From Facilitator to Learning Designer

My approach to instructional design was shaped long before it became my title. Years of facilitating leadership development, coaching facilitators, and supporting the transition from classroom to virtual learning gave me firsthand insight into how people experience learning—not just how it looks on the screen.

That experience taught me to think about learning from the perspective of the person who has to use it: What will make sense in the moment? Where might someone get stuck? What support will they need after the training ends?

Over time, those questions became central to the way I approach instructional design.

Building a Foundation in Facilitation

I began my Learning & Development career delivering training to frontline employees and later moved into leadership development, where I facilitated programs for supervisors, managers, and directors.

As my responsibilities grew, I also coached facilitators, coordinated leadership training across locations, and worked with programs such as DDI’s Foundations of Excellence. Those experiences gave me a strong foundation in facilitation, learner engagement, and the realities of delivering learning in a business environment.

Moving Learning into the Virtual Classroom

In 2013, I became one of the first facilitators in the organization to deliver and produce leadership development virtually. Moving established classroom programs into Adobe Connect required more than learning a new platform—we had to rethink how participants would engage, practice, and interact in a virtual environment.

I worked with the training vendor to adapt leadership content for virtual delivery, built virtual classrooms with activities such as breakout rooms and polls, and documented facilitator and producer guidance. I also developed participant communications that addressed pre-work and technology requirements before the session.

That experience taught me an important lesson I carried into instructional design: the learning experience includes everything around the course—not just the course itself.

Becoming an Instructional Designer

In 2015, I moved formally into instructional design, bringing my facilitation and leadership-development experience with me. I began designing learning with a stronger understanding of what happens after a course leaves the designer’s hands—how facilitators deliver it, how learners respond to it, and what people need to apply it back on the job.

Over the next several years, my work expanded across enterprise learning, eLearning, virtual and instructor-led training, performance support, accessibility, and large-scale business initiatives. In 2021, I moved into a Lead Instructional Designer role, taking greater responsibility for guiding projects from analysis through implementation and managing complex stakeholder relationships.

Seeing Learning from the Other Side

After retiring from my corporate L&D career, I later returned to the workforce in a frontline role. That experience gave me an unexpected opportunity to see workplace learning from the employee’s perspective again.

It has reinforced how much the fundamentals matter: clear onboarding, information that is easy to find, opportunities to practice, and performance support available when the work is actually being done. It has also been a reminder that employees are often balancing learning with customers, systems, time pressures, and the everyday demands of the job.

That perspective has made me even more intentional about designing learning that is focused, practical, and easy to use.

How It Shapes My Design

Today, I bring all of those perspectives to my work: facilitator, people leader, instructional designer, project lead, and learner.

They have taught me to start with the performance need, understand the environment in which the work happens, and design only what will help people succeed. Sometimes that means a course. Sometimes it means practice, a job aid, clearer source information, or another form of performance support.

My goal is straightforward: create learning that earns its place by helping people understand, decide, practice, or perform.