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How Do You Become a Better Learning Designer with Ant Pugh

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Episode summary

Ant Pugh helps unfulfilled learning designers graduate from frustrated order-takers to valued business partners. He writes a daily newsletter that provides inspiration to help learning designers deliver high-value, high-impact training. In this conversation, Ant talks about why the vast majority of learning in the world today is ineffective – and what learning designers can leverage from ‘documenting’ daily to an audience. We also talk about shiny object syndrome, private journaling, and how to think differently.

About Ant Pugh

Ant is a self-employed learning design consultant and instructional designer, with a career in learning and development spanning twenty years, with experience working in several continents, and global clients including ANZ, Westpac, Link Group, Microsoft and Carnival. He is renowned for using a performance-based approach to design training, passionate about implementing human-centred solutions to change behaviour, improve performance and deliver measurable business results.

Key Takeaways

  • The vast majority of learning is ineffective. Ant unpacks how a great learning designer questions everything and trusts their instincts. It’s very easy to just copy what others are doing, but if you ‘break out’ of the L&D world and review how else you learn in your day-to-day life, it’s easier to think outside of the box.
  • Writing is a great way of teaching (and learning). From writing a daily email to his mailing list, Ant has become a better writer and has learnt a lot more about learning design. Find your medium where you can capture – or report – daily on what you have learnt or thought about to a community, no matter how small.
  • Some of the biggest blockers for writing are not knowing who you are writing to and your mindset around writing. Ant has reframed what writing is to him – it’s about documenting, not creating content. This has been a powerful way to beat overwhelm for Ant, which enables him to write so frequently in a flow state. Focus on being a reporter rather than a leader or teacher, and simply share with others what has worked for you so far.

Segmented time stamps:

02:26 How to become a better learning designer
04:34 Ant’s strategy to seeing things differently
07:10 How to move forward in new ways of thinking
13:57 Why learning designers should write more
17:41 Making the time to write daily and Ant’s writing process
21:20 Some of the biggest blockers for writing – and how to overcome them

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