The Learning Experience vs Earning Experience Gap

Keeping aside all sorts of statistics, I thought the Learning Experience vs Earning Experience gap was important to discuss and debate. If I start by putting myself in the shoes of the learner, then we obviously learn to feel powerful—and that power can be income power or knowledge power. For instance, meet my cats who are proactive knowledge seekers.

It is very essential, each day that they wander and sniff across my entire apartment complex to learn about every activity or every living creature that has occurred/existed in the last 24 hours. Only then can they come home and sleep soundly. The exercise of acquiring knowledge and the knowledge itself gives them tremendous satisfaction. Similarly, many of us, often, make an effort to acquire a similar ‘knowledge’ power. But Google has now taken over this space. If you seek knowledge, you can Google, yada yada yada boom badok bang…

Who remain are eager income seekers and this is the audience that educational institutes, training/eLearning are seeking to empower. And despite increased variety, increased access and an ever-increasing number of ‘proactive learners/participants’—the employee/student’s learning experience is questionable and the ‘earning’ experience for each learner is diverse, to say the least.

People continually train/learn to invest in themselves, and they expect to immediately monetize that learning. Each course might be bespoke, multi-device, socially-connected, localized, collaborative or mentor-led—yet it is becoming harder to earn from what has been learnt. I had recently joined a class to upgrade a certain skillset and met many mid-career executives who were in the same boat. One year later, most of us are yet to certify and start practicing what we learnt. This is how it often unfolds…

From the other perspective, as a trainer/instructional designer—I find myself creating the same courses over and over for different clients. And I find myself thinking, if so many people are learning this content, then how come this topic isn’t dead and over? Are we re-learning things because of our failure to monetize what we have learnt? Or is it that we are not unlearning first? Yes. There is a gap here.

I think this gap can be addressed by adding two essential elements to the learning-to-earning journey (L2EJ): design thinking and coaching. Design thinking goes beyond just learner audience understanding and bespoke content selection. It is about understanding your learner/participant’s L2EJ and using that data as input when creating course content. This means fierce involvement from HR, Marketing and a subgroup of the learners/participants themselves.

While adding design thinking will get you real world, practical, paradigmatic buy-in, there is the entire issue of learner motivation. What makes me change my behaviour? This impacts the L2EJ. It's not just about teaching soft skills, it is the general emotional maturity of your participant/learner that needs a boost. This is where coaching comes in: coaching is not mentoring. Breaking down internal resistance is important for anyone to absorb their learning. Coaching helps in ROI and closes the L2E gap.

Take these small steps today for your next learning design approach. They are not complicated if you are confident about, and committed to, including them. Tell me how it goes!

The VELD Technique: Step 1

The VELD Technique: Step 1


“I needed to tell a story with the data. I also, determined that it needed to be visually distinctive to for it to be memorable”, Randy Krum from his book Cool Infographics: Effective Communication with Data Visualization and Design. The VELD Technique recognizes that before there were words, there were pictures (take the example of Egyptian hieroglyphics). Check out The Best Data Visualizations of 2013.

 In fact, one of the earliest known visualizations is a map. The famous Lascaux caves in France contain paintings on their walls that date from the paleolithic period. One particular painting shows three bright stars (Vega, Deneb and Altair) known as the Summer Triangle. The images around them may suggest ideas of constellations, ways to help remember the star patterns and navigate.

The Lascaux caves example clearly shows a context that birthed the content, that was elaborated through a visual, and which ultimately enabled learning. This fits into the four layers of our Visualization Concentric. Now, when we look at context, as an instructional designer, you need to take a holistic view.


While simple maps and diagrams represent static visuals, in today’s age of multimedia, we learning designers are afforded the privilege of working with animated infographics, tables, graphs and charts. We can even create click and reveal screens, or customized animations for an immersive learning experience—which are high in visual content and low in text. Hmmm… but where do we draw the line so that the visual does not take away from the learning? Welcome to the VELD Process.


There are 4-steps, which form the backbone of the VELD Technique. They are non-negotiable and linear. To stay true to the learning experience (learner empathy is paramount), a good instructional designer always begins by repositioning the content. What do I mean by this?

It means that you must first, check the pulse of the content—what is the essence of what the text is talking about. Next, you must take ownership of the voiceover/content. To do this, you can shift sentences, re-read and rewrite until you are sure that the content flows with intensity and clarity. Think of this step as laying the bricks and concrete. If you do not position the bricks with maximum tightness, your entire house will develop cracks.

Often, project managers, will argue that “we should not touch the client’s content” or that “rewriting the content is not within the scope of the project”. However, this rookie oversight always shows up cracks during the alpha review. I have been through this cycle so many times that in the interest of the project, my reputation and in full empathy with my invisible learner—I always begin by editing out redundancies, illogical transitions and overly-descriptive text, making sure NOT to misinterpret the client’s original expression/vocabulary.


Let me give you a for instance here. I received content to do with a company’s mission and vision. The characteristics of the mission were listed and then the definition of a vision was shared, with examples. I immediately decided that, ‘vision’ comes before ‘mission’ (re-adjusting for logical flow of content), I added active voice for both screen titles (Creating an Effective Vision, Creating an Effective Mission) and edited the language for typos, errors and punctuation inconsistencies.

This article is the second part of a 4-part series detailing Shalini Gogia’s VELD Technique. Next Monday, we will explore the next 3 steps of the VELD process.