by Anna Poli, iSpring
Ask someone with eight or nine years in L&D to speak at an industry event, and there’s a reasonable chance they’ll decline. Not because their diary is too full, although that helps. Because they don’t believe they have anything worth an hour of anyone’s time.
What’s odd is who says this. It’s rarely people at the very start of their careers, who tend to be enthusiastic about sharing what they’ve just learned. It’s the practitioners in the middle, the ones who have shipped enough programmes to know how many ways a project can go sideways.
I don’t think that’s a confidence problem. I think it’s structural and fairly specific to this profession.
Our work disappears when it succeeds
Four things make L&D expertise unusually hard to see from the outside.
The first is that good learning design dissolves into normal operations. An onboarding programme that works stops being a programme and becomes “how we do onboarding here.” There’s no artefact left to point at, no launch, nothing carrying your name.
The second is attribution. When the error rate falls, credit tends to land with the new process, the new supervisor, or better hiring. Learning is rarely the only variable that changed, so it’s rarely the one anyone credits.
The third is confidentiality. Much of your strongest material was designed for someone else’s organisation, under an agreement that stops you describing it. Practitioners often take that to rule the whole project out. It usually doesn’t, and I’ll come back to why.
The fourth is the craft itself. We’re trained to keep the designer invisible and put the learner at the centre of everything. That instinct is right inside a course and unhelpful outside one. After enough years of removing yourself from the work, standing in front of a room and saying what you think feels faintly improper.
None of this means you have nothing to say. It means the evidence for what you know isn’t lying around in a form you can pick up. It has to be assembled on purpose.
Turn experience into evidence
The distance between having experience and having something to say is mostly a question of organisation. What helps is keeping a running file, an evidence bank, where each entry answers four questions.
What do I believe about this? One sentence, stated plainly enough that a reasonable person could disagree. “Briefing line managers does more for transfer than any amount of reinforcement content” is a claim. “Manager involvement is important” is a shrug.
What have I seen that makes me believe it? Specific moments rather than general impressions. A manager admitting he’d never opened the briefing pack. One cohort behaving differently from the rest, and the reason it did. The detail is what separates a talk from a LinkedIn post.
Can I describe it without exposing anything I shouldn’t? Usually yes, once you strip the identifying details and keep the mechanism. “A manufacturer with four thousand shift workers” becomes “an organisation where most learners never sit at a desk.” The lesson survives anonymisation intact. The client’s name was never the interesting part.
What should someone do differently after hearing this? If there’s no answer, you have an observation rather than a session. Observations are good company over coffee. They don’t hold a room for forty minutes.
Three or four solid entries is enough to pitch with. Most people who feel they have nothing to say have simply never sat down with the second question, which is where the material actually lives.
The projects that went sideways are the better material
Most people choose a project that went well, and the reason is easy to understand: you’re standing in front of peers and you’d rather look competent.
The trouble is survivorship. Everything worked, so nothing in the account can be tested against the audience’s own experience. People nod, and then they forget.
A session about what you’d change is harder to deliver and much harder to ignore. “What I’d Do Differently in Our Onboarding Redesign” gives people something to avoid, which is more actionable than another account of how well something went. It also signals that you examine your own work critically, and that is most of what credibility consists of.
You don’t need to open with your worst failure. You do need at least one point where you were wrong about something.
Where to take it first
A conference stage isn’t the obvious starting point for a claim you haven’t said out loud yet. Podcasts are gentler. There are no slides, no session plan, and the format rewards thinking aloud rather than performing certainty. Listen to a few episodes of any show you’re considering, work out what its audience expects, then pitch two or three specific angles rather than a general offer to appear. Community events and vendor webinars work similarly, and both usually leave you with a recording you can point at afterwards.
An exercise for this week
Pick the project that took you the longest this year. Not the most successful one. The longest.
Write the sentence you’d say about it to a colleague in a corridor. Not the stakeholder update version, the honest one, the sentence that begins “The thing nobody tells you about…” That sentence is your claim.
Underneath it, list three moments from the project that led you to that conclusion. Three means you have a talk, a podcast pitch, or, at minimum, a decent article. One means it isn’t your topic yet, and you should try a different project.
None of this asks you to be further along in your career than you are. It asks you to treat your own work as evidence, which is something we do as a matter of routine for the programmes we build and almost never for ourselves.
The people whose names attach to a topic aren’t always the stronger practitioners. Often, they’ve just been more systematic about noticing what they know.
About the author:
Anna Poli is a Senior eLearning Developer at iSpring Solutions, where she helps organisations turn complex subject matter into learning people finish. She writes and speaks about instructional design, evaluation, and bringing stakeholders along. Connect with Anna on LinkedIn.