(and what I put first instead)
April is when most organisations begin their new financial year.
Learning plans that have been waiting for approval suddenly become real. And somewhere in that process, a familiar conversation tends to happen.
Someone has a platform in mind. A tool they’ve been recommended. A technology decision that’s been quietly waiting for the green light.
It’s a completely understandable place to start. Technology feels concrete and decisive. It’s something you can point to, budget for, and announce.
But in my experience, it’s the wrong first step. And the consequences of getting the order wrong tend to follow a project for a long time.
Why the order matters
Most learning providers lead with technology. They have a platform to sell or a tool they’ve built their business around, and that shapes everything they recommend.
I deliberately don’t work that way.
After nearly four decades in digital learning, I’ve developed a methodology built around a simple principle: the order in which you make decisions determines the quality of what you end up with.
That order is:
Learner first. Subject second. Technology last.
It sounds straightforward. In practice, it requires resisting some fairly consistent pressure to do things the other way round.
Learner first
The first step is to understand the people who will actually be doing the learning.
Not in a general sense. Specifically:
- Who are they?
- Where do they work?
- What devices do they use?
- When will they realistically engage with this content?
- What do they already know?
- What’s their relationship with learning itself?
These questions feel basic. They’re also surprisingly rarely answered properly before projects get underway.
When they’re skipped, every decision that follows is built on assumption. Content gets designed for a learner who doesn’t quite exist. Formats are chosen that don’t fit the reality of people’s working lives. Platforms are selected that add friction rather than removing it.
Starting with real people, and spending proper time understanding their actual context, removes most of those problems before they develop.
Subject second
Once I understand the people, I spend real time understanding what they need to learn.
This goes beyond reading the brief or accepting a subject matter expert’s (SME’s) summary at face value. It means getting genuinely close to the topic. Understanding what’s difficult about it. Where the common misconceptions are. What experienced practitioners do differently from beginners. And what the learner needs to be able to do, not just know, by the end.
That last distinction matters more than it might seem.
Learning that produces knowledge doesn’t always change behaviour. Learning that bridges knowledge and application usually does.
This step occasionally produces a surprising outcome. A proper understanding of the subject sometimes reveals that a learning solution isn’t actually what’s needed. The problem might be a process that’s unclear, a tool that’s poorly designed, or a management behaviour that no training course will fix.
Catching that early saves significant time, budget, and credibility. Clients remember the consultant who advised them not to spend the money.
Technology last
By the time the technology question arrives, most of the hard thinking is already done.
I know who the learners are and what suits their context. I know the subject and the right approach to teaching it. The technology choice at that point is much more straightforward, because I’m matching a clear set of requirements to the available options rather than working backwards from a platform chosen in advance.
The right technology for one audience and subject will be completely wrong for another.
Video might be essential in one context and irrelevant in another. A sophisticated interactive platform might be exactly right for one project and complete overkill for the next. Learning needs to be a blend.
When technology is chosen last, it serves the learning. When it’s chosen first, the learning quietly serves the technology instead.
A practical point for the new financial year
April is when the pressure to commit to technology is strongest.
Budgets need to be spent. Decisions need to be visible. A platform contract feels like progress.
I understand that pressure completely. But a technology decision made before the audience is understood, and before the subject has been properly explored, is a decision that will quietly cause problems for years.
The most expensive learning technology decisions I’ve seen weren’t always the ones with the biggest price tags. They were the ones made in the wrong order.
If you’re at the start of a new learning project this financial year, the most useful question isn’t which platform to use. It’s: do we properly understand the people this learning is for?
Everything else follows from there.
If you’d like to talk through what that looks like in practice, I’m always happy to have a sensible conversation.
