Live Learning & Media

05/10/2026

Passing along this promo video I made for Hagerstown Community College’s Heavy Equipment Operator program.

I teach/help out with the program, and it’s a great hands-on way for people to get introduced to the heavy equipment industry, learn real skills, and see if it’s a path they want to pursue.

Worth checking out or sharing with anyone who may be interested.

Ready for a better office view?Hagerstown Community College’s Heavy Equipment Operator Introduction and Skills programs give students a hands-on look at the ...

05/01/2026

I was talking with some trade school students recently, and it hit me pretty hard.

A lot of people trying to apply for jobs don’t have Microsoft Word.

They don’t use ChatGPT, Gemini, Canva, or the latest tools everyone keeps talking about.

They don’t want to pay for a resume builder.

And honestly, they shouldn’t have to.

Because here’s the trap:

A lot of “free” resume tools let you build the whole thing, enter your information, spend your time, and get excited…

Then the second you try to download it?

Paywall.

That may not feel like a big deal if you have a laptop, Microsoft 365, AI tools, subscriptions, and a polished LinkedIn profile.

But for someone who only needs a simple resume to apply for a job?

That is a barrier.

High school students applying for their first job.

Trade school students trying to get into the field.

College students without extra money to spend.

Adults changing careers.

Blue-collar workers with the skills, work ethic, and drive, but no easy way to build a clean resume.

So I built something for them.

It’s called Resumazer.

A simple, free resume-building tool for people who just need to get the job done.

No hidden fees.

No “free until download.”

No copy-and-paste nightmare.

No subscription.

You type in your information, use AI polish to clean it up, and download a PDF resume you can actually use.

That’s it.

It’s not meant to replace a professional resume writer.

It’s meant to remove one frustrating barrier for someone trying to move forward.

Sometimes innovation doesn’t need to be flashy.

Sometimes it just needs to help somebody take the next step.

If you know a student, job seeker, tradesperson, career changer, instructor, workforce program, or anyone who could use a simple free resume tool, please pass it along.

Link in the comments.

Resumazers!!!! Jobs up!! 😆



https://resumazer.livelearningandmedia.com/

04/30/2026

The workplace is teaching people every day.

Not just through courses.

Through what leaders tolerate.

Through what gets rewarded.

Through what gets ignored.

Through the shortcuts people watch others take.

Through the way mistakes are handled.

Through the difference between what gets said in training and what actually happens when pressure hits.

This is why Albert Bandura’s work on observational learning has always made sense to me.

People learn by watching.

And in many workplaces, they start learning long before the training ever begins.

That should challenge us a little.

Because if the course says one thing, but the culture models another, culture usually wins.

Maybe the better question is not always, “What training do people need?”

Maybe it is:

“What are people already learning by watching us?”

It’s been a while, but lately I’ve been thinking about how people really learn at work. Before a course ever launches, employees are already watching leaders, peers, pressure, shortcuts, and consequences. This post explores why the workplace is always teaching, and whether it is teaching the rig...

04/01/2026

Too much workplace training still starts in the wrong place.

The conversation kicks off with, “What training do we need?” when the better question is, “What is actually slowing performance down?”

That distinction matters more than a lot of organizations realize.

Because sometimes the issue is not capability at all. Sometimes it is a broken process. Too many handoffs. Too much meeting time. Clunky systems. Constant rework. Poor visibility. Buried knowledge. Friction everywhere. People are exhausted, calendars are full, and the business keeps calling it a training problem because training is the most familiar answer.

I think L&D has to push past that.

Our value cannot just be in building courses faster or making content look better. It has to be in helping the business find the real bottlenecks, understand the as-is, and align the right solution to the right problem.

Sometimes that solution is training.

Sometimes it is a tool, a workflow fix, a decision aid, an automation, a better support resource, or a technology that sits completely outside the normal learning stack.

That is the shift.

Less course-first thinking. More process awareness. More operational curiosity. More focus on what is draining time, energy, clarity, and performance.

The future of L&D does not belong to the teams that build the most training.

It belongs to the ones that solve the right problems.

Check out my latest blog post!

What is one “training problem” you have seen that really turned out to be something else?

Workplace learning has spent too long defaulting to courses when the real problem often lives somewhere else. This post explores why L&D needs to move beyond a training-first mindset and start identifying bottlenecks, reducing friction, and using the right tools, technologies, and performance-focuse...

03/12/2026

A lot of L&D reporting still sounds impressive without actually telling us whether anything changed.

Completions look clean. Survey scores look positive. Quiz data looks reassuring. But none of that automatically means people are performing better, making better decisions, or applying what they learned when work gets messy.

That is where I think many experienced L&D professionals feel the tension.

We know the field is capable of much more than content distribution and dashboard reporting. We know a course can be beautifully built, well received, and still fail to move the needle where it matters. We also know that many business problems handed to training were never training problems to begin with.

That is part of what makes this conversation so frustrating. Too often, reporting creates the appearance of rigor while masking the absence of real evaluation.

L&D has a credibility challenge to face. Not because reporting is useless, but because too many teams are still being asked to treat participation data like proof of value.

If we want a stronger seat at the table, we have to get more honest about the difference between activity and impact.

The most dangerous number in L&D is not the one that tells you nothing.

It is the one that tells you just enough to make you stop asking better questions.

https://www.livelearningandmedia.com/post/the-credibility-crisis-in-l-d-when-reporting-looks-better-than-reality

There is a quiet frustration that many learning and development professionals carry, even if they do not always say it out loud.We spend weeks, sometimes months, designing programs meant to solve real problems. We meet with stakeholders, analyze needs, build content, facilitate sessions, and launch....

03/06/2026

Not the busy kind. The slow kind.

It is walking into meetings where you know you could help solve the real problem, but the “solution” is already decided before you even speak.

“Make a course.”
“Turn this deck into eLearning.”
“Just make it more engaging.”

And then the part that sticks with you.

You build exactly what you were forced to build, inside the constraints you did not choose… and someone comments that it’s “weird.”

That moment always reveals the truth.

Healthy learning cultures get curious.
Unhealthy ones get critical.

In my latest post, I break down the 4 learning culture types I see most often:

1. Order Taker
2. Internal Consultant (without real authority)
3. Compliance Factory
4. Capability Builder

If you have ever felt beat down in L&D because you were treated like a production shop or a personal “consultant,” this one is for you.

When they criticize the thing they forced you to create, that is not feedback. That is culture.

There is a kind of exhaustion that comes from being an instructional designer in the wrong learning culture, and it is not the kind that shows up on your calendar. It is quieter than workload, deeper than deadlines, and harder to explain to anyone outside the profession. It comes from sitting in mee...

03/05/2026

Training measurement often becomes a box checking exercise.

Course completions.
Smile sheets.
Quiz scores.

We generate reports that prove people attended training.

But those metrics rarely answer the question that actually matters.

Did anything change in the way people work?

I will be honest. Earlier in my career I went along with this more times than I should have.

Build the course.
Launch the course.
Show the completion report.

As long as the records were clean, everyone moved on.

Compliance training is a perfect example. The real priority often becomes passing an audit, not improving behavior or reducing risk.

The problem is that when measurement stops at the course, it misses the place where performance actually lives.

In the workflow.
In the process.
In fewer errors, faster decisions, smoother handoffs, and less rework.

That is where real learning impact shows up.

When organizations cannot see those improvements, training starts to look like an expense instead of a performance driver.

I wrote a deeper piece about this and shared some practical ways to measure what actually matters.

Completion rates measure attendance.
Performance measures impact.

Training measurement often feels like a box-checking exercise.In many organizations, success is defined by course completions, survey scores, or whether someone passed a quiz. We have all seen the familiar frameworks used to evaluate training. They exist for a reason, but in practice they often miss...

02/20/2026

Most corporate training is designed to look successful.

High completion rates.
Clean dashboards.
Polished modules.

And yet… performance barely moves.

I know this because I built that kind of training for years.

I believed better slides, stronger visuals, and more interaction would close the gap. But real work does not happen inside an LMS. It happens under pressure. In the moment. When someone has to make a decision that actually matters.

That is where most learning fails. Not because the content is bad, but because it lives in the wrong place.

I just published a piece on why checkbox training continues to miss the mark and what it really takes to embed learning into the flow of work. It introduces the PST Model, a framework built around three non-negotiables:

Persona.
Strategy.
Technology.

If those three are not aligned, no amount of polish will save the initiative.

If you are in L&D, HR, operations, or leadership and you are tired of measuring completions instead of performance, this read is for you.

Comment “PST” and I’ll send you the website and the interactive tool so you can evaluate your own programs against the model.

Learning should not be measured by what was completed.

It should be measured by what improved.

How to Embed Learning in Real-Time for Maximum ImpactFor years, I designed corporate training the way most of us were taught to design it. Build the course, polish the slides, increase engagement, track completion, report metrics. If performance gaps remained, the assumption was that the content nee...

02/12/2026

Sometimes the dashboard smiles… and the work doesn’t change.

In L&D, we’re often asked to build compliance training that checks boxes, satisfies audits, and fits a solution leadership already chose. Completion rates look great. And deep down, we know it didn’t move performance.

This isn’t about blaming people—it’s about culture. When optics win, good design gets stripped down to “just build it.”

So I look for the crack in the wall: a tool, a scaffold, an enablement resource embedded where work actually happens. Small wins create proof. Proof shifts expectations.

If you’ve felt this tension, I wrote this for you:

I’m not proud of it—but I’m not going to pretend it’s rare, either. In L&D, we’re often asked to produce compliance modules that check boxes, satisfy audits, and align perfectly with a solution leadership already chose before we were ever brought in. The course gets shipped. Completion rat...

02/08/2026

SteelStamp makes heavy equipment inspections fast, simple, and jobsite-ready.With Open Mode, operators can complete equipment inspections instantly—no accoun...