Notification
Master
.
I get asked this question quite often.
The running joke in my family is that instead of saying “God will save you,” my job is to go around saying “Adobe will save you.” 😊
Jokes aside, the title “Learning Evangelist” actually describes something I have wanted to do for a long time: share what I’ve learned, learn from others, and hopefully help organizations solve some of the very real challenges they face with learning.
My journey into the world of learning happened almost accidentally.
More than two decades ago, I took what I thought would be a temporary job as a trainer at NIIT. This was 1996. COBOL and Pascal were beginning to feel dated, C++ was the new kid on the block, and I thought teaching would be fairly straightforward.
Explain the concept. Work through a few examples. Give the students plenty of homework.
How difficult could it be?
My first demo class answered that question rather emphatically.
I bombed.
I was teaching operating systems, and my lead gave me feedback that has stayed with me throughout my career:
You’ve presented everything you know about the subject. But how much of it will your learners actually understand?
She taught me to step back and look at the subject through the learner’s eyes.
Remember, this was 1996. Many of our students weren’t familiar with computers, let alone operating systems. So instead of beginning with technical terminology, she suggested starting with something everyone understood, the human body.
Input devices were like our eyes, ears and skin. The CPU was the brain. Output was how we expressed ourselves. And the operating system was what brought everything together and made it work.
That was my first real introduction to Instructional Design.
It was also the beginning of a career in learning that has taken me through roles as a trainer, instructional designer, LMS administrator, eLearning strategist, business development leader, L&D leader, head of partner and customer education, and now, Learning Evangelist.
Along the way, I’ve had the privilege of seeing this industry evolve, from classroom training and the early days of eLearning to LMSs, rapid authoring, virtual learning, learning ecosystems and now AI.
I’ve made mistakes. I’ve seen things that worked brilliantly and things that looked brilliant on PowerPoint but failed spectacularly in the real world. I’ve worked with customers trying to answer questions that many learning teams are still wrestling with today.
- How do you build an eLearning strategy that actually works?
- How do you decide what content to build and what not to build?
- How do you choose the right authoring approach and tools?
- How do you move from classroom training to digital learning without simply turning a 60-minute classroom session into 60 minutes of slides?
- How do you design learning that people actually want to consume?
- How do you build an ecosystem that can scale?
And, increasingly, how should AI change the way we think about learning, content creation and the role of L&D?
These are the kinds of questions I want to explore here.
Over the coming weeks and months, I’m going to start sharing regular posts drawing from my experiences, conversations with customers, industry trends, successes, failures and lessons learned along the way.
Some will be how-to posts.
Some will be solutioning posts, where I take a real learning problem and explore how I would approach solving it.
Some will be about eLearning strategy, instructional design, content authoring, technology and learning ecosystems.
And some will simply challenge the way we have traditionally done things in L&D.
I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers. After more than two decades in this industry, one thing I have learned is that there is always something new to learn.
But I do have a lot of experiences, ideas and stories to share.
So perhaps it is time to start paying some of that learning forward.
If you work in Learning & Development, eLearning, instructional design, training or education, I’d love for this to become a conversation rather than just a series of posts.
What are the learning problems you’re trying to solve today?
Send them my way.
They might just become the subject of one of my next posts.
Cheers!
Sharath
Principal eLearning Evangelist,
Adobe Digital Learning
I get asked this question quite often.
The running joke in my family is that instead of saying “God will save you,” my job is to go around saying “Adobe will save you.” 😊
Jokes aside, the title “Learning Evangelist” actually describes something I have wanted to do for a long time: share what I’ve learned, learn from others, and hopefully help organizations solve some of the very real challenges they face with learning.
My journey into the world of learning happened almost accidentally.
More than two decades ago, I took what I thought would be a temporary job as a trainer at NIIT. This was 1996. COBOL and Pascal were beginning to feel dated, C++ was the new kid on the block, and I thought teaching would be fairly straightforward.
Explain the concept. Work through a few examples. Give the students plenty of homework.
How difficult could it be?
My first demo class answered that question rather emphatically.
I bombed.
I was teaching operating systems, and my lead gave me feedback that has stayed with me throughout my career:
You’ve presented everything you know about the subject. But how much of it will your learners actually understand?
She taught me to step back and look at the subject through the learner’s eyes.
Remember, this was 1996. Many of our students weren’t familiar with computers, let alone operating systems. So instead of beginning with technical terminology, she suggested starting with something everyone understood, the human body.
Input devices were like our eyes, ears and skin. The CPU was the brain. Output was how we expressed ourselves. And the operating system was what brought everything together and made it work.
That was my first real introduction to Instructional Design.
It was also the beginning of a career in learning that has taken me through roles as a trainer, instructional designer, LMS administrator, eLearning strategist, business development leader, L&D leader, head of partner and customer education, and now, Learning Evangelist.
Along the way, I’ve had the privilege of seeing this industry evolve, from classroom training and the early days of eLearning to LMSs, rapid authoring, virtual learning, learning ecosystems and now AI.
I’ve made mistakes. I’ve seen things that worked brilliantly and things that looked brilliant on PowerPoint but failed spectacularly in the real world. I’ve worked with customers trying to answer questions that many learning teams are still wrestling with today.
- How do you build an eLearning strategy that actually works?
- How do you decide what content to build and what not to build?
- How do you choose the right authoring approach and tools?
- How do you move from classroom training to digital learning without simply turning a 60-minute classroom session into 60 minutes of slides?
- How do you design learning that people actually want to consume?
- How do you build an ecosystem that can scale?
And, increasingly, how should AI change the way we think about learning, content creation and the role of L&D?
These are the kinds of questions I want to explore here.
Over the coming weeks and months, I’m going to start sharing regular posts drawing from my experiences, conversations with customers, industry trends, successes, failures and lessons learned along the way.
Some will be how-to posts.
Some will be solutioning posts, where I take a real learning problem and explore how I would approach solving it.
Some will be about eLearning strategy, instructional design, content authoring, technology and learning ecosystems.
And some will simply challenge the way we have traditionally done things in L&D.
I certainly don’t claim to have all the answers. After more than two decades in this industry, one thing I have learned is that there is always something new to learn.
But I do have a lot of experiences, ideas and stories to share.
So perhaps it is time to start paying some of that learning forward.
If you work in Learning & Development, eLearning, instructional design, training or education, I’d love for this to become a conversation rather than just a series of posts.
What are the learning problems you’re trying to solve today?
Send them my way.
They might just become the subject of one of my next posts.
Cheers!
Sharath
Principal eLearning Evangelist,
Adobe Digital Learning
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