Like most things I’ve done in my life, both failures and successes, there was always a lesson involved.
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?”
“Have you ever read our newspaper Derek?” he replied.
I had to admit I hadn’t.
“You write, too, um… well for us. No one will read it.”
For a brief moment in my head I tried to turn this 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. 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.
Learners don’t engage with content because it’s comprehensive, they engage with it because it’s relevant, clear and useful. The best digital learning reduces unnecessary cognitive load. It speaks the learner’s language and respects their time, focusing on take-aways, not technicalities, or flowery wording.
If you can see this in your organisation’s course writing, the solution is to strip back and start with the learner, not the content – because if you’re not catering for the audience, you’re just writing for yourself.