If that sounds provocative, good. It should. Because if you’re serious about behaviour change, you already know that most value is not created in the classroom or the LMS, but out there in the messy, busy reality of work – where people either do something different, consistently, or they don’t.
When you look at it that way, the uncomfortable truth is this: content doesn’t change behaviour. Doing does.
Why training courses alone don’t deliver behaviour change
Let’s start with the obvious. Aside from ticking compliance boxes, the reason we do L&D is to help people do their jobs better. We want them to take different actions instead of what they are doing now, so they get better results. In other words, our real goal is behaviour change.
But behaviour change doesn’t happen in a one‑day workshop, a webinar, or a nice bit of eLearning. It happens when people repeatedly try new things, in their real context, over time, until those new actions become their default way of working.
Traditional, course‑centric approaches are stacked against that:
- They’re time‑bound events, while behaviour change is a process that unfolds over weeks and months.
- They focus on knowledge and content, not on the sequence of activities required to build new habits at work.
- They may sit in an LMS that’s good at tracking completions, but an LMS doesn’t get people doing the activities that actually change behaviour.
I often see beautifully designed courses that simply don’t survive first contact with the day job. People leave full of good intentions, then the inbox, the manager, and the next crisis arrive – and the old habits quietly win.
It’s like installing a brilliant new app on your phone, playing with it for an hour, and then never opening it again. Or giving someone a powerful smartphone but no charger. The potential is there, but without ongoing support and prompts, it fades fast.
What a learning workflow really is
To fix this, we need to change the unit of design in L&D. Instead of stopping at “the course”, we need to design the workflow.
A workflow is a sequence of activities over time that accomplishes a desired outcome. A learning workflow accomplishes desired learning outcomes.
That sounds simple but it’s also profound. Because once you start thinking in workflows, you stop asking, “What content should we deliver?” and start asking, “What activities do people need to do, in what order, to reach this outcome?”
A learning workflow typically includes:
- Short bursts of content to spark ideas or provide models.
- Specific tasks to try in the real job, with clear instructions.
- Reflection prompts so people notice what happened and what they’ll do next.
- Conversations with managers or peers to support, challenge, and hold to account.
- Follow‑up nudges over time so new behaviours don’t fade away.
Notice the emphasis here: tasks, not just content. It’s the doing, reflecting, and repeating in the flow of work that shifts behaviour, not another slide deck or video.
A simple learning workflow recipe
You don’t need a complex model to get started. Here’s a straightforward recipe you can apply to almost any programme where behaviour change is the goal.
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Get crystal clear on the behaviour
Define, in plain language, what you want people to do differently and how you’ll see that in the workplace. If you can’t describe the behaviour, you can’t design a workflow to achieve it. -
Map the key activities over time
Sketch a simple sequence: before, during, and after any formal training. Include manager briefings, workplace experiments, peer discussions, quick practice tasks, and check‑ins. Think in weeks and months, not hours. -
Add only the content that fuels those activities
Once the activities are clear, decide what content is actually needed: a short video, a job aid, a case study, a few reflection questions, and when it is needed. Resist the urge to throw in more content “because we have it”. -
Build in reflection and feedback loops
For each key activity, ask: how will people reflect on it, and who will give them feedback? Manager prompts, peer coaching, and simple self‑reflection questions are all part of the workflow. -
Automate the nudges wherever you can
Manually sending emails and reminders quickly becomes unmanageable. This is where technology comes in – to deliver the sequence of activities, at scale, over time.
If you’re looking at one of your current programmes and thinking, “We’ve got a course, but not a workflow,” you’re not alone. That’s exactly the gap I see again and again when I talk with L&D teams.
Where ePortfolios fit into the workflow story
One of the main jobs of an ePortfolio is to gather evidence for a qualification or CPD over time. Learners collect artefacts, reflections, feedback, and sign‑off from others to demonstrate that they’ve met certain standards.
Look at that through a workflow lens. Gathering evidence isn’t a one‑off action; it’s a workflow of activities: doing something in the real world, recording it, reflecting on it, getting it verified, and repeating.
That’s why an ePortfolio shouldn’t just be a static repository. An effective ePortfolio should have a workflow engine at its heart – prompting people to collect evidence, reflect, and seek sign‑off at the right times. In other words, it should behave like a learning workflow, not just a filing cabinet.
When you use a Learning Workflow Platform (LWP) as an ePortfolio, you get a structured sequence of activities, and a way to capture the evidence that those activities are leading to real outcomes.
Why you need an LWP as well as an LMS
Most organisations already have an LMS, and that’s fine. An LMS is good at managing and tracking access to content – courses, modules, videos, assessments.
But remember: content doesn’t change behaviour. Activities do. And that’s where an LMS typically falls short. It can provide a pathway of learning content, but it doesn’t orchestrate the ongoing, in‑role activities people need to build new habits.
A Learning Workflow Platform (LWP) is designed for a different job:
- Delivering sequences of activities over time, not just unlocking content.
- Nudging people to try things in their real work, reflect, and come back for more.
- Involving managers and peers at key points in the workflow.
- Capturing evidence and reflections in an ePortfolio as the workflow unfolds.
A LWP can sit alongside the LMS, complementing it rather than competing with it. The LMS handles the catalogue and compliance reporting; the LWP handles the behaviour change.
That’s why we built the People Alchemy Learning Workflow Platform (LWP): to focus on delivering activities, not just content, so you get genuine learning transfer and sustainable behaviour change.
Ready to stop wasting good training?
If you keep designing ever‑better courses without designing a learning transfer workflow to wrap around them, you’ll keep seeing the same pattern: great feedback on the day, and very little visible change back at work.
The mindset shift is simple but powerful: stop thinking in terms of training events and start thinking in terms of learning workflows – sequences of activities, over time, embedded in the real work people do. Content still matters, of course, but it’s there to fuel the activities, not to stand alone.
If you’d like to explore how a learning workflow could rescue one of your existing programmes, I’d love to talk. Book a short call or demo, and we can look at one of your real challenges, share ideas, and walk through how an LWP and ePortfolio‑style evidence collection might support better learning transfer in your context. You’ll leave the conversation with practical tips you can use straight away – even if we never speak again.
> See our platform in action here
> Download our Learning Workflow Design Guide
