Author: Sarah Baker – Chief Learning Officer & Co-founder, Embed
What Your Learners Wished You’d Asked Before You Built That Course
Great learning design starts with curiosity, not content. When we’re brought into a project, our first instinct isn’t to open the brief — it’s to question it.
To listen harder, dig deeper, and challenge the assumptions that are so often baked into a commission before we’ve even been introduced.
What Our Clients Tell Us – and What We Find
When we’re brought in to work on a new project, we often hear some version of the same things:
“We’ve got the content and the SMEs – you have everything you need.”
“We know our learners well.”
“We can’t change anything – let’s just work with what we’ve got.”
These aren’t unreasonable things to say.
They come from genuine time pressures, organisational constraints, and real confidence in existing knowledge.
But when we dig a little deeper, a more complex picture almost always emerges.
- We find passionate SMEs who know their subject inside out, but who are often surprisingly disconnected from the day-to-day reality of the people they’re trying to reach.
- We find learners who have plenty of opinions about what they need, but who have long since stopped sharing them because their feedback never seemed to go anywhere.
- We find trainers sitting on brilliant ideas, quietly frustrated that nobody has thought to ask.
- We find project leads focused on deadlines, and senior leaders who need real impact but aren’t sure how to define or measure it.
- And we find training that has been built to a brief, but that somehow doesn’t feel like it belongs to the organisation it was made for.
None of this is anyone’s fault. It’s what happens when a project starts with content and requirements rather than curiosity and conversation.
The Real Cost of Skipping Discovery
In our experience, Discovery is the thing most likely to be cut when a client is working to a tight timeline or budget.
From the outside, it can look like a slow start, a delay before the real work begins, and handing over the content and a list of requirements is enough, isn’t it?
But here’s what years of delivering learning projects has taught us: a poor discovery means a poor learning product at end of it. Every time.
Effective Discovery does something that no amount of great instructional design can compensate for if it’s missing. It challenges assumptions before they get baked into the design. It surfaces potential problems early, when they’re cheap to solve rather than expensive to unpick. It identifies quick wins alongside longer-term opportunities. And perhaps most importantly, it shifts the focus from temporarily patching symptoms to understanding the systemic issues underneath them.
It also connects the learning we design to something that is too often left out of the brief entirely: the evolving, real-world needs of the people it’s meant to serve.
From Requirements List to Human-Centred Understanding
What Discovery actually does is shift the starting point of a project. Instead of beginning with “here is what we need to build”, it begins with “here is what we need to understand.”
That shift from a list of requirements to a genuinely human-centred picture of need is what makes the difference between learning that ticks a box and learning that changes behaviour.
And it doesn’t have to be daunting. Using a structured approach takes the uncertainty out of the process.
We use our Discovery Diagnostic to collect evidence across five key areas:
- The organisational context
- The project parameters
- Stakeholder needs
- The technology landscape
- Learning content
Each area generates insight that feeds directly into design decisions; nothing is gathered for its own sake.
The Best Insights Come from Talking to People
Desk research has its place. But the richest, most useful Discovery data almost always comes from direct conversation; with stakeholders, with learners, with the people closest to the problem.
When we’re brought into a project, we use a range of methods to gather that insight: workshops, stakeholder interviews, observations, pilots, feedback analysis, and more. The goal is always the same; to build a picture that no single perspective, however expert, could provide on its own.
And the things we hear when we do this properly? They change projects.
Police officers telling us they didn’t need more training, they needed short, accessible videos they could pull up in the moment, just when a situation called for it. Learners explaining that they never voluntarily accessed their LMS, not because they weren’t motivated, but because the number of steps it took to find anything had simply ground them down. Product owners who understood exactly what their customers needed from the training, but who hadn’t been able to bring their SMEs along with them.
None of these insights were in the brief. None of them would have emerged from a content review or a requirements meeting.
They came from asking; genuinely, curiously, and without assumption.
So, What Did Your Learners Wish You’d Asked?
Probably something like:
What do you actually need?
What gets in your way?
What would make this feel worth your time?
Discovery doesn’t just make learning better. It makes it relevant, sustainable, and genuinely fit for the people it’s designed for. It isn’t the part of the project you do before the real work starts.
It is the real work.