The Evolution to Learning Experience Design – ATD

Veronica, who works in human resources, was reading through the resumes that a recruiter sent for a new opening in the learning and development group. She noticed several candidates referred to themselves as learning experience designers. After reviewing the lists of accomplishments, Veronica figured this must be a new synonym for instructional designer. Did Veronica come to the correct conclusion?

The name of a business, the title of a career, or even a nickname can be arbitrary, or it can be revealing. Learning experience design is a great example of this paradox. As with much terminology in our industry, learning experience design has multiple meanings, depending on your perspective.

As a result, our industry adopted many of the relevant practices and tools from the user experience (UX) community. For example, developing personas, using empathy maps, and creating learning journey maps come from the UX world. This gave instructional designers a new toolkit and somewhat of a new approach. From this perspective, learning experience design is instructional design merged with user experience design. Think of a Venn diagram.

The evolved learning experience designer will be better equipped to solve the messy and complex challenges introduced by rapid technological change, constant disruption, global communities, inclusion strategies, flattening of organizational hierarchies, and new workforce models.

Im advocating for the term learning experience design to be a meaningful change, not an arbitrary oneone that gives us greater leverage and authority to solve the right problems with the right solutions. One that allows us to say that training wont solve every problem. Most importantly, it will give us a role where we transition from order taker to solution builder and change agent.

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The Evolution to Learning Experience Design - ATD