Category: Learning Strategy

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Learning Strategy Skills

How To Close The Skills Gap For Work

Ok, we’ve spent the previous edition in this series getting super nerdy about skills.

Find those here:

Now it’s time to get really tactical.

That means taking action people. We’re going to shift gears to unpack how you can close the skills gap not only in your company but in your skillset too. What a fabulous 2-for-1 offer!

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We know from our exploration so far that skills are the biggest barrier to business transformation for many companies. The same goes for each of us with our career opportunities.

If we don’t have the right skills, we don’t have access to the best opportunities.

Data from the World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs report in 2023 tells us that companies are focusing on the below practices to bridge skills gaps.

Let’s unpack the top 3:

  • Improve progression and promotion processes
  • Offer more money
  • Provide effective reskilling and upskilling

Only one of these is an L&D thing. I’ll let you guess which one.

3 key insights to help close the skills gap

Progression and promotion processes

This can be a very fickle conversation.

If you want a quick way to scare any line manager and HR partner at one time, ask about progression and promotion processes.

They’re almost like a secret central intelligence file that no one can view.

They exist, but how one navigates these is a mystery in most businesses. However, the pressure these days to be more transparent on just how the hell does one move from here to here has never been bigger.

In reality, we have a really easy fix here.

Just make it very clear and transparent on how all this works. As much as you can of course (calm down HR managers, I’m still looking out for you).

You’ll most likely solve 70% of issues here.

It’s never going to be straightforward but a bit of clear structure will go far.

Money, money, money

Let me be straight with you – I don’t have the answer to this.

I’ve been in the HR and L&D space for over 16 years. There’s never an easy answer to this.

It’s contextual to each person, company and moment.

I’ll leave it at that because this isn’t my zone of expertise.

Effective upskilling and reskilling

Finally, something we can get our teeth into.

We know how important this is for every human on this spinning blue rock to survive. So, forgive me for not covering this like many of the fluff pieces do.

Instead, we’re getting right into the components of a killer upskilling or reskilling programme.

7 practical steps to close the skills gap

I see too much junk on this topic online.

Too much focus on the how, aka the delivery of using ‘x’ tool to do this, and not enough on the what and why behind this.

You can’t have the former without the latter.

Here’s the basic principles to consider:

1/ Identify real business performance enhancers

Get clear on specific skills gaps within your organisations.

It doesn’t matter how you do it, just do it. This data is the bedrock from which you ensure your efforts are focused on the right things. Ignore the assumptions and biased opinions behind closed doors.

→ Engage with department heads and conduct surveys or focus groups with employees to gain insights.

2/ Understand employee aspirations

You don’t want to build stuff no one wants.

People often don’t know what they should focus on. Yet, you should still have your finger on the pulse of what the voice of the business is saying about the skills they value.

Employee surveys are useful data mines for this.

If you don’t have this, get out into your company to run mini-focus groups and surveys. You’ll be surprised what comes back.

Your goal is to align business and employees as much as possible.

3/ Establish clear objectives and outcomes

This should be obvious.

Yet, it seems to get lost in the excitement of the ‘how’.

Always know your measure of success. Without this, nothing else is worth much. You’re essentially throwing stuff on the wall to see what sticks.

→ Work with key stakeholders to define and review these. It’s a team effort after all.

4/ Practical application

Every learning experience should have this.

It’s the measure of value with any experience. We all need a safe environment and an opportunity to put what we’ve absorbed into practice.

This could take many forms including:

  • Stretch projects
  • Digital and real-life simulations
  • One-time scenarios and events

Whatever it is, you want to work with teams across your organisation to create something that best fits the culture and context of the work people need to do.

5/ Create a supportive environment

This is where leveraging line managers works well.

Often, I find, managers don’t take enough accountability for the development of their team. Too many are confused about their job. It’s not about the doing, it’s all focused on the people.

We can only be successful based on the environment we create and that others do too.

It doesn’t matter how much ‘learning’ or training’ a company provides. Without this practical application, it’s money down the drain.

Ideas for this include:

  • Line manager coaching and mentoring
  • External mentoring
  • Group Slack and/or Teams communities, or go rogue and do a real-life group session

6/ Evaluate and improve

Setting goals that you don’t track is dumb.

Sorry. It’s true.

I see this all the time. The common situation is to track none of the agreed metrics through an experience, only to wait until it’s complete and realise none of them was achieved 🤦.

Feedback and/or retro loops in every meeting are useful to combat this.

This doesn’t need to be heavy.

Spare 5 minutes at the end of every update meeting to evaluate where you are today, and how everything is performing and review if anything needs to be adapted.

Those 5 minutes could save you months of work and lots of money!

7/ Building Partnerships to cement success

This is all about social proof.

Nothing sells and cements the reputation of an experience more than endorsements.

Here, I suggest leveraging your senior leaders and well-respected team members to become part of your endorsement campaign. Imagine it like a political race without all the crazy backstabbing.

Case studies and personal stories work well here.

Speaking of case studies. Keep scrolling for inspiration from some of the world’s largest retailers.

Two case studies on closing the skills gap

🛒 IKEA: Upskilling 8,500 employees to boost sales by $1.4 billion

This is the most popular case study on the blog.

You can read the full piece here. Get the TL;DR below:

  • 8,500 call centre workers were transformed into interior design advisors.

  • Billie, the AI bot, effectively managed 47% of customer inquiries.

  • Sales through remote interior design consultations amounted to 1.3 billion euros(~$1.4 billion).

🥐 Carrefour: Upskilling 320,00 employees for the Digital World

This French Grocery retailer is on a mission to future-proof its employees for the evolving digital world.

Get the full case study here. TL;DR below:

  • Carrefour aims for a digital-first retail model by 2026.

  • The ‘Tous digital!’ initiative equips all employees, notably frontline staff, with essential digital skills.

  • In 3 weeks they upskilled 60,000 employees, aligning with EU’s 2023 Year of Skills.

  • Future plans include an exploration of emerging tech like Generative AI.
A 3-step framework to close the skills gap

Steal this framework for easy skill-building conversations

I’ve shared this before and I’m doing it again because the drum beat needs to keep going.

I find we never do enough skill health checks.

They’re the objects that grant us the power to improve our earnings and freedom, yet we don’t tend to them like you would a garden. Your skills need constant attention in the form of watering and pruning ya know.

Every quarter I recommend you do this:

  • Open a doc or grab a notebook
  • Create a 3-column table
  • Place these 3 headers – ‘expiring’, ‘evolving’ and ‘emerging’ in one of the column headers
  • Now, the good stuff. Reflect on your current skills and place each of them in the best column.

The power of this exercise enables you to:

  1. Chuck out the skills which no longer serve you and the world
  2. Double down on the skills that can give you a performance advantage
  3. Identify advantageous skills to add to separate you from the crowd

Be human skills-focused

As I say nearly every week, I’m all in for a human-powered future. Digital technology is a beautiful enabler, but it is nothing without humanness.

Your biggest advantage in this world is your human skills.

Technical skills are incredibly important, but your human capabilities are what makes the difference. I’m hoping this has come through in all the data and insights we’ve explored across November.

→ Unlock human capabilities at the heart of everything you build.

The Skills Trilogy: Today, Tomorrow and Always

Ok, we’ve reached the end of the first trilogy in the series.

Fret not, we have much more to come on the future of skills for 2024 before the year is out.

For now, feed your brain with the previous instalments.

  1. Today’s Skills: The 5 skills that matter most
  2. Tomorrow’s Skills: The skills we need to build to succeed for the next 5 years
  3. Always: How to build effective skill strategies (you’re reading it)

Bonus:

Before you go… 👋

If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.

You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.

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Learning Strategy Skills

The Skills To Thrive For The Next 5 Years

Survival is the game of the human race.

At the end of the day, we’re all just trying to figure out how to survive. Skills are the currency of that game. They’re how we position ourselves in the marketplace of employability.

That was a rather philosophical line.

Last time, we focused on the 5 skills that matter most, and why too many companies are ignoring the most important skill of this year in AI delegation.

Today we’ll unpack how these skills co-exist with each other and the next 5 year outlook for our skills.

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The Skills Brain

This viz is from the Microsoft Work Trend report. I’ve adapted it for purposes of clarity.

Newsflash: Learning isn’t keeping up with the pace of work.

You probably knew that already.

It’s not just AI skills that leaders are looking for employees to develop. They want those that will enhance an AI-powered future too. As we covered last time, the future is human-powered.

Human + AI skills are the winning combo.

You’ve probably seen that line in some form on social media. I believe it’s the future we’re currently building. Look at generative AI as a tool. Like any tool, it has a time and place for use, and its real power is in the hands of a skilled operator.

If these are the baseline skills, what else can we expect to craft in the next 5 years of both reskilling and upskilling programmes?

Let’s dive deeper down the rabbit hole, friend.

Back to the future…or 2027

Like many other reports, WSE drops their 10 skills for the reskilling and upskilling scene:

  1. Analytical thinking
  2. Creative thinking
  3. AI and big data
  4. Leadership and social influence
  5. Resilience, flexibility and agility
  6. Curiosity and lifelong learning
  7. Technological literacy
  8. Design and user experience
  9. Motivation and self-awareness
  10. Empathy and active listening

The takeaway: Skills are always being disrupted. It is the nature of life.

Are you seeing the pattern here?

Human + digital technology together. These are the perfect combo to navigate the career game.

In the year of AI, is it any surprise companies rank analytical thinking as the #1 core skill for work?

Human thinking on any level is something generative AI can’t do.

In an evolving workplace where we’ll likely partner with AI tools, the ability to think like a human will be a prized asset. That’s why it’s no surprise, critical thinking came in at #2 on this list.

The social skills pandemic

Digital technology is beautiful.

I’m a huge fan of what it’s contributed to and enabled in society. Yet, I’m also aware of what we’ve lost.

I feel like we struggle to talk with and engage with each other more as the years pass by. I heard from organisations recently how their next generation of talent struggles to do simple things outside of a screen.

More data on this is now coming to light.

That’s why it’s no surprise this report’s top 10 skills for the future are stuffed with social skills like:

  • Leading: As workplaces become more collaborative and less hierarchical, the ability to lead and influence others is no longer restricted to the C-suite.

  • Empathy and Active Listening: With remote work and digital communication becoming the norm, the need for empathy and active listening skyrockets. These skills are vital for effective communication and teamwork, particularly when face-to-face interactions are limited.

  • Emotional Intelligence: High EQ, represented by these social skills, is increasingly seen as a predictor of success, sometimes even over IQ. It’s not just about being smart. It’s about being smart with people.

Evolving & emerging skills

I find we never do enough skill health checks.

Which is weird, IMO.

They’re the objects that grant us the power to improve our earnings and freedom, yet we don’t tend to them like you would a garden. Your skills need constant attention in the form of watering and pruning ya know.

  • Every quarter I recommend you do this:
  • Open a doc or grab a notebook
  • Create a 3-column table
  • Place these 3 headers – ‘expiring’, ‘evolving’ and ‘emerging’ in one of the column headers
  • Now, the good stuff. Reflect on your current skills and place each of them in the best column.

The power of this exercise enables you to:

  1. Chuck out the skills which no longer serve you and the world
  2. Double down on the skills that can give you a performance advantage
  3. Identify advantageous skills to add to separate you from the crowd

To help you with the last two columns, here’s what the World Economic Forums identified as the most pressing evolving and emerging skills across industries:

Skills are the biggest barrier to success

This is true for both you personally, and organisations.

We cannot understate the importance of skills in life and work. We each partake in the career marketplace. The currency in this market is skills.

→ The better skills you have, the better opportunities you can unlock.

You will see the reverse of this on the company side. For any company to succeed, they need the people with the best skills. And, those with the best skills can command the best opportunities.

Are you following me? Good.

We see this backed up in more data from the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report. The single biggest barrier to businesses evolving is skills.

We have two big opportunities as L&D operators and leaders here:

1/ Focus deeply on your skills

As those often responsible for helping others improve, we tend to forget ourselves.

Don’t make this mistake.

You play in the career marketplace with the rest of the world. Spend time investing in the skills explored above with the how-to frameworks shared last time. These will be your route to being a high-performing operator with opportunities knocking at your door and a strategic L&D leader, should that be the path you want.

Pair these human skills with the 7 skills L&D pros need today and you will be unstoppable.

2/ Crafting the right skills strategies

Let’s be real, most companies have no clue what skills they have or need.

I see a lot of posturing online but very few have a real grasp on this. In next week’s chat, I’m going to share ideas and examples to help you close your company’s skills gap. For now, I’ll say this.

Lean on your internal and external market data to focus on the right skills, not more skills.

Too many of these fancy skill-based organisation strategies are focused on opinions rather than concrete evidence.

Questions to consider right now are:

  • Do I have a view of the key skills my organisation needs to succeed today
  • If not, how can I get this? (talent management data, HR and L&D systems etc)
  • Are these skills aligned with my organisation’s goals?
  • What are the skills we need to be successful in the next 3 years? Future-proof your workforce
  • How do I get the answers to these in the simplest and most minimal way? This is very important ←

You can learn more about skill-based organisations in this piece from Degreed.

Final thoughts

In sum:

  • Don’t forget to invest in your own skills
  • Focus on the right skills, not more skills
  • Skill strategies are worthless without the right data

Also read: The 5 skills that matter for work and how to build them

Before you go… 👋

If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.

You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.

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Learning Strategy

How To Build High-Quality Learning And Performance Solutions

Here’s the process I use for designing high-quality performance solutions.

You can use this to solve a problem as opposed to doing what I like to call the McDonald’s conveyor belt of just taking orders and not doing anything that has a return on investment.

Contents

  1. The Four Performance Discovery Zones
    1. 1/ What are the key things users need to know about that topic?
    2. 2/ What do they know today?
    3. 3/ What do they need to know that’s not been identified?
    4. 4/ The not-known zone

Let’s be hypothetical here.

Imagine someone has come to you with a performance or capability issue in their team. I like to look at the problem as a window and break it down into four sections.

The Four Performance Discovery Zones

1/ What are the key things users need to know about that topic?

How can you get them from A → B in a logical manner?

Consider the things which will move the needle.

2/ What do they know today?

It’s key to get an assessment of what is known today.

Without this, it’s like the blind leading the blind. You’re going to find it difficult to pitch your solution at the right level.

Consider:

  • What do these people know today about this topic?
  • Do they know its importance?
  • How it supports them in their role, and how it supports them potentially in their future growth.

3/ What do they need to know that’s not been identified?

Your stakeholder’s view is only one side of the coin.

Think like a consultant (or detective) to uncover what might have been missed.

Reflect on things that they need to know to succeed in the modern era but have not been identified either by the team or the stakeholder. We can frame this as what they think they need versus what they actually need.

Quite often I find stakeholders will come to you and say, ‘This is what I think we need’.

Sometimes that might be 100% of the picture.

But I find that 9 times out of 10, there is more than meets the eye to what is shared in those conversations. It’s key that you take a consultant approach to dig down and find out what is it people think they need to know, but what is it they actually need to know?

This enables you to trim the fat.

→ You can add lots of value by taking things away.

4/ The not-known zone

The last bit is what I call the not-known zone.

This data will become apparent during the design process as you speak with both stakeholders and users in more detail.

At the beginning of the process, you don’t know about this. It’s something that reveals itself because it’s unknown to everyone during the process. It reveals itself through retros and continuous feedback.

This is a good thing. This is not something to worry about at all.

It’s part of the design process. It’s why I advocate looking at building solutions or products as minimal viable products where you can ship something that meets the basic user needs quickly.

This enables you to test and learn at speed and tweak your solutions for a final product.

Happy problem-solving!

Before you go… 👋

If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.

You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.

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Learning Strategy

How To Discover What Your People (Really) Want To Learn

This is so simple you’ll probably have a WTF! moment.

You can do this in any company.

→ Go to the analytics section of your LMS or LXP.

Locate the ‘search results’ function. This tells you what searches users input to your platform.

You should be able to view:

1. Successful searches: Those matched with relevant content

2. Unsuccessful searches: Those which could not be matched with any content

There are two actions you want to take here:

1️⃣ Review the 10 most successful searches

Reflect on how you can expand on these through targeted campaigns and more helpful content on these topics.

2️⃣ Review the unsuccessful searches

What are the trends here? Take the top 10 results and build content for these. If people are searching for them but get no results, you either need to build the content or improve discoverability.

If you can’t access this on your platform, you 100% need to get your vendor to enable this.

📈 How to make content easier to find

You may not have full control over this on your platform.

Speak to your vendor if you don’t. This influences how easy it is for people to find the right content based on search terms.

You can improve results to the right keywords by:

  • Headline title: Does the title match keywords users search for?
  • Keywords: Do the keywords users search for appear in the body text of your content?
  • Meta description: This is the 1-2 line description used to give users a preview of the content. You’ll recognise this from your Google searches too.

Most LMS/LXPs work like search engines.

Just like search engines, you can optimise content for better discoverability based on a user’s search intent.

If this has got you all curious. I help L&D teams leverage their technology for better workforce performance. Learn more here.

Before you go… 👋

If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.

You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.

Categories
Learning Strategy

How to Design Learning for the Digitally Native: A 4-Step Playbook

As I type these words, tens of thousands of humans have taken my online courses, read my work, and binged my videos.

I class each of these as a learning experience and, as such, design them for audiences living in this era and how we now experience the world.

For the most part, this is digital.

Now, I don’t class myself as a learning designer, LXD, or the other million labels for this type of role.

What I do understand is how to build products and experiences for the digital age we live in.

Most corporate L&D programmes aren’t designed for a digitally native mind. They continue the status quo of classroom-based delivery and convert that to digital platforms.

Note: Just because you have a resource or course on a digital platform, doesn’t mean it’s built for digitally native minds.

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Other industries have learnt how to change their approach for the digitally native society.

Your mind has changed

Since everyone could start writing online in the early 00s, established Writers figured out they couldn’t structure words stuffed into long paragraphs as they had for so many years.

People just won’t read stuffy pages that overwhelm their eyes.

So, they adapted.

Digital writers brought about clear and compelling writing structures with 1/3/1 and 1/4/1 paragraph styles, and improved heading structure.

They evolved their practice to work for digital consumption.

Our friends in marketing did the same thing.

Ask most people under 25 about print marketing, and you’ll get an odd stare. The term ‘digital marketing’ was born to adapt to the digital age.

Marketers didn’t just take what worked in print and slap it online.

The style, structure and delivery had to evolve.

We see this with videos too.

For those old enough to remember the lynda.com tutorials (btw, LinkedIn bought them) that taught you how to use any piece of software in about 100 hours.

These have now morphed into 3-minute short videos that pollute our digital spaces.

My point is each of these industries adapted how they built experiences for their audiences.

So, why hasn’t that translated across our industry?

Seriously, I don’t know – I’m asking.

There are only so many full-day leadership workshops that could have been a 10-minute video that one guy can take before slamming his head off a printer.

Why You Need to Know Your Audience

Here’s an example of a classic mistake I see with digital courses.

Someone once asked why my AI Crash Course only takes around 3–4 hours to complete.

They wanted more.

It’s a crash course, FYI. It was designed for time-poor people who need actionable insights — aka my target audience.

This was my answer 👇

Having:

  1. 300 lessons
  2. 1,000 hours of video
  3. 200 PDF documents

…doesn’t make your digital experience more valuable.

The goal is always to get a user to their outcome in the quickest time possible. The modern digital era created those rules — I didn’t make them up.

If there are two learning experiences with the same outcome, but one takes 2 hours and the other 40…

Guess which one I’m buying?

Good design means seeing through the eyes of your user.

We too often fall prey to the more must be better fallacy. In most cases, it’s not.

Think about your consumption habits.

How many times have you:

  • Not finished that course
  • Not finished that book
  • Fallen asleep halfway through a bloated project update email

We tend to make things more complex than they need to be.

That’s been my experience after nearly 20 years in the industry (damn, I’m old).

I’ve been part of many experiences that would’ve been far more useful as a five-minute article, a short email, or even a single sentence sent via Slack.

This is why thoughtful design is such an important part of any kind of work.

It’s not exclusive to L&D.

Anyone building products will benefit from designing more intentionally. Design is everywhere and everything.

A diagram with three overlapping circles labeled 'Design Like a Creator,' 'Think Like a Product Manager,' and 'Deliver Like a Human,' with the phrase 'Design Learning Experiences for The Digital Mind' in bold at the top.

📔 The Learning Design Playbook For The Digital Age

Ok, you know my take.

So, how can we improve the way we design for digitally native audiences?

Of course, I’m not going to leave you hanging.

Here are four elements that will serve you well, regardless of the format you’re designing for:

1/ Understand the user’s goals, objectives and constraints

If you don’t know this, you’re in trouble.

Use research techniques to identify audience needs, pain points, and desired outcomes. You can’t build the best solution without truly understanding the problem.

This could be done through user interviews, surveys or just talking to people like a human.

Get as close to the problem as possible.

  1. What do users already know about it today?
  2. What are their motivations for solving it?
  3. Do they even care about it?
  4. What constraints are in their world? (e.g. time)

The more you know, the better you can help.

2/ Simplify complex concepts and information

Thoughtful design should simplify the complex, not make it feel heavier.

I always see any L&D operator’s role as a context guide.

You’re most effective when you can frame a complex subject and say: “Hey, this is what it means.” That’s your superpower.

Once again, speaking to your audience helps here.

Understanding their existing knowledge and motivations will inform your design. It has to. Otherwise, you’ll end up building something no one asked for.

This has killed many learning experiences where I’ve been a student.

Confusing your audience with big words and detailed technical explanations doesn’t make you look smart. It just makes it harder for them to reach their goals.

3/ Prioritise usability and ease of navigation

This is ‘THE’ crucial aspect of thoughtful design.

It doesn’t matter if you built the best solution our world has seen. If it’s drowned in a poor user interface and experience, it’s worthless. I know this sounds harsh.

Yet, I see this happen every day.

It literally happened an hour before I typed these words. I enjoy learning from smart people, but even they fall victim to poor design.

I stopped reading a newsletter this morning, even though I knew the content was fantastic.

It was horribly formatted.

My eyes were overwhelmed with huge blocks of text with never-ending paragraphs.

I kept scrolling and they kept coming.

It doesn’t matter how great the content is if I can’t clearly and easily consume it.

So, structure your content logically and intuitively.

Use clear labels and headings, and provide search and filtering options. Make it easy for users to unlock the value your work offers.

This applies to videos, emails, and live talks too.

The UI (interface) and UX (experience) of everything you create matters. Great structure amplifies great work. Don’t over-index on the latter and forget the former.

4/ Test and iterate based on feedback

Experiment, test and improve – always.

The best way to do this is through your users.

Build minimum viable products (MVPs) for your audience to play with. Then talk to them.

Discover what worked, what didn’t and you might even uncover things you never thought of before.

Build feedback reflections into your design process.

It’s a no-brainer if you want to solve real problems and deliver real value.

Again this applies to anything you design like:

  • Emails
  • Articles
  • Reports
  • Presentations
  • Courses
  • Videos
  • Instructions for your AI assistant

Every one of these is a learning experience.

What L&D Can Learn from Social Media Creators

Ok, here’s some of that perhaps juicy, controversial stuff I was foreshadowing earlier.

I’ve (honestly) seen better experience design in a 5-minute YouTube video than a lot of 60-minute corpo L&D workshops.

Ron Burgundy What GIF

Yes, I’m painting a wide canvas, and yes, you can throw your pitchforks and fire at me. Still, it exists.

Let’s be clear, I’m using YouTube as an example of modern social content.

You can insert whatever platform you like instead as they’re all designed the same way (sort of).

YouTube has been one of my best sources of great learning experience design, and I know a lot of people who’ve had better experiences with learning from social content than from pre-defined corporate learning initiatives.

There’s a reason why YouTube is one of the biggest streaming platforms in the world.

Side Note: I shared a playbook on what I learnt about experience design from my year-long experimentation with YouTube videos late last year. Since then, I’ve grown my channel from 1,000 to 3,000 subs in 6 months. I’ll write about that at some point if anyone’s interested.

I made a point a few months back on LinkedIn about audiences not caring what ‘L&D methodologies’ we might use to build products.

Those same methodologies are often what imprison us to poor experience design.

You don’t have to be married to them.

Some of the biggest social media creators have built valuable learning experiences not because they followed the industry-touted model, but because they understood how digitally native minds want to experience information.

Granted, creators have a tighter grasp on their specific audience than most corporate L&D teams do. We’re forced into grouping people by departments, roles etc.

But still, there’s a lot we can borrow from these creators to elevate corporate learning design for the modern digital audience:

1️⃣ Optimise format and consumption habits

Creators shape their content for how people actually consume: mobile-first, bite-sized, visually engaging, and emotionally compelling often within seconds.

They know their audience can swipe away at any moment. In fact, YouTube tracks engagement in the first 120 seconds as a critical performance metric.

If you don’t communicate the why, what and how to a user in that time, you’re doomed.

Of course, platform algorithms play a part here — but still.

Chew on this:

What might your experiences look like if designed with the assumption that a participant might disengage in under 10 seconds?

2️⃣ Immediate action vs. Delayed application

As capturing attention is what drives a creator’s work, it shouldn’t surprise you when they deliver immediate, practical value by showing audiences ‘How to do x’, not just talking about it.

I’m a huge fan of live demo videos.

Which, if you follow me on YouTube, is not hard to guess. There’s something beautiful about applying what you’ve just learned in real-time.

Sadly, much of corpo L&D doesn’t work this way.

We tend to flood people with theoretical models and frameworks, without a clear pathway to action.

What transpires is audiences have no momentum for action or forget everything before they ever get a chance to apply it.

A thought for you:

How can your learning experiences better integrate immediate, actionable outcomes?

We could chalk this down to ‘showing’ not just ‘telling’.

3️⃣ Connect like a human

The best creators know how to tap into curiosity, humour, storytelling, and credibility in their work.

Which is like a drug for our brains as we all want to be seen, heard and valued. It’s not rocket science. They call out a shared pain, sympathise with it and then show you how to solve it.

That’s a pretty solid learning experience, imo.

We need more of that in corpo L&D because it can be a little stale when it comes to storytelling and connecting on an emotional level.

Now, I’m not suggesting you show up like a fitness or beauty influencer. That might be career-ending in some environments.

But ask yourself this:

What practical ways can you introduce the type of connection that drives your audience to take action?

(Hint: I gave you the answer in the second paragraph)

Final Thoughts

We’ve covered a lot today.

From luscious hair on webinars to learning design lessons from YouTube.

But beneath the GIFs and sarcasm sits a serious point:

The world has changed, and how we design learning needs to catch up.

Today’s audiences are digitally native, time-poor, and overloaded. They don’t want to wade through 40-hour courses or decipher abstract frameworks.

They want clarity, relevance and momentum.

And who’s nailing that right now?

Not always corporate L&D, but creators, product designers, and marketers who’ve adapted their craft for modern consumption.

They lead with empathy, design with intention, and make learning feel like less of a chore and more of a choice.

That’s the energy we need to bring into L&D.

Not by copying TikTok trends, but by rethinking how we structure, deliver and humanise learning experiences. Whether it’s simplifying information, prioritising usability, or showing (not telling).

Design like a creator → Think like a product person → Deliver like a human.

That’s how we make learning work in the digital age.

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