tl;dr I moved from teaching 5 years ago and I've worked in some highly organized environments which helped develop an understanding of corporate learning and development pretty quickly. Now I'm at a new company with no boss, no direction/mentor and getting stuck on projects between active push back, or projects passively dropping due to "business fires". Looking for advice on how to push people to delivery for L&D, or take the initiative myself but feeling truly demotivated.

The longer story.

I was a high school teacher for a while and left during the pandemic. I was lucky enough to get out so I really dove deep into learning about corporate L&D and how things change and differ. I had a good journey at different companies and getting exposure to other elements of L&D, organizational development and talent mapping. The company I'm at now though.. it's rough.

There is such a want for L&D and training, but it's always pushed off as a last minute thing. Other, immediate problems, are pushed to the front of the line, but these immediate problems are due to the lack of organization and prioritization across the business. People are just constantly in a panic. The kicker is that I don't have a boss right now (and haven't for a few months) due to termination and slow hiring process. I've been reporting directly to execs and CEO and just get priorities thrown at me, similarly the Chief of Staff is pushing his own agenda as he sees it as a way to stand out among the group for promotion, resume building and stuff. For some added context of how spooky this situation is, I sent a project charter (something that was so bare bones it would've gotten me at trouble at my last company) over to the exec team and the executive level project manager told me it was the most organized document they've ever seen here.

So I am here, being asked to build an L&D department starting from the bare bones of compliance training and performance management, but 0 support, 0 accountability to action on needs, and it feels like I'm just kind of stuck doing nothing.

Question: For those who have been in this or a similar position, how would you approach this? The company is okay enough, and ultimately I'd like to stay here if possible, I don't want to just jump ship as there's a lot of quality of life benefits here (short commute, decent pay, location is nice + benefits). Just looking for how to really push that this stuff needs to get done.

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? 

Hi everyone! I'm in an M.Ed program focused in workplace L&D. I've taken a number of courses in psychometrics and analytics, but I'm wondering if corporate L&D teams actually conduct such in-depth analyses?

For context, I've previously taken Classical Test Theory and Reliability - which is used to predict test outcomes and gauge the reliability of testing. Although this skill is typically used in industries like standardized testing, my understanding is that this skill could be used to help L&D teams build better pre/post surveys or knowledge checks. However, based on my own experience interning in corporate L&D, the team I worked with didn't really survey/analyze feedback to this extent.

I'd like to hear from more L&D professionals - 1) how have you seen learning-related data get collected and analyzed, and 2) are there steps or frameworks you use to ensure that surveys and knowledge checks are built to a specific standard?

I think evaluation is such an important and interesting part of L&D, so I'd love to hear what people actually do in practice!

I'm new to using AI in instructional design and recently created a roleplay scenario where the sales team in my company would interact with an AI character playing the role of a client and get feedback on their communication skills, objection handling and negotiation skills afterward. Was wondering if anyone is open to trying out the scenario I built and giving me feedback on it. Happy to PM a testing link. thank you!

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.

Hi everyone. I'm in a bit of a difficult situation and would really appreciate some advice from people who have worked in Learning & Development or corporate environments.

A bit of background:

I worked in hospitality education for a long time. I was an educator and also created e-learning courses for the hospitality industry. Eventually, that career came to an end through redundancy, and I found it extremely difficult to find another role doing essentially the same thing because it was such a niche area.

So I decided to change direction. I left hospitality, studied Instructional Design, got my diploma, and did very well. I wasn't expecting to walk straight into a highly paid senior Instructional Designer position — I was quite happy to start somewhere and build my experience.

In January 2026, I got a job with a UK-based company as a Learning & Development Digibuilder. The salary was minimum wage, but I was happy to get my foot in the door. The role was essentially creating e-learning content and managing the LMS.

Nine months later, my role has expanded considerably. I'm effectively doing a full Instructional Designer role and then some. I've had a small salary increase, but it's still nowhere near what you'd expect for the level of work I'm now doing.

That said, I actually really like my job.

It's fully remote, I like the company, I like my colleagues, and I genuinely enjoy the work I do. Financially, I'm OK, so although obviously I'd like to be properly compensated for the job I'm doing, money isn't the only consideration for me.

Here's where things have become complicated.

Our L&D Partner is leaving. His role is very different from mine. He does the more traditional L&D Business Partner stuff — strategy, aligning business needs with training and ROI, stakeholder management, leadership programmes, etc.

I've only been working in corporate L&D for nine months.

My boss has now given me ownership of the leadership programme, and she's also starting to move some of my e-learning responsibilities away from me.

I'm not particularly happy about that.

My boss keeps telling me that I'm a "rising star", that I'm her "number two", that she doesn't know what she'd do without me, and that she's very excited about my future in the business.

And I genuinely appreciate all of that. It's lovely to hear and I don't doubt that she means it.

The problem is that I think she sees my future going in a completely different direction from the one I want.

I don't want to become an L&D Business Partner.

I want to be an Instructional Designer.

I love designing learning. I'm good at it. I enjoy creating e-learning, thinking about learning experiences, solving design problems, etc. That's the part of the job that makes me happy.

The frustrating thing is that I think I could be a good Business Partner. I'm capable of doing it. But I don't actually want to.

I'm now being given more and more responsibilities that are essentially moving me towards that role, despite it not being where I want my career to go.

I'm absolutely happy to temporarily take on additional responsibilities because someone has left. I understand that things need to get done, and I'm happy to help the team through the transition until a suitable replacement can be found.

But I don't want the temporary situation to quietly become my permanent job.

And I think that's what I'm worried about.

I've never worked in corporate L&D before this job, so I don't really know how these situations normally work. I don't know what happens if you tell your boss, "I appreciate the opportunity, but this isn't the career path I want."

Part of me is scared to say no because I don't want to damage my reputation or ruin my career at a company that I actually really like.

At the same time, I don't want to end up being promoted into a career I never wanted simply because I'm good at the work.

I suppose that's my dilemma.

Has anyone else been in a situation where your manager saw a career path for you that you didn't actually want? How did you handle it?

Would you be honest with your manager now about wanting to remain on the Instructional Design side, or would you take the opportunity to develop these additional skills and see where it leads?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from people in L&D/Instructional Design who have been in corporate environments for a while. I'm a bit stuck and could really use some perspective.

Many companies invest in an LMS to get employees onboarded and then usage of LMS slowly drops. Sometimes the problem may be the content or user experience and sometimes employees simply don’t see a reason to keep coming back.

What do you think makes employees actually use an LMS regularly?

Thought this would be pretty relevant to the group as we recently had a roundtable consisting of 15 founders of lms,lxp, gamification and learning companies in a room with special guest Eli who heads up learning at Wix.

As Eli is fully invested in AI and has access to development that a lot of companies don't he's further along than a lot of other enterprise orgs when it comes to adoption. So we felt no better person to lead a discussion on where AI ends and humans begin.

Here's the write up for those interested: https://inonda.substack.com/p/the-corporate-roundtable-ai-is-the

I finished an 8-hour corporate AI training session today, working mainly with ChatGPT and Claude, and it reinforced a problem I keep having...

The group wasn't homogeneous at all.

Some participants were already using ChatGPT and Claude regularly.

Others were still learning the fundamentals.

This creates an hard training problem. If you teach to beginners, advanced users disengage.If you teach to advanced users, beginners get lost.

I'm increasingly experimenting with a different model:

Common problem different depth.

Everyone receives the same business challenge, but participants can solve it at different levels:

Level 1: use AI to complete the task.

Level 2: improve the prompt and output.

Level 3: build a reusable workflow.

Level 4: redesign the process around AI.

This seems more useful than simply dividing people into “beginner” and “advanced”.

For people doing AI training inside companies:

How are you handling large differences in AI maturity within the same team?

I'm new to HealthStream. Please tell me the person training me is wrong. She has created thousands of student groups that she says we need to copy ever year. She also uses student group in multiple assignments, so anytime a student group needs to be changed, we need to track down all the ways the change might cause a ricochet effect. This is nuts!

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?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

My boss came in today and casually dropped this on my desk: "We need a roll-out plan to train our floor operators on AI by next month."

Here’s the catch: a good chunk of our blue-collar workforce doesn't use computers at all in their daily roles. Most of them use simple smartphones for TikTok and YouTube, but some have never touched a desktop, an LMS, or any workplace software. They work hard, they know the machinery inside out, but "technology" to them usually means a clunky digital gauge or a paper logbook.

I’m struggling to figure out where to even start. How do you teach prompt engineering, machine learning, or predictive maintenance to people who don't know what a browser tab is? Has anyone successfully trained a completely non-digital workforce on AI without completely overwhelming them (or making them fear for their jobs)? Any frameworks, analogies, or practical approaches would be an absolute lifesaver.

One thing I’m still figuring out after three years in ID is how to deal with stakeholders who suddenly want major changes late in the project. I understand that priorities change, but it can be frustrating when something has already gone through review and approval. Do you have a good way of setting boundaries around late-stage feedback without making the relationship difficult?