Instructional Design Tips

Instructional Design Tips

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Initial Reflections from Connect 2025
Connect 2025 was last Friday, and I’ve spent the weekend trying to make sense of what I took from it.
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Tom McDowall
Sunday L&D Myths #5: Left Brain, Right Brain, and the Harm of Hemispheric Labels
This week, I’m tackling a myth that’s so deeply embedded in how many think about themselves and others that it’s shaped hiring decisions, team…
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Tom McDowall
Lack of Ownership
Today is Connect 2025.
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Tom McDowall
The Overlooked Skill: Why L&D Needs to Talk About Office Politics
Office politics has a reputation problem.
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Tom McDowall
The CPD Loop We Never Close
I’m writing this for release on the first day of the CPD & Retrain Expo in London, surrounded by stands promising transformation through courses…
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Tom McDowall
AI Readiness Means More Than Testing Tools
We talk about AI readiness as though it’s a checklist: train your people on prompt engineering, establish governance frameworks, identify use cases…
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Tom McDowall
Sunday L&D Myth #4: People Forget 70% of What They Learn Within 24 Hours
Tom's thoughts on workplace learning and development. I publish two short reads and three long reads a week.
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Tom McDowall
The Moan Management Matrix: Three Approaches to Handling Complaints in the Training Room
There’s a particular moment that every facilitator and trainer learns to recognise, usually about forty minutes into a session, when you’ve just asked…
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Tom McDowall
When Video Games Teach Better Than Our Training Interfaces: Four UI Heuristics from Dispatch
I spent some time this week playing Dispatch, the episodic superhero workplace comedy from AdHoc Studio, and found my mind drifting back towards work…
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Tom McDowall
Culture Isn't Something You Design; It's Something You Inherit
I’ve spent a considerable amount of time criticising the way we talk about workplace culture, and I’m comfortable being first in line for that…
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Tom McDowall
A Little Less Certainty, A Little More Conversation, Please
When I’m not thinking about L&D, I spend my time desperately trying to write poetry and fairy stories.
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Tom McDowall
Sunday L&D Myths #3: A Picture is Worth 60,000 Words
There’s a statistic that circulates through L&D materials, vendor presentations, and conference slides with remarkable persistence: the claim that the…
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Tom McDowall
© 2025 Tom McDowall
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