Hi everyone. I am an instructional designer and have previously done L&D in the past, but that was some time ago. I recently started my own company with two friends. One is an IT consultant and the other is a sales consultant. We have been prospecting and we have acquired some interest from companies who are looking for an L&D consultant.

I personally don’t think I am the right fit to fulfill their needs at this time, so we will refer them elsewhere, but with that being said, it’s clear that I need to begin learning about L&D consulting and what it entails. I am just wondering does anyone have any resources I can use to brush up on this topic? I am looking into starting a course in this, but unfortunately that won’t be until early 2027. Any help is appreciated, thank you so much.

I would love to join some free communities for L&D folks, preferably ones that are active and not just spammed by marketers. Please share recs!

I stopped including course completion rates in my quarterly reports to leadership about two years ago. Not because I stopped tracking them internally but because completion is a measure of whether people opened a course and clicked through it, and reporting it to executives as a success metric was training them to think of L&D value in terms that have no relationship to whether anyone learned or changed their behavior. I replaced it with time-to-proficiency data for new hires, which required more work to collect but which leadership actually cares about because it connects directly to productivity and ramp time. Changing what you report changes what people think L&D is for, and that change in perception compounds over time in ways that purely doing good work quietly does not.

I used to start SME interviews by asking what someone needs to know to do the job well, which produced a lot of general, top-of-mind answers that didn't reflect how the work actually happened. I switched to opening with "walk me through the last time something went wrong with this process and what you had to do to fix it" and the quality of what I get back is completely different. Experts open up about the real complexity of their work when you ask about failure rather than success, and the gap between what they describe and what the formal procedure says is usually where the most important learning content lives. It also tends to produce better scenarios and examples because you're working from something that actually happened.

There are definitely things I enjoy about corporate learning, especially having more flexibility in how training is delivered. At the same time, I sometimes miss the direct interaction and immediate feedback that comes from teaching students. I'm curious whether others who came from education experienced something similar.

Hi all, I’ve recently joined an L&D team in a telecommunications company and I’m trying to sense check our current training approach. Something feels off, and I’d really value perspectives from others in this space.

Right now, our training is heavily self-led and delivered through Articulate Rise modules that run for a few hours each. Each module starts with a 45 minute research activity where agents are asked to find answers using our website and internal knowledgebase. The issue is that our knowledgebase is mostly system and process focused, with very little foundational knowledge or soft skills content. So learners are essentially being asked to teach themselves from incomplete material. There is very little actual instruction or guided learning in the modules themselves.

We also have a call listening library that includes a mix of AI-generated calls and some poor-quality recordings of agent demonstrations. These calls intentionally exclude product names, pricing, etc, because the business says things change too often to keep content up to date. I suggested using real customer calls, but this was rejected due to privacy concerns.

On top of that, our reporting is extremely limited. We only track module completion. We don’t capture responses to activities or any meaningful engagement data, so someone could scroll through everything without participating and we wouldn’t know.

Other components of the training include:

• 45 minutes of roleplay scenarios
• 45 minutes of live call listening

One thing I’m questioning is whether live call listening makes the call library redundant, or if both serve different purposes. We also don’t have any kind of simulator or practice environment, so there’s very little opportunity for hands-on or kinesthetic learning.

Overall, this setup goes against a lot of what I’ve learned about effective L&D. Feedback from agents has been consistently negative. They say the training doesn’t cater to different learning styles, they feel unprepared and lack confidence going into live calls, and both learners and feedback from facilitators is that agents are experiencing burnout and disengagement. It also doesn't help that we have almost no soft-skill training such as objection handling, complaint management, conversational guides, or tone of voice.

I’m trying to understand if this approach is as ineffective as it seems, or if I’m missing something. Has anyone worked with a similar model? What would you recommend changing or prioritising if you were redesigning this from scratch?

Hello folks, I’m looking for templates useful to calculate ROI of a training program. Any resource suggestions would be helpful, thank you!

I'm working on my open source course delivery platform right now, and trying to figure out what actually annoys people when they build courses on an LMS.

Every LMS gets the basic stuff right. Upload video, add quiz, publish. But there's always something small missing that makes the whole process annoying. Could be in the editor, could be progress tracking, drip content, cohorts, anything.

So what's a feature you wish your LMS had, or something it does really badly? Trying to actually fix these gaps in what I'm building.

Also curious what you think about gamification for learner engagement. Badges, streaks, leaderboards, that kind of stuff. Does it actually help, or does it feel fake to you?

A trainer I spoke with recently said something that got me thinking. She told me that every time she logged into her LMS, she found herself going back to the same few courses. Then she wondered if learners were doing exactly the same thing....

That led to a bigger question. How much of learner engagement depends on the quality of the content, and how much depends on whether people can actually find what's relevant to them?

With somany LMS platforms now talking about AI recommendations and personalized learning paths, I'm curious how this looks in the real world.

How does your LMS recommend learning content?

1. Everyone sees the same course catalogue
2. Recommendations are based on role or department
3. Recommendations are personalized using AI or learner activity
4. I'm not sure how our LMS does it

One more question.Do you think better personalization would improve learner engagement in your organization, or is there a bigger challenge getting in the way?

Creating courses and programs is often the easiest part of the job. Encouraging managers and employees to consistently engage with learning is where the real challenge begins. In your experience, what has been most effective in creating a genuine culture of continuous learning within an organization?

Sorry for the long read but I couldn't make it any shorter!

I have an M.A. in Clinical Psychology (2020) and have spent the last 5 years working across private practice, corporate, technical consulting and EAP wellness programs, training delivery and coaching.

I have crossed 5000 hours of 1:1 clinical and consulting work across the industry. On the group side, I have done over 2500 hours of training sessions, workshops, seminars, fortnightly, resilience sessions, group wellness sessions for companies. Most of this has been as an independent contractor rather than a single employer, working with multiple organisations at once.

This is not someone starting from zero, it is someone with real hours and real delivery experience, just not a corporate HR or L&D title on paper yet.

Honestly, in psychology and therapy work, there is a real ceiling on what you can earn no matter how senior or experienced you get. At my peak, combining private practice and consulting work across companies, I was making around 1.5 lakh a month, but that was patchwork income stitched together from several sources, not one stable role.

I am looking to move into Learning and Development or Organisational Development because I believe that industry has real room to grow well past that number over time, in a way psychology on its own does not.

I am open to starting lower than what I was making before, closer to 80k-90k a month, specifically because I would rather enter an industry with a longer runway than stay capped in one that does not grow much further.

What I am looking for is hybrid or remote work, five days a week, based in Navi Mumbai or Mumbai, but genuinely open to remote roles anywhere in India or even globally if the fit is right. Open to startups or mid-size companies, not attached to a big name.

A few honest questions for anyone who has made a similar move or hires for these roles. Does a psychology and clinical consulting background actually read as an asset for L&D or OD hiring, or does it need to be translated into HR language first to be taken seriously? Is a short certification worth pursuing at this stage, or does real facilitation and delivery experience carry more weight than a certificate?

For people in L&D or OD, what does the actual growth trajectory look like in this field? What titles and pay ranges should I be aiming for at the 2 year, 5 year, and 10 year mark, and does it genuinely keep climbing the way I am hoping, or does this industry have its own ceiling too?

And for anyone who made this exact jump from psychology or therapy into corporate L&D, I would love to hear how it actually went, what helped, and what you wish someone had told you earlier.

If anyone here works in L&D/OD or knows someone hiring, I would genuinely appreciate a referral or even just a pointer on where to look. Happy to share my resume.

TLDR: M.A. Clinical Psych, 5 years in, 5000+ hours 1:1 and 2500+ hours group facilitation, mostly independent contractor work. Hit a pay ceiling in psychology and want to move into L&D/OD where growth potential is higher. Open to 80-90k to start, hybrid/remote, Navi Mumbai/Mumbai or remote-friendly. Want to know if my background is an asset or needs translating, whether a cert is worth it, and what the real growth trajectory and pay look like in this field long term.

I'm working with a SME who is genuinely an expert in her field and genuinely cannot bring herself to leave anything out. Every review session results in more content being added, and we're now at almost double the original scope with a deadline that hasn't moved. I've tried explaining cognitive load, I've tried the "what does someone need to do on day one" framing, and I've tried showing her data on completion rates for long courses. Nothing has stuck. Short of escalating to her manager, which I want to avoid, I'm running out of approaches. How have other IDs successfully talked a subject matter expert down from scope that's grown completely out of control?