Like many lessons in my career, this one began with failure.
During my digital nomad year of 2013-14 I pursued a side hustle while solving eLearning problems remotely: writing and submitting travel articles. I must have submitted more than a dozen, from working with Buddhist monks in Cambodia to touring the castles and cathedrals of France. No magazine or newspaper travel lift-out was safe from my genius.
But actually they were.
Because none of them ever replied.
Until one day I prompted an editor with whom I had a mutual acquaintance, asking for feedback.
“Oh yeah, I read your piece about exploring London’s canals, but I can’t use it,” he said.
“Why not? Was it too short? Too long? Too… watery?” I wanted to know.
“Have you ever actually read our newspaper?” he replied.
I had to admit I hadn’t.
“You write, too… well for us. No one will read it.”
For a brief moment in my head I tried to turn that whack into some kind of a compliment, but it quickly became clear that it wasn’t. I was busted – I wasn’t writing for his audience, I was writing to impress myself. This lesson may not have helped my travel writing career, but it certainly helped my L&D career, because developing course materials and learning experiences is no different.
We don’t have a content problem, we have a design problem
When we overthink our learning design, write beautiful prose, and gleefully paste in box-ticking copy from legal, detail-heavy process steps from safety experts, and jargon from marketing, we’re often forgetting the people who actually need to use it.
The end result can be courses that are technically correct but practically ineffective, and after more than 25 years working in eLearning, I still see organisations making the same mistakes. The subject matter has changed, the technology has evolved and the tools available to create the learning objects have improved dramatically, but the fundamental challenge remains the same: we often design learning around what the organisation wants to communicate rather than what the learner actually needs, or has the capacity to absorb.
The answer is not simply creating better content or investing in more sophisticated technology; it requires a more human-centred approach to learning design – one that starts by understanding the people we are asking to change, adapt and develop. Human-centred learning recognises that learners are not starting from scratch – they bring existing experience, expectations, pressures and constraints that influence whether learning feels relevant and whether they can apply it.
Stop delivering training content, and start designing experiences
As organisations prepare their people for a changing world, reskilling has become one of the most important conversations in learning and development. We talk about future capabilities, emerging technologies and the skills people will need in new roles, yet many reskilling initiatives struggle before the learning even begins: not because organisations have identified the wrong skills, but because the learning experience itself has not been designed with the learner in mind.
Too often, we broadcast learning rather than design it – a subtle but significant difference.
Broadcasting learning starts with the information the organisation wants to deliver. It gathers content from subject matter experts, policies, procedures and internal stakeholders, then attempts to package everything into a course. The objective becomes making sure nothing important is missed, assuming everything that’s important to the organisation is going to be important to the learner.
This difference can be summarised by two very different approaches to learning design. The traditional approach often looks something like this:
Organisation → Content → Learner.
The organisation decides what it wants people to know, gathers the information, builds the learning and then delivers it to the team.
A human-centred approach has a different start point:
Learner → Purpose → Content → Experience.
It begins by understanding who the learner is, what they need to achieve, and what type of experience will help them apply that knowledge in practice. Do they prefer face-to-face or Zoom sessions, where social learning can take place? Or will well designed and organised eLearning suit them – on demand, “moment of need” or self-paced? The content is always important, but it becomes a tool to support the outcome rather than the starting point of the design process.
The learner is not waiting for us
Every stakeholder involved in creating learning usually has a great reason for wanting their information included; legal want accuracy, and to highlight actions and consequences, safety teams need risk covered, operations want processes outlined, and management often just want their vast knowledge and experience represented. By the time all those requirements have been woven in, the organisation may well have successfully captured everything it knows about a topic, but left learners wondering what they are actually supposed to do with it.
This is where eLearning has a unique challenge. It is not simply training delivered through a screen, it is a digital experience, and learners bring the same expectations they have from every other digital product they use. Consider the tools people interact with every day: banking apps designed to make money tasks easier, streaming platforms that remember preferences and push them, and search engines that provide answers almost instantly. These products are successful because they are designed around the user’s needs. Yet workplace training often follows a very different model, creating modules that ask learners to navigate lengthy content, absorb organisational language and work through information that might be relevant eventually, but is not necessarily useful right now. If we designed customer software this way, it would be considered poor usability. For some reason we have traditionally accepted a lower standard for learning because completing training is often mandatory, (or at the very least, completion is the primary purpose) but mandatory does not always mean engaging.
One of my old favourite sayings in eLearning is that “if you build it, they won’t necessarily come”. The challenge has never simply been creating learning, it’s been creating learning that people are willing and able to use – which is why usability matters so much in digital learning.
My new favourite saying in eLearning is “The greatest usability challenge is not how people use it, it’s getting them to use it.” That means understanding the learner before opening the authoring tool. It means considering their experience level, their working environment, their technical confidence and the language they use every day, while recognising that the person completing the module is not sitting there waiting to receive information from the organisation. They are just like you and me – a busy person trying to complete a task, solve a problem or develop a capability.
AI can create content, but it can’t create understanding
Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes this conversation even more important – it’s already changing the way learning content is created. It can summarise information, restructure documents and produce drafts, schematics and storyboards in a fraction of the time previously needed. These capabilities are valuable, but they do not replace the need for human judgement. Yes, AI can generate content quickly, but it still takes a human to understand the intent behind the learning. AI does not know which information matters most to a particular team, sense organisational culture, factor in timelines or budgets, and it cannot know your learner’s frustrations or the difference between what someone needs to know and what someone might simply be interested in knowing. Those decisions still require people who understand learning, their users and the context. In fact, as content becomes easier to create, thoughtful design will become even more important. The future challenge in eLearning will not be producing more information or compiling learning materials quickly, it will be offering relevant, timely learning, while creating experiences that help people make sense of the information they already have access to.
The future of learning starts with empathy
Successful reskilling will not be achieved by organisations creating the largest volume of learning content, it will come from organisations that understand their learners well enough to create learning that feels relevant, practical and worth their time – an organisation that remembers learners are as “busy” as they are, and respects their time.
Similarly, the question we ask at the beginning of any learning project matters. It is tempting to ask, “What do we need to teach?”, but perhaps the better question is, “Who are we designing this learning for?” Because once we start with the learner, everything else becomes clearer: the technology, the content and delivery methods all become tools to support the experience rather than the focus of it.
After all, the purpose of eLearning has never been to broadcast what an organisation knows, it has been to help people use that knowledge when they need it most.
(first appeared in Australian Institute of Training and Development Magazine – winter 2026 edition, “Reskilling for a Changing World”)