You're Probably Designing for Compliance. Here's What to Design for Instead.
Every learning experience produces one of two things: compliance or commitment. Compliance looks like participation: people show up, complete the activities, submit the reflection form. Commitment looks like something quieter and harder to measure: a learner who connects the content to a real problem, adapts an idea to their context, and returns to it without being asked. If you design professional learning, you've almost certainly built experiences that produced the first one when you were hoping for the second.
Why Adult Learning Theory Isn't Optional If You're Building for Adults
If you design courses for adult learners, you've probably experienced the gap. Participants engage during the session, feedback is positive, completion rates look fine, and then, weeks later, almost nothing has changed in how people actually work. That gap isn't a facilitation problem. It's a design problem, and it has a name: transfer.
Why the Training You Attended Last Month Already Faded (And Why It's Not Your Fault)
Think about the last professional learning experience you attended. Maybe it was useful. Maybe you even left with some notes or a sense of clarity. Now think about what you actually did with it once you got back to work. If the honest answer is "not much," you're not alone — and more importantly, you're not the reason it faded.