Practical perspectives on digital learning and programme design, and what's actually working in 2026. No hype, no jargon, just honest observations from thirty years in the field.

1 July 2026
You don't commission custom builds often — so when you do, you're making a six-figure decision on a process you've only seen from outside, while the market sells you a story about how fast and cheap AI has made it. AI has genuinely compressed production. It hasn't touched the parts that decide whether your programme is any good: the design judgment, getting knowledge out of your experts, the review cycle, and engineering completion. The honest shape of the work, and where the risk actually sits.
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24 June 2026
You paid for bespoke courses to fix the completion problem — and the dashboard still shows a strong start and a long tail of half-finished records. The cause usually isn't the learner or the platform. It's a set of decisions made at the design stage, before the first module is built: module length, a reason to return, where assessment lives, engineered relevance, and who owns completion. The build-time choices that decide whether a custom programme gets finished.
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17 June 2026
The completion statistics that frighten finance education teams come from optional, consumer learning. Regulated finance CPD is mandatory — the regulator has already solved the motivation problem. So a programme that still only hits its target through constant administrator follow-up doesn't have a learner problem. It has a design problem. What self-sustaining completion is actually built from.
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10 June 2026
The EU has provisionally delayed the AI Act's high-risk rules to December 2027. But the delay is narrower than the headline: it isn't law yet, the Article 4 literacy duty wasn't moved, and the high-risk regime covers AI used to evaluate learning outcomes. What it actually changes for certification bodies, regulated training providers, and corporate academies using AI in assessment and CPD.
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3 June 2026
A regulated programme is accurate at launch and quietly wrong eighteen months later, because the budget was a build budget and nobody owns currency. The four forms ageing takes, why it happens, and a six-question maintenance diagnostic for Heads of Learning at certification bodies, regulated training providers, and corporate academies.
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28 May 2026
Digital programmes drift when assessment is the last decision in the work plan, not the second. The four specific drifts, why they happen, and a six-question diagnostic for Heads of Programme at professional certification bodies, regulated training providers, and corporate academies.
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29 April 2026
The gap between board approval and a launched digital programme is where most institute projects quietly stall. Three moves that close it. Three that do not.
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22 April 2026
Article 4 of the EU AI Act requires every organisation deploying AI tools to ensure workforce literacy. The deadline is 2 August. Most have quietly missed it.
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15 April 2026
Six dimensions that separate the institute programmes members rave about from the ones members ask when the classroom version is coming back.
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8 April 2026
Most professional institutes pick the wrong first programme to digitise. Four signals that identify the right one, and three categories to deliberately avoid.
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2 April 2026
The Employment Rights Act 2025 raises the bar on compliance training. Tick-box eLearning won't meet the new standard. Here's what employers need now.
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26 March 2026
For fast-growing companies, the gap between hiring speed and training quality is where talent gets lost. Here's what to do about it.
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19 March 2026
Accenture invested $3 billion in AI and trained 70% of its workforce. Adoption still stalled. Now promotions depend on usage. There's a lesson here for every business.
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12 March 2026
New research shows AI-first learning teams vastly outperform traditional approaches. Here's what's now possible — and why most organisations are still behind.
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5 March 2026
Most eLearning fails not because learners won't engage, but because the content was never designed to compete for their attention.
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