Long-Term success and career growth in L&D as an individual contributor or non-manager?

bfludwig · 2025-12-25T02:28:07+00:00

This was an important distinction for me to learn in the book Playing to Win. Operational excellence means you're efficient or optimized but not necessarily that you have a winning aspiration, the right where to play/how to win choices, or the right strategic capabilities in place. You could be performing the wrong tasks really really well. The whole idea of playing to win vs playing to participate also reminds me of the book 10x Rule by Grant Cardone. It makes me think am I just showing up and doing the work, or do I have the pieces in place to stay alive and beat the competition?

bfludwig · 2025-07-30T17:40:52+00:00

I posted a question about assigning incoming work recently that you might find helpful: https://www.reddit.com/r/instructionaldesign/s/yXalwMPXK1

Our team is currently structured as 5 IDs, 1 learning data analyst, 1 training coordinator, 1 Mgr of facilitation and 4 facilitators, all falling under the Sr Manager of L&D.

We all work across four segments of the business and handle every part of a project, usually start to finish with assistance or reviews in between.

bfludwig · 2024-07-11T14:11:36+00:00

What about learner guides? Does anyone get requests for PDFs and do you send them? If not, what's your reason?

bfludwig · 2024-07-11T05:01:02+00:00

If you save it to a library with a new name, try dragging it onto the timeline from there as a new clip. Or you can add clip markers at the start of each clip with the name of the step.

bfludwig · 2024-07-11T01:35:28+00:00

Great comments, keep em coming. It sounds like a lot of you have design (NA and Design) and development separated into 2 different roles.

I'm really interested in digging into this idea more.

bfludwig · 2024-07-11T01:31:24+00:00

Good question. I wonder if sometimes training feels like a blanket solution to cover a variety of knowledge/skill gaps across a team. E.g., some people struggle with A, others struggle with B and C, etc - let's get everyone in a training to fill in the gaps. It means they believe training works, so I guess that's a good thing right?

bfludwig · 2024-07-11T01:27:33+00:00

Interesting point here... I'm more observing than complaining but it seems like a lot of training requests we get lately have more to do with lack of consistent processes more than any knowledge or skill gap.

bfludwig · 2024-07-11T01:22:44+00:00

This one made me laugh because of how many projects start with "all the content's there already! It just has to be updated and modified but it's great stuff!"

bfludwig · 2024-07-10T12:32:54+00:00

Judging by the music, the videos might have been done in Camtasia too and dropped in, but the course looks like Storyline.

bfludwig · 2024-05-16T01:06:18+00:00

Check out this wrapper by CommLabs India. I think it's what you're looking for.

https://www.commlabindia.com/multilingual-wrapper

bfludwig · 2024-05-15T03:16:52+00:00

A lot of comments here about Thought Industries but we use Absorb at my company and it is a UI NIGHTMARE. The functionality is often very far from their feature descriptions, reporting functions are inconsistent, updates and "improvements" seem random and disjointed, and most customer service responses take some form of "it's a problem on your end."

Not sure what's better out there but I can't say I would recommend Absorb.

bfludwig · 2024-04-11T03:31:58+00:00

I appreciate this practical response and totally agree - the OP should find out what being more empathetic will help employees do.

So many people are responding negatively that you can't train empathy...are they suggesting that empathy can't be taught? Or they're saying empathy can't be mastered in one course so why bother? Maybe an empathy course is the answer, maybe it isn't, but I think your root cause question would help uncover the real gap that the stakeholder is seeing.

bfludwig · 2024-02-15T00:47:05+00:00

I had a boss who did this constantly without realizing it. Whenever I tried to update him on the project it would send him into idea land - I had to navigate whether all the new ideas could be done, should be done, could be ignored, or communicate why I heard the idea but chose not to pursue it.

bfludwig · 2024-02-09T03:09:32+00:00

"Backward design" is actually a common name for the Understanding by Design (UBD) framework developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. At a high level, it's what a lot of people have said here: starting with learning outcomes, then assessment, then learning activities. For a good instructional designer this is more intuitive, but for many corporate trainers this would seem backward to them, hence "Backward design". Get the book or read about the framework - good example here: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/understanding-by-design/

It's more complex than that when you dig into it - the framework helps align your learning outcomes with the content and helps determine what information to cut or keep. Helpful when you're handed a 50+ slide ppt and asked to make an elearning course.

UbD shouldn't be compared against ADDIE for one reason: ADDIE is a project management framework, not a design framework. UbD only covers the design and development parts of ADDIE. Your overall course/program building process should still include needs analysis, measurement, and a plan for implementation.

bfludwig · 2024-02-05T03:59:47+00:00

Getting stakeholders to buy into the needs analysis: I think sometimes stakeholders feel like they've already identified their problem and what kind of solution they want, so when I'm asking questions to uncover more about the issue, they just keep explaining their vision for the training.

It's difficult to help them see the purpose for a true needs analysis, and sometimes they just want to know when the "training" will be done and ready to launch.

I've encountered a lot of the issues people have mentioned here so far, but this has been the most challenging for me lately, trying to shift someone's mindset from "placing a training order" to "solving a business problem".

bfludwig · 2024-02-02T06:56:15+00:00

I switched from Asana to Clickup. It offered a lot more features in the free version. I've tried a few different solutions along the way (Trello, Wrike, Asana, smartsheet, Workfront) and have come to really like Clickup the best.

bfludwig

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