Insights
Articles on running live sessions: design, delivery, participation, the legal side and what AI changed. Free, open and written from HR practice rather than theory.
New articles twice a month. No paywall, no form to read them.
Design
Why recorded training does not finish
The completion gap between recorded and live training is not a content problem. It is a problem of who is expecting you on Tuesday.
September 22, 2026
How to run a breakout room
Breakouts get blamed for awkwardness that was designed in before anybody was moved. Four things fix almost all of it.
September 18, 2026
Accessibility in live sessions
Most accessibility in training happens only when somebody asks for it, which means it happens after the person has already had to disclose something.
September 14, 2026
How long a session should be
Length is usually decided by what is available on the calendar, which is the worst possible input.
September 9, 2026
Onboarding that starts with week one
Most onboarding teaches a new person the history of the company before teaching them how to do Monday.
September 8, 2026
First-time manager training
New managers get sent to leadership training and come back with a vocabulary. What they needed was practice at three specific conversations.
September 7, 2026
Delivery
How to open a virtual session
Most virtual sessions are lost before anything important is said, in an opening that teaches the room nothing is required of them.
September 21, 2026
The person who takes over the room
Every recurring session has one. Handled badly, you lose either the room or the person. Handled with structure, neither.
September 17, 2026
Hybrid rooms are two rooms
The remote people know within ten minutes whether they are participants or an audience, and they are almost always an audience.
September 10, 2026
Training a room that already knows this
Half the room has done this for ten years. The other half started Monday. Most facilitators pick one and lose the other.
September 26, 2026
Participation
Camera off is not disengagement
Facilitators read black squares as apathy and design accordingly. That read is wrong often enough to cost you the people you most want in the session.
September 20, 2026
What to do when nobody talks
A silent room is not an empty room. It is a room telling you something specific, and the move depends on which of three things it is saying.
September 19, 2026
The unwritten rules at work
The information gap at work is rarely about skill. It is about who was told how things actually work.
September 4, 2026
What to do instead of icebreakers
The two truths and a lie round is the most reliable way to lose the introverts in the first five minutes.
September 3, 2026
Hard moments
Facilitating after layoffs
The training was on the calendar before the announcement. Now you are standing in front of people who watched colleagues disappear on Thursday.
September 16, 2026
When the sponsor does not show up
The executive who asked for this training is not in the room. The room knows.
September 26, 2026
Legal
Recording consent in training
Recording a session is easy. Everything downstream of the recording is where facilitators get into trouble.
September 15, 2026
Harassment prevention training that works
California law sets the floor. Almost every employer builds to the floor, then wonders why the training did not prevent anything.
September 13, 2026
Do I need workplace violence training too?
California employers have been carrying two separate live training mandates since July 2024. Most of the ones I talk to think the harassment training covered both.
September 26, 2026
Business
How to price a workshop
Most independent facilitators price from what they feel comfortable saying out loud, which is usually well under what the market pays.
September 12, 2026
What train the trainer actually takes
Organizations buy train the trainer expecting a certificate. What makes it work is far less glamorous and mostly about what leaves the room with them.
September 11, 2026
How to measure training
Smile sheets measure whether people enjoyed an hour. No budget has ever been saved by an average of 4.6.
September 6, 2026
Your training budget fell and your hours rose
The 2026 ATD numbers look like a collapse in training investment. Read the second line and it is something more specific.
September 26, 2026
AI
What to draft with AI
The useful question is not whether to use AI in training. It is which specific tasks it should touch, and which ones it should never see.
September 5, 2026
What AI cannot do in a live session
AI writes the deck faster than you do. It has no answer for the moment somebody says something the deck did not anticipate.
September 26, 2026
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