r/LearningDevelopment • u/darkhomer419 • 1d ago
The biggest mindset shift coming from teaching: learners in corporate L&D are not there because they want to be
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.
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u/woodenbookend 1d ago
That’s not my experience.
This only makes sense if the training doesn’t align with what people need to succeed and/or if you’ve got more work to do to engage with those people.
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u/eddibravo 1d ago
That shift from “teaching” to actually designing the learning experience is huge. I feel like that’s one of the hardest parts to get used to when moving into L&D
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u/Brilliant_Gift7760 1d ago
This is the reason I wanna move away from L&D. I could be wrong, but for the past few months, I genuinely felt that this field might get stagnant.
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u/rfoil 1d ago
My wife is taking the mandatory compliance training before she's allowed to teach grammar school in 8 days. It's her fifth year watching the same talking slides. It's tortuous.
She remembers none of it. It's there only because it's state mandated. Teachers go through the motions without retaining anything.
There is no evidence of sound learning principles. School systems buy this crap and checkoff the completion box. It's a charade.
The same goes for a lot of workplace training. As the SVP of a large bank told me, "our training materials are terminally boring."
When there is some entertainment value and at least retrieval activities in the training, the engagement is higher and the resistance goes down. Learners look forward to our serially released training materials because each episode teases the next.
My early background in media is early reality tv - episodes of Real People, That's Incredible, etc. If you spin a good story and provide some entertainment value, people stay engaged. If you don't they switch channels.
Same principle applies in workplace learning.
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u/christyinsdesign 1d ago
When I moved from teaching to ID, the biggest shift was something completely different. The big mental shift was moving from being the expert in my content and owning my own lessons to focusing on partnering with SMEs who had that deep expertise.
Releasing the need to be the expert in the content was a huge change, and one that applies whether I'm creating compliance training for reluctant participants or professional development that learners want enough to pay out of pocket for it.
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u/Available-Ad-5081 1d ago edited 1d ago
In some cases, they don't want to be there. We have plenty of people sign up for leadership or professional development sessions on their own without any manager push.
That being said, I like to say we are an internal sales department for our own function. You have to be able to sell employees on why they are there, what's in it for them, etc. and also make it engaging. It's harder for some topics, like compliance, but certainly doable.