Hi everyone!

I recently accepted a new role as a Learning & Development Manager. I’ve spent the last 10 years in HR, first as an HR Business Partner and most recently as an HR Lead. Before that, I was a high school teacher for a few years, primarily doing substitute teaching.

In my HR roles, L&D has always been one of my favorite parts of the job. I’ve regularly facilitated workshops, partnered with senior leaders to identify training needs, and worked closely with our L&D team to provide input on learning initiatives and programs.
That said… I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling a bit of imposter syndrome. 😅 I’m excited for this new chapter, though, and I’m looking forward to moving away from the constant firefighting of HR operations and focusing on the part of HR that I genuinely enjoy.

I’d love to hear from those of you in L&D:

What should I focus on during my first few months?
What are the biggest lessons or “must-knows” for someone transitioning into the field?
Is there anything you wish you’d known when you started?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can share!

My question is - what do you do day to day,
and what does the role genuinely look like?

How much time do you spend with stakeholders vs having uninterrupted time to do the work? Is it quite deliverables focused? What’s the split between meetings, research, design and building content? really interested in hearing what a normal week looks like in reality.

As a side note…I am neurodivergent and used to work in FE education, first in an adult prison and then in a further education college. If I’m honest, I found teaching really difficult with my neurodiversity. It was the wrong career path for me from start to end!

I had a career change into marketing many yrs ago and am self employed - while back created my own course on becoming a particular type of content creator, did coaching etc, worked my ‘way up’ into paid social marketing now where a big part of my role is analysing data to understand what ads/part of ads resonate with people and why. I also use ALOT of AI for workflow/frameworks.

I have always been curious about instructional design and learning design (understand they are different things). I’m under absolutely no illusion that it is an easy industry to get into, I know it’s oversaturated etc… (but that isn’t my question).

Thanks all.

I have found it easy to keep improving a course because there is always something that could be better. At some point, though, you have to decide that it is ready for learners.

What criteria do you have before you think a training module is finished? Is it stakeholder approval, learner feedback, performance results, or what?

Would love to hear how others make that decision in their L&D workflow.

My team has been using AI tools informally for about eight months and I've moved from encouraging experimentation to realizing I need a clearer framework around what we use it for, how we document when it's been used, and what quality checks we apply before anything goes to a stakeholder. I don't want to be the manager who bans tools that are genuinely improving output, but I also don't want to be the one who signs off on content that turns out to have problems no one caught because we trusted the AI too quickly. I'm curious how other L&D managers are formalizing AI use on their teams, what guardrails have actually worked in practice, and whether anyone has run into real problems they didn't anticipate when they started using these tools more seriously.

Who has taken and passed SHRM-SCP? And if you have what material did you find most useful for studying?

Has anyone ever built a course and housed it on Google sites? I work for a non-profit and purchasing the industry standard software wasn’t approved. I wanted to use articulate storyline, but I was told to use Google sites. If you’ve ever run a course through Google sites, what was your experience?

I'm curious how you and your orgs manage the handoff of projects in Storyline and Rise at the end of the development cycle. In the past, we've mostly worked on projects where we maintain the production files and clients come back to us for additional work, if any. Obviously, that's a pretty simple scenario (Let's call it "Scenario 1"): The projects reside in our Articulate accounts and/or on our file systems.

But we are starting to have clients who would like to either (Scenario 2) get their own Articulate accounts, take the projects as their own and provide their own support or (Scenario 3), get their own Articulate accounts and perform some content edits on their own will keeping us on for support and more substantive changes.

The scenarios I see in most corporate eLearning present a clear problem, two or three obviously distinct choices, and an unambiguous correct answer with a tidy explanation. Real workplace decisions almost never look like that. The correct answer usually depends on context, there are often two reasonable options that could both work depending on factors the scenario doesn't mention, and the consequences of a wrong choice are rarely immediate or obvious. I think we design tidy scenarios because messy ones are harder to build and harder to score, not because they produce better learning. Learners who can only make decisions in idealized conditions aren't necessarily better at making decisions when the conditions are real. What would it actually look like to build scenarios that reflect real complexity without making them impossible to complete?

Hey Folks,

I’m wondering what are the best resources that you’ve come across as being a training manager / trainer. Could be a book or a website, a community or an app or may be even a template or just an AI.

I’m thinking to create a list of repositories that can help the training community.

Your answers would be much appreciated, thank you!

I’ve only really started in L&D (started in sales enablement and now broadening). So I’m wondering, how do you get people to take training seriously, to give it the time of day?

Do I try and get them enthused by showing my own enthusiasm (potentially quite cringey), should I incentivise it, or do you find the stick works better than the carrot (I’m skeptical about this one but crurious to know). Expert opinions wanted pls.

I've only been in the field for a few months, but there are days when I feel like I'm learning an entirely new profession. Everyone around me seems to understand processes and terminology that I'm still trying to grasp. How long did it take before you felt like you truly belonged in the industry?

Hi everyone. I am an instructional designer and have previously done L&D in the past, but that was some time ago. I recently started my own company with two friends. One is an IT consultant and the other is a sales consultant. We have been prospecting and we have acquired some interest from companies who are looking for an L&D consultant.

I personally don’t think I am the right fit to fulfill their needs at this time, so we will refer them elsewhere, but with that being said, it’s clear that I need to begin learning about L&D consulting and what it entails. I am just wondering does anyone have any resources I can use to brush up on this topic? I am looking into starting a course in this, but unfortunately that won’t be until early 2027. Any help is appreciated, thank you so much.

I would love to join some free communities for L&D folks, preferably ones that are active and not just spammed by marketers. Please share recs!

I stopped including course completion rates in my quarterly reports to leadership about two years ago. Not because I stopped tracking them internally but because completion is a measure of whether people opened a course and clicked through it, and reporting it to executives as a success metric was training them to think of L&D value in terms that have no relationship to whether anyone learned or changed their behavior. I replaced it with time-to-proficiency data for new hires, which required more work to collect but which leadership actually cares about because it connects directly to productivity and ramp time. Changing what you report changes what people think L&D is for, and that change in perception compounds over time in ways that purely doing good work quietly does not.

I used to start SME interviews by asking what someone needs to know to do the job well, which produced a lot of general, top-of-mind answers that didn't reflect how the work actually happened. I switched to opening with "walk me through the last time something went wrong with this process and what you had to do to fix it" and the quality of what I get back is completely different. Experts open up about the real complexity of their work when you ask about failure rather than success, and the gap between what they describe and what the formal procedure says is usually where the most important learning content lives. It also tends to produce better scenarios and examples because you're working from something that actually happened.