On Learning Design
Learning, as it exists at scale currently, isn't aligned with how people actually learn.
Education systems built upon decades of institutionalized knowledge, revised annually to update with emerging trends, aren't directly related to the reality of how jobs function and apprenticeship programs are far too few.
Also, there's AI.
Work is rapidly shifting and educational trends haven't kept up.
Thinkslop. Cognitive offloading. Cognitive Debt. "ChatGPT told me this..."
The newest report from June 2026, published in HBR, from AI in the Wild, is the largest longitudinal study I've come across. It talks about Learning and Education use cases, but learning and education still falls behind Content Creation and Editing, Technical Assistance and Troubleshooting, Personal and Professional Support - only to be higher than Creativity and Recreation with Research, Analysis, and Decision-Making to be at the very end.
We're doing more with AI, but are we actually learning in ways that support whatever the future of work might be if learning effective decision-making, the ability of discern facts from hallucinations or the ability to verify sources?
The art and science of better judgement is a more scarce commodity than tokens.
I have a background in humanities in what was/is (depending on who you ask, but this is the general perception) considered the one of the most 'worthless' degree in Arts, Literature. The only work, I was told, I could get out of this was becoming a professor and I didn't want to teach, since I didn't like the way I was taught enough to continue doing it, even for what is stable pay and a respectable profession.
I went into marketing instead and I'm self-taught* in it.
In my nearly a decade of working, I have been paid to write, to edit the writing of others, to strategize marketing campaigns and make content and campaign calendars, to then oversee the creation to the execution of those campaigns based on ambiguous briefs.
I have done this for blog content that had to be optimized for SEO, I have done it for social media, for all channels including push notifications, web notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, and the only one I currently continue to do since I prefer permission-based marketing that has flexibility of experimentation with formats while being low-lift - email.
Job titles for what I do have changed over the years. Copywriting merged with content writing, which merged with content marketing. Even my omni-channel marketing role went by different names, CRM marketing, lifecycle markteting, (insert industry-standard SaaS tool here) marketer, which also then merged with other roles to be called growth marketing, which was about the time I took a break from applying to full-time roles.
Since then, I've dipped back into the job market to see what full-time roles are out there that might fit my generalist experience, skills, and interest.
I was never paid to learn, to research, to do competition analysis, to discern what makes good strategy from bad strategy, to know which campaigns are more effective because they actually are better in quality vs which campaigns are the ones that the company wants to push out because they want higher conversions, at any cost, to lead teams and make them better.
I've worked across a lot of industries in some capacity related to marketing execution or strategy: An airline, agriculture, automotive lubricants, baby products, business-to-business ops and services, beverages, consumer electronics, a cruise line, events, fashion, fast food, healthy food, health supplements, healthcare, hotels and restaurants, jewelry, luxury goods, manufacturing, movies, nutrition, logistics and transportation, personal care, packaging, telecommunications, SaaS, tech devices, wellness, and even some peripheries of finance.
All of the learning of how to do the work has been through working, experimenting, learning, and learning how to learn better.
This has been true across all companies I've worked in, with, or alongside. For context, this includes one-person start-ups to large, multi-national corporations. Some were one-off projects, some month-long retainers.
And from my personal experience, the quality of work that can be done only improves when the people doing the work believe in it and want to do it better. Higher pay only goes so far in motivation for learning, and in some cases, might even be a barrier to it because there's no point in upskilling if you're earning enough now unless you're one of the few that actually likes to learn.
Both the work you do and the environment you do the work in and learn as you work play a big factor in learning.
I've always learned more from asking people with expertise questions than from any online course.
Online courses, and there are hundreds of them, and they all draw from the same foundational sources depending on what you're learning, don't offer nearly enough to equip you to navigate learning better. There is innovation in learning design, now powered by AI, that include gamified experiences to make it more 'engaging' but I don't think that fixes the core issue which is making the process of learning in general fun again, regardless of what you are learning.
You will learn the tools and skills, but those tools and specific skills might be obsolete fast and the strategy and ways of thinking they teach might not apply to a new, emerging economy where the work you do isn't the same as what was listed in the job you applied for.
Company trainings fill a certain gap, but even in-house trainings lag behind on trends since trends are changing faster than ever.
I do think everyone would want to learn if they fit the right way to learn. Humans are curious creatures, pun intended.
If it's delightful and inspiring, motivation becomes internally generative and you don't need to track the progress of how far into a course you are if you are hungry to learn all of what is in the course.
Better mentorship and better ways of learning are required.
*Self-taught
Self-taught has never been learning that's done in a vacuum. I've learned through people. People dead but alive through what they have to teach written in books, on the internet, in other media, in buried documentation. People alive, directly, through asking questions, learning alongside them, working by their side, and figuring out things together.
I'm not interested in creating a mass-education one-size-fits-all-course because I don't think people fit into one-size-fits-all umbrella and neither do their jobs. That is up to existing educational systems. For now, I can help a few who I hope can help a few more.
I'm currently working on designing learning experiences to fill this gap: that teach creativity, research, and analysis. These will be designed for different demographics to address specific learning challenges, from kids and adults, including ways to train existing educators.
If you're interested in keeping up with the updates around that, sign up to hear about it here.
If you're interested in 1:1 coaching with me, depending on where my specific expertise can help you, get in touch with me here and we will discuss the number of sessions you might need and you pay as you go.