Training 77,000 people who don't sit at desks

Corporate L&D mostly optimizes for people who, on some level, like learning — who sit at a desk, have a calendar, and can give you forty-five minutes. The frontline has none of that.

When we onboarded delivery partners at scale, the learner was someone between two deliveries, on a phone, with low patience for theory and a real need to perform today. Everything I knew about elegant course design had to bend to that reality.

What actually worked:

Short, mobile, and task-anchored. No 45-minute e-learning. Single tasks, completable in the gaps of a working day.

Show, don’t tell. Visual and vernacular over walls of text. The goal is a correct action, not a remembered definition.

Measure on the job, not on a quiz. A passing score means nothing if the behavior on the road doesn’t change. Tie training to the operational metric the business already watches.

The unglamorous truth: the hardest learners to design for are the ones who matter most to the business. Designing for the frontline made me a far better instructional designer than any polished corporate course ever did.