Most workplace training is forgotten within a week, and that usually comes down to the way it was built rather than the people sitting through it. We design ours to stay with people long after the course is over, so it changes the way they work for good.
We have all sat through a slideshow with a quiz bolted on the end, the kind you have forgotten by Friday afternoon. Forgettable is the problem everyone notices, but it is rarely the only thing going wrong. Here is what we tend to find when we look under the bonnet of a training program that is not landing.
People click through it and have lost almost all of it within a week.
Content that no longer matches how the job is done today.
Templates and visuals that look nothing like the rest of your organisation.
Builds that ignore accessibility, leaving some of your team unable to use them.
Wall-to-wall text and voiceover that loses people within minutes.
Click-next modules built for compliance and little else.
Most training is built front to back, starting with the content someone wants covered and hoping it adds up to something useful. We work the other way, using an approach called backward design, drawn from Wiggins and McTighe's Understanding by Design. We start with the result you are after and work back from it, so everything in the finished course earns its place.
Start with the outcome. We get clear on what your people need to be able to do once the training is done, in specific terms rather than vague ones like "understand" or "be aware of". That goal drives every decision that follows.
Decide how we will know. Before a single screen is designed, we agree what success looks like and how we will see it, the evidence that shows people can genuinely do the thing rather than just sit through the content.
Then build the learning. Only now do we design the activities, practice and content, all of it pointed at that outcome and the evidence for it, with nothing in there just to fill time.
Our learning is made to feel approachable for your people and easy for you to work with, while underneath every decision is grounded in how adults learn and what helps them understand, remember and use what they have been taught. We follow the same five steps on every project.
It is a free 30-minute conversation about whatever learning challenge you are facing, with no pitch deck and no pressure to sign up to anything. You talk us through what is going on, we ask the kinds of questions a good designer would ask, and you come away with honest feedback on where to start.
It works a little like a check-up for your training. Whether or not you decide to work with us afterwards, you will finish the call understanding your situation more clearly than when you started.
Book a Health CheckWe build accessibility in from the very first storyboard, so it becomes part of how the learning is made rather than something we check off at the end. If any of your people cannot use the training, then as far as we are concerned the job is not done.
Everything we make meets WCAG 2.1 AA as standard, so your learning works for everyone on your team and stands up to scrutiny if you are ever asked about it.
A completion rate only tells you that people reached the end of the course, which is a long way from telling you that anything changed. We look a fair bit further than that, at whether people took the material in, whether they are using it in their work, and whether it shifted the result you set out to improve in the first place.