3 Essential Lessons from My 20 Year Career in Learning and Development
I feel strongly that you don't need a formal education in adult learning to be a good instructional designer. But I do think instructional designers have to be open to learning new things.
I’ve learned a lot over my 20 year career in Learning and Development and in this episode, I’m sharing three of my most valuable lessons.
Listen to the episode or scroll down to read the blog post ↓
Key Points:
00:58 The education needed to be a good instructional designer
02:18 My Learning and Development career
05:59 Three essential lessons from my Learning and Development career
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3 Essential Lessons from My 20 Year Career in Learning and Development
Happy 2025, friend!
To kick off the new year, I thought it would be fun to reflect on my 20ish year career in L&D.
I honestly thought this would be a fun, easy post to write that would still provide a lot of value and would be great for the beginning of the year. I was wrong, at least on part of that.
This was not an easy post to write.
How can I summarize what I've learned across 20 years? I know I'm going to forget something important, but I still think it's worth it.
I often get asked how people can transition into L&D:
“What are the skills or experiences that I’m going to need?”
“Should I go back to school and get a degree in this stuff?”
I feel strongly that you don't need a formal education in adult learning to be a good instructional designer. But I do think instructional designers have to be open to learning new things.
In this blog post, we’re covering the following:
1) My 20 Year Career in Learning and Development
I started my career as an assistant editor in a curriculum team, creating training for first responders.
Not too long into that role, I realized that they were looking for people to learn about adult learning theory and enhance their existing curriculum. I was interested in how people learn but I was also interested in growing my career so I raised my hand.
That decision set me on a career path focused on adult learning.
Now, fast forward.
About 12 years ago, I landed at a national nonprofit. It was more collaborative than I had ever experienced, and it was a highly functioning, highly productive team.
I began learning more about change management, human-centered design, and other areas that informed the way I worked.
After about eight years there, I launched Skill Masters Market - my L&D consulting business for nonprofits and associations. And for the past four, almost five years, I've been working with nonprofits all over the country on their training and leadership development needs.
I create functional training, leadership training, and leadership competencies to inform competency-based learning strategies.
I like to give these two examples to show the breadth of my work.
1. I worked with one nonprofit to create training for doulas and midwives:
The organization had found that the postpartum death rate was too high and they felt their audience of doulas and midwives could help.
Their training was focused on something the doulas and midwives could do in their jobs to encourage their clients, the postpartum women, to seek medical care and in doing so, potentially save lives.
Take a look at this blog post to learn more about this:
This is a great example of functional training.
This was relevant to their job, relevant to their role, and allowed them to do their job better and make a huge impact in the process.
2. I've been working with a nonprofit to create a global leadership development program:
This is on the other side of the spectrum.
It's focused on systems thinking and other key skills for the future of their organization. The focus is very much on their leadership and how they can evolve to meet the needs of the future.
That gives you a sense of the type of work I do.
2) Three Essential Lessons from My Learning and Development Career
I want to share three things I find essential in my work.
1. Learning and Development Is All About People
When I think about L&D (you can call it what you want - training, learning, instructional design, performance enablement) it all comes down to the people.
It's the people you work with.
It's the people you work for.
It's the people you create any sort of learning for.
We want to build relationships with our subject matter experts, the people who are in our intended audience for learning, and key partners in the organization.
And to do that, we have to commit to listening actively. We have to learn to ask powerful questions and facilitate great conversations.
We can get to know and understand what the needs of these people are and how we can best meet them.
But it also continues in the learning process.
We have to figure out ways that we can create connection among our audience. We have to figure out a way that we can be inclusive so that people are ready and willing to open up, trust, and build relationships with each other.
And we have to make sure that what we do is accessible because if people can't access it, if they can't learn in the way that it's being provided, then it's not about the people.
It has to work for the people.
When I first started thinking about adult learning, I don't think I was this focused on the people. But now, 20 years later, I see that it's all about the people.
2. Focus on Behavior
We have so many ways of gaining information, so when we're working on learning, it's important to focus on behavior.
Now that's not an easy task.
We're complex people. We don't like to change our behavior even if that behavior is a good thing.
We see this with people who struggle to quit a bad habit. They want to, but it's hard to make that change.
We see that with people who struggle to create a good habit. They want to but it's hard to make that change.
So take the time to learn about human behavior.
Think about how the brain works and learn how change happens, both at the individual and the organizational level. Because almost anything we create in L&D is a change project. It's intended to change something.
So focus on behavior and learn things you need to learn to be able to create that behavior change.
3. Have a Growth Mindset
There's a lot to unpack with having a growth mindset.
One of the things that I like to do when I'm starting a project is to start with the end in mind. Figure out what success looks like, and aim for that.
Now, where the growth mindset comes in is I always want to learn new techniques to achieve those outcomes.
And I want to learn from outside the field of L&D:
I want to learn from human-centered design.
I want to learn from Agile processes.
I want to learn from the gaming industry.
I want to learn from the cartoons that my kids watch.
There are so many places we can learn from that impact how we approach L&D.
Now it doesn't stop there because not all of those new techniques will work.
So we have to be willing to test things and iterate until we get it right. And that's a process that requires us to never stop learning, to never stop trying, and to be okay with failure from time to time.
When we're committed to trying things, testing things, and learning from those things, what you can learn is incredible.
So we never want to stop learning, and we always want to have that growth mindset.
Now, I'm sure there are a million other recommendations that other L&D folks could share with you, and many of their recommendations might even be better than mine.
There are all kinds of resources to help people navigate their L&D careers.
So in the vein of what I just shared, never stop learning, I want you to go ask other people what they have learned in their career. Or if you've been in L&D for a while, what is it that you would share?
And if it's different than what I've shared, I would love to hear that. Send me a message on LinkedIn and let's start a conversation.
To hear the full conversation I had on the Learning for Good Podcast, scroll all the way up and tune into episode 115.
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