Human-Centred Learning Design in Corporate Training
We've all been there. Sitting through another mandatory training module, clicking "Next" with the enthusiasm of someone filing their taxes. The content washes over us without sticking, and by the time we're back at our desks, we've forgotten everything except the mild irritation of having lost an hour we'll never get back.
This isn't a failure of employees. It's a failure of design.
For decades, corporate training has operated on the assumption that learning is something we do to people rather than with them. We've built elaborate systems for content delivery, compliance tracking, and knowledge verification. But somewhere along the way, we forgot a fundamental truth: learning is inherently human, inherently social, and inherently contextual. When we strip away these elements in favour of efficiency and standardization, we don't just create boring training—we create training that doesn't work.
The Problem with Traditional L&D Approaches
Traditional corporate learning follows a predictable pattern. An organization identifies a skill gap or compliance requirement. They hire an expert (often external) to deliver the solution. That expert creates or curates content. Employees consume the content. Success is measured by completion rates and quiz scores. Everyone moves on.
This approach makes several flawed assumptions. First, it assumes that expertise lives outside the organization rather than within it. Second, it treats all learners as identical units requiring identical inputs. Third, and most damaging, it positions employees as passive recipients rather than active participants in their own development.
The one-day workshop syndrome is perhaps the most glaring example of this dysfunction. An outside expert parachutes in, delivers their standard presentation, and leaves. They don't understand the specific challenges your team faces, the constraints they work within, or the culture that shapes how work gets done. The result? Generic advice that sounds good in theory but falls apart in practice. Employees return to their desks with a binder full of best practices that have no clear connection to their actual work.
Even worse are the click-through compliance modules that reduce complex human behaviours to multiple-choice questions. These digital experiences treat employees like data-processing units, asking them to memorize information long enough to pass a test. But real workplace challenges don't come with four pre-written options. They require judgment, creativity, collaboration—all the messy human skills that standardized training systematically ignores.
What Human-Centred Learning Design Really Means
Human-centred learning design starts from a different premise: that employees are whole people with experiences, contexts, goals, and wisdom of their own. It recognizes that the most powerful learning happens when people can connect new information to their existing knowledge, apply it to their specific situations, and share their insights with others.
This isn't just feel-good philosophy. It's grounded in how humans actually learn. We're social creatures who make sense of the world through stories, relationships, and shared experiences. We learn best when we can see ourselves in the material, when we can contribute our own perspectives, and when we feel that our learning matters—not just to the organization, but to us personally.
A human-centred approach means designing learning experiences that:
- Start with employees' real challenges and contexts
- Create space for learners to bring their own expertise
- Foster connections between people, not just between people and content
- Allow for multiple pathways and outcomes
- Treat mistakes as learning opportunities, not failures
Most importantly, it means recognizing that employees aren't just learning for the company's benefit. They're learning to become better professionals, to solve problems that matter to them, to advance their careers, to feel more confident and capable in their work. When we design with these human motivations in mind, engagement follows naturally.
The Pedagogy of Care in Corporate Settings
Here's where things get interesting—and perhaps a bit uncomfortable for traditional L&D thinking. What if we approached workplace learning with the same care we'd want for our own development? What if we designed training that actually considered the whole person sitting in front of the screen or in the classroom?
A pedagogy of care in the workplace means acknowledging that employees bring their full selves to work, whether we recognize it or not. They bring their aspirations and anxieties, their past experiences and future hopes, their family obligations and personal challenges. They bring different ways of knowing, different cultural perspectives, different definitions of success.
This doesn't mean turning training into therapy or lowering standards. It means creating learning environments where people feel seen, valued, and supported. It means understanding that an employee struggling with a new system might also be already behind deadline, that someone resistant to change might have been burned by previous "transformations," that the quiet person in the workshop might have brilliant insights if given the right opportunity to share them.
When we practice care in our learning design, we:
- Build in flexibility for different learning styles and life situations
- Create psychological safety for questions and mistakes
- Acknowledge and validate the expertise employees already possess
- Design for connection and community, not just content consumption
- Consider the emotional and cognitive load we're placing on learners
This approach requires a fundamental shift in how we think about our role as L&D professionals. We're not just content deliverers or compliance enforcers. We're facilitators of human development, architects of learning communities, champions of employee growth and well-being.
From Knowledge Consumption to Knowledge Production
Perhaps the most radical shift in human-centred learning design is moving from knowledge consumption to knowledge production. Traditional training assumes that knowledge flows in one direction: from expert to employee. But what if we recognized that knowledge already exists within our organizations, distributed amongst the very people we're trying to train?
There's a simple truth that forward-thinking organizations are beginning to embrace: people learn best together. When we bring employees together to tackle real workplace challenges, something remarkable happens. The salesperson shares insights about customer pain points that the product team never considered. The junior developer offers a fresh perspective that challenges long-held assumptions. The remote worker describes workflows that could benefit the entire team. Knowledge isn't just transferred—it's created.
This collaborative approach does more than generate better solutions. It builds community. It creates ownership. It develops the kind of collective intelligence that no external expert could provide. And critically, it produces learning that's immediately relevant and applicable because it emerges from the actual context in which it will be used.
Consider the difference between a generic "effective communication" workshop and bringing together a cross-functional team to solve a specific communication breakdown they're experiencing. The first might offer useful frameworks, but the second produces actionable insights, strengthened relationships, and solutions tailored to the organization's specific culture and constraints.
The beauty of this approach is that it naturally creates personalized learning paths—not through algorithms predicting what someone should learn next, but through the organic process of people identifying what they need to know to solve real problems. When an employee encounters a challenge in their work and brings it to a learning community, the path forward becomes clear and personally meaningful. They're not following a predetermined route; they're creating their own journey based on actual needs.
Practical Implementation: Making It Real
So how do we actually implement human-centred learning design? It starts with asking different questions. Instead of "What do employees need to know?" we ask "What challenges are employees facing?" Instead of "How do we deliver this content efficiently?" we ask "How do we create conditions for meaningful learning?"
Here are some practical shifts:
- Replace one-size-fits-all modules with problem-based learning sessions where employees bring real challenges and work together to solve them. Yes, this means you can't pre-script every outcome, but the learning will be far more relevant and memorable.
- Transform compliance training from click-through exercises into scenario-based discussions where employees can explore the nuances and grey areas they actually encounter. People remember stories and discussions far better than bullet points.
- Build learning communities rather than training cohorts. Create ongoing spaces where employees can share experiences, ask questions, and learn from each other long after the formal training ends. The best insights often emerge in these informal exchanges. And here's where technology can actually serve human connection: the right community platforms can facilitate these ongoing conversations, making it possible for distributed teams to learn together regardless of location or time zone.
- Design for the whole person by acknowledging that learning happens in the context of full, complex lives. Offer multiple ways to engage, flexible timelines where possible, and recognition that different people bring different strengths and challenges.
- Most importantly, trust your employees. Trust that they want to grow, that they have valuable insights, that they can direct much of their own learning if given the opportunity and support. This trust, more than any specific technique, is what transforms training from a chore into an opportunity.
The Business Case for Care
Here's what sceptics need to understand: caring about employees as whole people isn't just nice—it's strategic. Employees who feel seen and valued are more engaged in their work. They're more likely to contribute their best ideas, to collaborate effectively with colleagues, to stay with the organization long-term. They're more innovative because they feel safe taking risks. They're more productive because they're working toward goals that matter to them personally, not just checking boxes.
When we create learning experiences that honour employees' full humanity, we're not sacrificing business outcomes. We're achieving them more effectively. The employee who can connect new skills to their personal goals will apply them more enthusiastically. The team that builds genuine relationships while solving problems together will collaborate better on future projects. The organization that treats learning as a collaborative endeavour will be more agile and innovative than one that simply broadcasts information to its workforce.
Moving Forward
The shift to human-centred learning design isn't just about new techniques or technologies. It's about recognizing a fundamental truth: that organizations are made of people, and people learn best when treated as whole, complex, capable human beings.
This doesn't mean abandoning rigor or accountability. It means expanding our definition of success beyond completion rates and test scores. It means measuring whether employees feel more capable, more connected, more invested in their work and their colleagues. It means creating learning experiences that people actually want to participate in, not because they're mandatory, but because they're meaningful.
The good news is that we're not starting from scratch. Smart organizations are already discovering the power of community-driven learning. They're investing in platforms that facilitate genuine connection alongside content delivery. They're using AI not to replace human interaction but to handle administrative tasks so that humans can focus on what matters: thinking together, solving problems together, growing together.
When we embrace the principle that people learn best together, everything changes. Personalized learning paths emerge naturally from collective problem-solving. Engagement increases because people are learning what they need when they need it. Knowledge retention improves because it's tied to real application and reinforced through community discussion.
As L&D professionals, we have a choice. We can continue to design training that treats employees as interchangeable units to be programmed with correct information. Or we can design learning experiences that honour their humanity, leverage their wisdom, and create the conditions for genuine growth and connection. Organisations already taking this approach are discovering that when you design for humans rather than robots, you don't just get better learning outcomes—you get more engaged employees, stronger communities, and organizations better equipped to navigate complexity and change.
It's time our own learning looked more like the future we're trying to build.
About the author
Sean Michael Morris has been working in digital education for 22 years. Beginning in 2012, he helped to surface the research field critical digital pedagogy, and co-founded the journal Hybrid Pedagogy. In 2015, he became the director of the global professional development event, Digital Pedagogy Lab, which was held on campuses across North America, Europe, and the Middle East. In his positions at Middlebury College, University of Mary Washington, and the University of Colorado Denver, he worked to empower K20 teachers with a deeper understanding of educational technologies and their impact on pedagogy and learning design.
His work has been featured by National Public Radio, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, Times Higher Ed, The Guardian, Forbes, Fortune, and by numerous podcasts across the education space. He has spoken to audiences on six continents on an array of topics from critical digital pedagogy, critical instructional design, alternative assessment, AI, and the role of imagination in teaching and learning. He is the co-author of An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy, and most recently published chapters in The Ends of Knowledge (Bloomsbury) and Virtual Identities and Digital Culture (Routledge).
