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If content design is mainly about helping people complete tasks, learning design is about helping people change their behaviour.
By Ros Fordyce
Ros has nearly 30 years’ experience in content design. She was one of the first designers to join Scroll and worked for GDS on the launch of GOV.UK in 2011. As Head of Content at Skill Boosters, she specialised in creating training content for leadership, workplace behaviour and inclusion.
How content design and learning design fit together
Learning design involves all of the core principles of content design, but what sets it apart as a specialist area is that it’s about translating information into action. As learning designers, therefore, we’re trying to do something that’s notoriously tricky: change people’s behaviour.
The sheer size of the global corporate training market – valued in 2025 at $361.5 billion and estimated to reach $805.6 billion by 2035 – means that the opportunities for content designers to work in this field are vast and varied. They range from designing e-learning courses and digital simulations to in-person workshops, interactive webinars, coaching sessions and on-the-job training.
However, whether you’re teaching people how to use new software, avoid data breaches or handle difficult conversations, at its core, all learning content needs to be:
useful
engaging
sticky (that is, people remember and apply it)
What’s in it for me?
The more clearly learners can see the outcomes of training in terms of personal benefits – making their job easier, say, or enhancing their career prospects – the more likely they are to engage with, retain and apply it. As learning designers, it’s our job to understand learners’ needs and pain points and make sure that we’re addressing them with meaningful content and actionable takeaways.
Key to this is understanding not just individual roles and specific challenges, but also the wider context and culture of an organisation. One company I worked with, for example, wanted some of their managers to be trained in how to give better performance feedback. Delving into employee surveys, 360s and exit interviews, however, it became clear that these managers were simply too overwhelmed with work to hold regular one-to-ones and do performance reviews. The problem wasn’t that they didn’t know how to do it – they just didn’t have the time. Knowing this made it possible to craft training that addressed the real underlying needs of better time management and how to provide constructive feedback in a high-pressure environment.
If there’s a mismatch between organisational and personal benefits, or if people sense that training is largely performative, learners can start to see it as a burden rather than a development opportunity.
An unfortunate example of this is the huge amount of diversity and inclusion (DEI) training that emerged in the UK in the wake of the Equality Act 2010.
A lot of this training was driven by employers wanting to cover their backs rather than by any real belief in the benefits of diversity or a genuine desire to tackle bias and discrimination. When people cottoned on to this, they dismissed the training as a tick-box exercise. Hardly surprising, then, that research into the effectiveness of DEI training has shown much of it to have had little to no lasting impact on behaviour.
The rules of engagement
We’ve all experienced death by PowerPoint, participated in cringe-worthy role-plays and clicked our way through robotic e-learning. Inappropriate formats, language and visuals and poor alignment of content with learner experience can all scupper the most well-intentioned training. The mistaken assumption that everyone is computer-literate means that there’s an awful lot of digital learning sitting unloved on learning management systems while leaders scratch their heads and wonder why nobody’s doing it.
So what’s the key?
Engaging content turns passive learners into active ones. Technology today offers a dazzling array of interactive options such as branching drama, gamification, live polls, quizzes and chat tools. However, interactive content doesn’t have to involve cutting-edge tech, and a mix of approaches helps to accommodate different learning styles and abilities and keep everyone engaged.
Scenario-based learning (budding screenwriters, here’s your chance) works wonders, and this can be video or text-based depending on your subject, budget and resources, or even involve live actors improvising interactions. Social learning, too, is a great way for people share experiences and learn from each other, and can take the form of group discussions, peer feedback and even co-creating resources.
Will it stick?
The most effective training uses the power of storytelling and wraps key facts up in an engaging narrative. Stories simulate real experiences, which our brains are hard-wired to remember, and they are some of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal as learning designers. So rather than kicking off with a big list of learning objectives, starting with a relatable situation and believable stakes means you can grab your learners’ attention from the get-go and then build learning in a way that supports better retention.
Size matters, too – and people tend to retain information that’s presented in small, focused chunks. Smartphone use and shrinking attention spans may be partly to blame for this, but it’s a fact that bite-size learning fits far more easily into our busy lives. Modular training that consists of concise, self-contained units is also easy to update, re-configure and tailor for different audiences, making it an attractive format for organisations that need flexible, scalable learning that can be adapted as the needs of the business change.
It goes without saying that practice is the key to ensuring that people retain and apply what they’ve learned. Reflection exercises, role plays and problem-solving tasks all help learners to consider how they might apply their learning in everyday situations and try out their skills in a safe environment, supported by meaningful knowledge checks and assessment to gauge their progress.
Learning is a continuous journey
A one-off workshop or e-learning course is unlikely to bring about lasting behaviour change. As learning designers we need to think about the entire learning journey, from pre-course preparation to post-course resources such as toolkits, templates and just-in-time guides to ensure that new skills and behaviours are properly embedded. When we look at training as an ongoing process rather than a single event, and when we design training content as an interconnected learning ecosystem, we’re far more likely to create meaningful learning that actually transfers into everyday practice.
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