Learning Path Design

"I'm looking to pivot into L&D. What should I learn? Where do I start?" This is the question I answer the most during my mentoring sessions. And I always recommend the same 4-step process for people to dive deep into the magical (and scientific) world of L&D. 😁 1️⃣ Gain clarity by researching the field. L&D is broad. Explore the part that matches your interests and talents most. 👉 Access the Association for Talent Development (ATD) Capability Model and see which ones 'speak to you' most. —Are you looking for a specialist role? Hands-on? Strategic? Leading? —Is it instructional design, training, facilitation, program development, strategic, or performance consulting? 👉 Then chat with folks doing that work in those roles already, to understand what their day-to-day looks like, and what challenges they are solving more often. 2️⃣ Get the basics right: knowledge and skills There's LOTS of content out there, so no wonder folks are overwhelmed. Here's my "starter pack" for L&D—These are the basics: 🧠 5Di Toolkit of learning design by Nick Shackleton-Jones (+ his book "How People Learn") 🧠 Five Moments of Need for performance-support by Bob Mosher 🧠 The Learning-Transfer Evaluation Model (LTEM) by Will Thalheimer 🧠 Performance Consulting Masterclass by The The LPI (Learning and Performance Institute) 🧠 Action Mapping book by Cathy Moore 🧠 "Joining Forces with your Brain" course by Lauren Waldman, Learning Pirate AI and Learning: 🧠 The AI Crash Course and The AI Accelerator by Ross Stevenson 🧠 The AI Learning Design Bootcamp by Dr Philippa Hardman Facilitation and experience design: 🧠 KAOSPILOT certifications: "Designing & Facilitating Learning Space" by Simon Kavanagh and "Experience Design" by Andy Sontag 🧠 Leading Groups Course by Mischief Makers B.V. Other resources: 🧠 "Learning Ecosystems" book by Katja Schipperheijn 🧠 "The Social Learning Guidebook" by Julian Stodd 🧠 Offbeat Newsletter + "The Learning Brief Newsletter" from L&D SHAKERS + anything on human-centered design + design thinking + agile ways of working If you are choosing the Instructional Design path, pick a strong certification (check out Devlin Peck, Tim Slade and IDOL Academy) 3️⃣ Immerse yourself! Join an L&D community (L&D SHAKERS, for example 😅) & surround yourself with diverse learning opportunities from peers and experts. Bonus if you start to get involved in projects, and learn by doing! 💪 Rolling up your sleeves and volunteering is how you gain practical experience and start building your portfolio. 4️⃣ Learn out loud and build your network Slowly start to share your learning process, with wins and setbacks, your adventures, takeaways, and lessons learned on LinkedIn. This will attract those who care about the same things as you do. Curate your feed: Use the notification feature, don't scroll at the mercy of the algorithm. Beware: This is the long game. Don't expect to see changes overnight. But it compounds, trust me!

When you align learning strategy with how the brain actually learns you'll find that performance improves. In many organisations, learning still means content delivery - I battle this challenge regularly. L&D teams measure outputs like number of courses, completions, attendance rather than outcomes. But humans don’t learn by consuming information. They learn by connecting ideas, making meaning, and putting their knowledge and skills into practice over and over again until their brains physically change. If you want to genuinely change behaviour and performance in your organisation then your whole strategy needs to be designed with the brain in mind. Here are three practical principles to share with your design and delivery teams: 🧠 Space, don’t cram Learning needs time to settle. Encourage teams to design experiences that build over time rather than delivering everything in one go. The return on retention is remarkable. 💡 Engage peoples emotions People remember what feels relevant and real. Challenge your designers to stimulate learners emotions with hooks like stories, challenges and personal connections. Don't just design pretty slides. 🔄 Practice and retrieval Learning journeys, rather than one off events, give people time to apply, reflect, and test new skills where it matters - on the job. This doesn't mean repetition for its own sake; it's simply how neural pathways are strengthened. When your learning strategy aligns with how the brain naturally works key metrics like engagement, performance and business impact improve. How do you enable your teams to bring brain science into the way they design and deliver learning?

“I used to design training that was informative. Now, I aim for impact.” That shift happened when I started using Bloom’s Taxonomy—not as an academic framework, but as a real design tool. So what is it? Bloom’s Taxonomy is a layered model that helps structure learning outcomes in six stages: Remember → Understand → Apply → Analyze → Evaluate → Create It moves learners from basic awareness to higher-order thinking and doing. I recently used this in a workshop with architecture students on Mindset and responsiveness: We explored what mindset really means (Understand) Looked at how it shapes behavior (Analyze) Unpacked fixed vs growth mindset (Evaluate) Then tackled a group challenge where they applied the growth mindset in action (Apply) Finally, they reflected: What did I learn? How will I use this? (Create) The session didn’t just leave them with new ideas—it left them with new ways of thinking and responding. Turns out, when you design learning like a staircase, people don’t just attend your session. They climb! P.S - PS: Every flower needs sunlight and space to grow. In my sessions, I add one more invisible petal to Bloom’s flower—a Safe Space. A space to pause, reflect, stumble, ask, unlearn, and try again. Because without it, no learning really blooms.

Learning journeys are not built in a day. But they can be built with a system. I created the G.R.O.W.T.H. Framework to help learning designers map experiences that actually stick. Most models stay in theory. G.R.O.W.T.H. is a toolkit you can take into your next project and put to work. Here is what you will find inside: ✅ Six-stage framework to map your journey ✅ Goal-setting worksheet for stakeholder alignment ✅ Empathy mapping template ✅ Learner feedback form ✅ Team retro guide ✅ Real-world case study to show it in practice This is a free download. You will find the full PDF attached to this post. If you are building learning journeys for onboarding, upskilling, compliance, or customer education, this gives you a clear structure to follow. Simple. Practical. Designed to be used. Scroll through the document and tell me what you think. I would love your feedback.

What will truly move the needle for the participants? (The most fun part of what I do: Learning Design) When designing this 3 months long Peak Performance learning journey, I started the sketch work by speaking to people it was meant for. During initial conversations, one participant’s words that were echoed by the majority stuck with me: "I know I need to focus, but I can’t figure out how to prioritize when everything feels urgent." That became my anchor. Talking to them during our discovery calls gave me a very thorough understanding of their challenges while also noticing their actual needs. The Design Process- To address challenges like this, I focused on three key areas: - Awareness: Helping participants see how busyness often masks the real work that drives results. - Practical Tools: From Walt's thinking model to self energy audits, I selected strategies participants could apply immediately. - Sustainability: I introduced micro-habits, that create big results over time. One of my favorite moments came during an energy management exercise. A senior manager realized she was doing her hardest work during her lowest-energy hours. She shifted her schedule the next week and reported a significant boost in how she perceived herself and in her productivity. Workshops aren’t about cramming in content — they’re about creating actionable breakthroughs. For me, the reward is seeing participants leave equipped with the clarity and tools to perform at their peak and while in their project phase they implemented the tools of peak productivity and witnessed actual shifts. In my next post I will also be sharing a few successful shifts that the participants created. As an L&D Associate, how do you look at the learning design? Priya Arora | LinkedIn for Learning | LinkedIn HR #PeakPerformance #WorkshopDesign #CorporateTraining #LearningThatLasts #LearningJourney #SoftSkills #ExecutivePresence #Facilitator #Session #Workshop #TeamCoaching #TeamBonding #TeamPerformance #TeamBuilding #LearningandDevelopment

Effectiveness is often held hostage by the overblown importance of engagement. Remember, we're not here to build an audience base. We're here to help people learn. So... Avoid the flashy stuff! Focus beats engagement when it comes to learning. 🔬 To Optimize Learner ATTENTION: ▪️ Eliminate distractions: If it’s not essential, leave it out. ▪️ Chunk the material: Divide content into manageable pieces. ▪️ Keep related information together: Avoid splitting attention between different times or places. 🚂 To Bolster Learner MOTIVATION: ▪️ Establish relevance: Connect objectives to their goals, needs, or real-world applications. ▪️ Bake-in early successes: Wins at the onset keep motivation high. Build a path of small successes to sustain momentum. ▪️ Encourage collaboration over cooperation. One fosters shared ownership, the other is simply dividing tasks. 💡 To Help Things CLICK: ▪️ Set the stage: Provide context to show how new information fits. ▪️ Prioritize: Distinguish between "need-to-know" and "nice-to-know." ▪️ Fade to abstractions: Start with concrete examples before moving to abstract concepts. ▪️ Encourage connections: Help learners relate new information to what they already know and the self-expalin it. 🧠 To Help Things STICK: ▪️ Give targeted feedback: Focus on correcting mistakes and reinforcing understanding. ▪️Build knowledge and skills: Spaced Retrieval, Interleaving, Elaboration, and Deliberate Practice at increasing levels of desirable difficulty. ▪️Scaffold complexity: Start with questions to answer and move to problems to solve. ▪️Make meaning through reflection: Guide learners to generate relevant paralells between the knowledge and thier own story. 🟩 Content Selection Tip: Leverage the Pareto Principle Focus on the 20% of content that delivers 80% of the impact. This simplifies your design, prevents content bloat (of which higher ed is wildly guilty), and lays a reliable foundation for learners to develop a specialized set of relevant skills on their own as the guidance slowly fades out. There's always so much missing in linkedin posts. This is just a public journal entry. Primes my thinking for the day. The main takeaway here is to lean into creating focus more than cultivating engagement when designing and delivering instruction. Engagement is deceptive and too much of it can hinder our ability to reflect. See the "Transience Effect" for more on that. I hope this is helpful. #instructionaldesign #learning #HigherEd