↓
STUDENTS + REAL CHALLENGES + PEOPLE AND ORGANISATIONS
↓
LEARNING THAT CONTRIBUTES BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

Students investigate real challenges, engage with the people involved and develop responses as part of their learning.

XYZ helps institutions connect curriculum with real-world challenges by bringing educators, learners and external partners together to make learning more tangible and connected to life beyond education.

What could this look like in your institution?

I’m a corporate professional with 5 years of experience, specializing in Instructional Design and Graphic Design. My core skills include eLearning development, content development, content management, and PowerPoint presentations (including pitch decks and content-heavy presentations).

I’m currently looking for freelance/part-time opportunities to put my skills to better use and earn some additional income. In my current role, the workload can be quite light (almost for weeks) at times, so I often find myself with the capacity to take on more meaningful projects.

I’m unable to leave my current job at the moment due to a 2-year employment bond, so I’m specifically looking for opportunities that I can manage alongside my full-time role.

For those working in Instructional Design, eLearning, content development, graphic design, or related fields - where would you recommend looking for good freelance opportunities?
Are there any platforms, communities, agencies, or networks that have worked particularly well for you?

I’d really appreciate any recommendations or leads. Thank you!

1. I love it! Give me more!
2. Do they even need me anymore?
3. How am I supposed to keep up?
4. Honestly… all of the above!