Here's what I actually believe
about this work.
I got into instructional design twenty years ago with a fairly simple idea: that learning, when it is designed well, actually changes what people do. Not just what they know. What they do. I still believe that. What has changed over twenty years is that I have seen enough evidence of it to stop qualifying the statement. A technician who walks into a customer's home feeling genuinely ready, because a programme gave them that. A new hire who arrives at a clinical trial site already knowing what to do. A fraud investigator who spots a red flag because a simulation once made the cost of missing it feel real. That is the version of this work that keeps me interested in it.
My work sits at the crossroads of instructional science and creative design. On one side: the rigour — competency frameworks, pathway architecture, assessment strategy, LMS implementation. On the other: making the thing actually interesting to go through. I think adult learners deserve both. The clicks-and-slides approach respects neither their time nor their intelligence. Whether I am building a nine-stage clinical simulation, a gamified assessment for a hospital, or a full competency architecture for a manufacturing plant — the question I keep coming back to is the same: will this actually change what someone does on Tuesday morning?
I work independently. That means clients get direct access to the thinking — not a summary of it through a project manager. Every brief gets my full attention from the first conversation to the final file. The projects I find most interesting are the genuinely difficult ones — where there is no obvious solution, the content is scattered across six SMEs, the audience is varied, and the timeline is tighter than anyone would like. Those are the projects that require real craft. And that, in my experience, is what separates learning that gets completed from learning that gets remembered.