Whether you’re looking to showcase your work internally, seeking employment, or prospecting for clients, developing and maintaining an up-to-date portfolio will help you articulate what you do well. With a little forethought and planning, your portfolio can become one of your most valuable tools, opening up conversations and possibilities beyond your expectations.

Traditional eLearning can be dull and demotivating, a reality that runs counter to human nature. People eagerly consume and comprehend new ideas whenever they find the content engaging. They want eLearning that leverages learners’ innate desire for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

The term “bench strength” is frequently used in relation to leadership, so it isn’t surprising that many organizations are keen to create development programs for their future leaders. However, many of these programs fail to adequately prepare employees for the demands of assuming a leadership role.

Very often, training is created in isolation. Stakeholders may believe that “one and done” constitutes a solution; however, in reality, training needs to be reinforced and scaffolded. The eLearning you create is one piece of the puzzle, but it needs a bit more to really stick.

Too many eLearning courses are just data dumps full of facts, details, and nonessential content. These kinds of courses also often lack the necessary context to explain how all this information applies to the real world, making them both boring and ineffective. eLearning should be redesigned to better reach the audience and share content with them in a way that’s engaging and practical. And one simple but effective way to do that is through interactive stories.

During design and development, SMEs and stakeholders sometimes suggest ideas or practices that are antithetical to good instructional design. For example, a designer might have a stakeholder who believes it’s best to simply film a daylong stand-up training session and deliver it as one video. In this case, like so many others, it’s helpful for the designer to identify research findings to help them understand why learning should be designed differently.

Science fiction has always challenged people to see their world in new ways, from a glimpse at an imagined “long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” in Star Wars to envisioning a potential future centuries from now in Star Trek. Movies like The Matrix, Inception, Minority Report, Blade Runner, and so many others have proposed mind-blowing ideas like alternate realities, parallel universes, transporter beams, and time travel. One of the many reasons this genre is so popular is that it poses a wide range of “what-if” questions and allows its audience to play with possible answers. But these ideas can do more then just entertain you—they can also inspire your work in L&D.

Most learning programs have the goal of supporting behavior change, even a change as simple as getting people to do their jobs better. Organizational learning traditionally measures desired outcomes in terms of “learning objectives,” which are fairly straightforward to identify. In contrast, identifying the root cause of behavior change problems is considerably more complex.

eLearning professionals are expected to take on a wide variety of very different roles. Sometimes you’re the eLearning developer, graphics designer, narrator, or videographer. Other times you may act as the project manager, researcher, or even the department’s tech guru. It’s no surprise that this can be a daunting and sometimes scary prospect for those new to the industry, leaving them feeling insecure, overwhelmed, and unsure of where to begin.

In the customer training world, L&D professionals often have difficulty convincing their customers to complete coursework. This audience consists of busy professionals who increasingly want training they can take at their own pace, on their own time. While in theory this approach has benefits for both companies and customers, in practice there can be real challenges in trying to convince customers to prioritize this non-mandatory training over their other pressing work tasks and deadlines.

With so much of your design work focused on smooth navigation, creating engaging content, and crafting complex interactions, you may overlook a basic issue: Can people actually be successful with the course? Design flaws such as overload, ineffective use of multimedia (especially narration), and poor assessment items are just some of the ways an “engaging” course can still cause people to stumble.

By creating a learner profile, you will be better able to avoid building training that is ineffective, undesirable, and lacking relevance for your learners. By doing research up front about all aspects of your learners, you will be able to leverage those details to create impactful training that will capture their attention.

Organizations implement new software all the time, especially with the constantly changing technology landscape. A healthcare organization was tasked with training thousands of non-clinical associates, nurses, and physicians when it implemented a new electronic health record. The burning question was: How do you teach people new software in a way that sticks? How do you provide learners with authentic context to practice what they’ll actually do on the job?

eLearning and instructional professionals constantly crave new approaches to design, and they regularly grapple with how best to incorporate design thinking into their workflows. Many experienced designers find themselves struggling to enhance usability, influence perception, and make better design decisions. For the instructional designer, the ability to add techniques that “teach through design” can validate creative prowess and yield enhanced interactive and visual solutions in learning materials.

With tight timelines and rapid development tools, people on your team often find themselves on the hamster wheel of endless production. Out of context, this production machine seems very much alive and in sync with corporate needs. But is it? A six-word story experiment asked people to share their experience with corporate training—and not a single one of these stories offered a happy ending. Even with only six words, stories can weave an intricate web of emotions and events. What if you could capitalize on the power of story to redirect the efforts of your team and bring out everything human about your organization?

Storyboarding an eLearning project is a process. There is no right or wrong way to document the design of eLearning, and there is no rule that a project even needs to use the storyboarding process in some circumstances. Because of this, the choices for storyboarding techniques and procedures can be overwhelming if you’re new to the process, and it’s no surprise that some people decide to skip it entirely. But storyboarding can, in the long run, help your project development run smoother, encourage buy-in from your stakeholders or clients, and allow you to create projects you’re more satisfied with—it’s just a matter of determining a storyboarding process that works for you.

Neuroscience is one of the hottest topics in training and education, so it’s no surprise if you’re drawn to this research as a source of wisdom for your learning designs. Yet despite its promise, neuroscience is a fairly young field. Questions remain. Are neuroscience findings valid? Are they relevant to learning design? Are they useful?

Outsourcing of T&D is becoming more frequent, providing a large gap for freelancers to fill. But deciding to move to freelancing means you’ll need to find answers to a wide range of business concerns that you likely never had to worry about as an employee. What kind of business should you establish? How can you thrive in a competitive landscape? What do you need to put in place to protect both your new business and yourself?

It has been a bit of an uphill battle for clients and learning professionals to make the shift from content creation to curation. You should always be looking to see what exists before you get into creating or customizing new instruction.

The benefits of collaboration are well known, and today the tools available to extend collaborative efforts across time and space (geography) are plentiful. However, merely having collaborative platforms doesn’t necessarily mean collaboration will happen.

It’s estimated that 50 to 90 percent of training is “scrap learning”—content that is delivered but never actually applied back on the job. Scrap learning serves no practical purpose and is essentially a waste of everyone’s time. L&D professionals can’t help but be uncomfortable with those figures, but nothing in their traditional training bag of tricks has proven capable of eliminating that waste. It’s time to alter the training paradigm.

Training professionals typically fall along a continuum with varying levels of access to their target audience. That amount of access often influences, consciously or not, the techniques they use to analyze their audience. Without adequate awareness of this continuum and where they fall on it, designers risk depending on their own assumptions about their target audience and may end up overlooking more effective analysis strategies that can improve training.

Agile design processes are beginning to change the ways that people create training content. While agile design appeared in the L&D space only in the last few years, they took hold in the software industry much earlier, starting in the mid-1990s. Clearly there is overlap between L&D and the software industry, and if agile design works in both worlds, what other practices used by software development teams could help L&D create better training and work more effectively?

You’re faced with volumes of complicated content that you must translate into effective training. Your SMEs are pushing for delivering it through hours and hours of web-based training, which you know your audience will dread. You’ve heard of the benefits of using a micro format, but how can you possibly use it to cover all of that content?