How To Build An L&D Brand And Tell Better Stories With Kelly Rodrigues

Having listened to an interview you did on the Assembly L&D podcast, I believe you started out in dance training, which then led you to the non-profit world and then to where you are.

It’d be great to understand how that started and the lessons you took from there into where you are with WebPros now.

The journey that I took to get into the learning industry was that I am a trained dancer, but I always knew that I wanted to do something to help other people, particularly adults and older people. There’s something about adults that are a little bit easier to handle when it comes to learning or teaching than, say teaching children. So I went into something called dance movement therapy, where I used dance as therapy for people with dementia and cognitive degenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.

I worked with one of our UK-leading dance psychotherapists, Coleridge Curtin. We mainly covered Yorkshire because that’s where we were based, but I would volunteer on my weekends. I went to uni in London, and I would volunteer on weekends and holidays to go and use dance to unlock memories for people with dementia.

There’s a lot of science around our memories and that when we do get dementia, it’s not so much the long-term memories. They tend to stay as the dementia progresses. It’s more your short-term memory. It’s almost like erasing your more recent memories down to when it stops degenerating.

There’s something about dance that unlocks things for older people because they’re used to ballroom dance and similar styles. When I got employed by a local authority called Kirklees Council, I was a dance and physical activity development officer. My job was to go around care homes and do this work, and also train staff how to do it.

But I realised as one person operating across quite a big council, I wasn’t able to do that. Very quickly I realised training was the way to go. That’s when I started my training, about a year out of university. I did that for about nine years across various genres of dance, which was incredible to do full time.

Then I moved to a national UK charity called UK Coaching and became what they called a learning architect. They wanted me to structure and scaffold learning for sports and physical activity coaches across the UK.

The interesting point here is that my role, plus one other, was to scale learning across the UK for learners we didn’t have direct contact with. They operate on a subscription membership model where anything we create is either salable or part of a membership base for coaches who are usually out in the field or in gyms.

The concept of creating something and getting it out to the masses remotely was new for me, because I’d been very in touch with the community in my previous job. This role was much less in touch, so a lot of it was around digital learning.

At the time, e-learning was a big thing. We were one of the first to create accessible e-learning in the country. The first project I worked on was creating a piece of e-learning for British Blind Sport. It had to be accessible for blind people, but this was before tools like Articulate embedded accessibility by design.

We were one of the first to create a fully accessible end-to-end piece of e-learning that a blind person could complete. There were lots of failures along the way but we ended up winning a Learning Performance Institute award for that piece.

That spurred us to think about accessibility at scale within the organisation. I progressed over eight years to become Head of Learning and Assessment, leading a team of learning designers and assessors.

We looked to embed assessment as part of the learning journey so we got rid of the scary experience around assessment. We were trying to get coaches up to occupational standards in a meaningful way through learning experiences.

Then a personal move with an ambition to live in Portugal took me to WebPros, where I am now. It’s a fully commercial organisation, the world’s leading web hosting organisation. We provide the infrastructure to host the web for big companies like GoDaddy.

My role is to lead our global L&D team to make sure our workforce, about 650 people and growing, has the training they need for now and the future, and that our customers can onboard our products.

It’s a completely different sector, but a great opportunity. What I realised is that in the charity sector, you have to be extremely resourceful and innovative. We were trying to get human skills out to people working remotely.

In the corporate world, they’ve been so focused on technical skills that they’ve forgotten the human side. When I came in, some basic things to me were not basic to WebPros. There have been real opportunities in the first eight months to make a big impact quickly.

I believe you had to create an entire branding strategy for the L&D team to establish its identity. What was that like?

Yeah, a hundred percent. At UK Coaching, we were our own department of learning and assessment. We weren’t tied into HR. Strangely, though, they would buy external development rather than use us internally. So I got used to people knowing us as L&D. We had our own KPIs, impact measures, and strategy.

At WebPros, L&D was swallowed up within HR, which managed everything from grievances to benefits. Learning is seen as an employee benefit, but I don’t believe it should be a benefit. It should be a given.

People should be enabled to learn to improve performance, which drives business success. When companies list learning as a benefit, it gets under my skin. How do you expect your company to grow if development is optional?

When I joined, the team didn’t understand how their jobs connected to the bigger picture. There was no learning strategy, no clear direction, no identity. So the first thing I did was listen and talk to department leads and understand what people thought L&D did. People didn’t know how to access learning or what we offered.

I built connections and created a three-to-five-year strategy. It focused on internal workforce, customer enablement, innovation and efficiency, and accessibility, inclusion, and diversity. That was the first thing that put us on the map.

The second thing was ensuring L&D had a presence in company meetings like HR all-hands and manager briefings so we weren’t hidden within HR.

The third thing was building team capability. They weren’t operating as an L&D team; they were reacting to requests. Now they’re attending webinars, listening to podcasts, reading, and upskilling as professionals. They’re operating on a completely different level now. 

If you were advising someone else in your position to brand an L&D team, what would you recommend?

If you think about an L&D expert, there are a few things that really stand out. As a leader, I had to advocate for the team. I had to go out and build those relationships and make those connections myself. So if you are an L&D leader and you’re wondering where to start, especially if your function is being lumped in with everything else that HR does, you need to be the one who goes out and becomes that voice for L&D. 

You need to understand what your function can do to stand on its own two feet and how it feeds into business impact and performance. For example, within our function, we now understand how we directly contribute to key KPIs in terms of learning, and the team knows that too. Not just me so they can stand confidently on their own.

The second thing I would say is you need a really strong learning and development strategy, alongside an operational plan that shows how you mobilise that strategy. People need to see where you are heading over the next few years and how you plan to get there as a function. And that’s as L&D or learning and performance, not as part of HR, but as your own function contributing independently to the business.

The third thing, and this is something you shouldn’t take for granted, is making sure your team actually knows how to operate as an L&D team. The team I inherited wasn’t really operating as one. They weren’t doing proper scoping; they were just taking requests at face value. 

Someone would come along and say, “I want an e-learning course on this,” and they’d just go and build it, without pushing back or applying basic adult learning principles. So they’ve been on a fast development journey to understand those fundamentals of how to scope properly, how to consult, how to ask the right questions, so now they can operate as true learning consultants rather than order-takers. 

So for me, those are the three key things: leadership advocacy, a strong strategy with a clear operational plan, and a team that is actually skilled and set up to function as an L&D team.

What are your thoughts on e-learning now versus when you started as there’s an opinion in the industry that e-learning has become oversaturated. 

When I think back to the beginning, particularly when I was working in a local authority, a lot of the work was face-to-face and geared towards people with cognitive degenerative disorders. Because of that, it was naturally inclusive. I was delivering training in the way that best suited the participants in front of me.

When I moved into UK Coaching, accessibility became a much bigger focus, but we also had clear user needs. We were working with people who were blind, amputees, people who needed keyboard accessibility. We brought those voices in through focus groups, which really helped me get close to the actual need.

Now, accessibility has become more standard, mainly because the tools we use like authoring tools and platforms have started to embed accessibility by design. So there’s more awareness, and the baseline has improved.

But what I’ve noticed moving into the corporate world is that it’s not that organisations don’t care, it’s more that they’re not fully thinking it through. In the sector I work in now, which is technology, I have a strong suspicion, an educated one, that over half of our workforce is neurodivergent. I know that from daily conversations and from my own team, where over half are not neurotypical.

So the challenge for me right now is this: if we can reasonably assume that a large proportion of the workforce is not neurotypical, why are we still designing learning and operating in a neurotypical way? That’s something I’m actively challenging within the business.

There’s also a hesitation around formally surveying this, because once you know, you have to act on it but from a learning design perspective. That’s exactly why we should know. Ultimately, if you design for accessibility, you’re designing for everyone. It’s just good practice. Whether it’s children, adults, or people with specific conditions, inclusive design benefits everyone.

For me, we’re on a journey at the moment of upskilling the team around inclusive-by-design approaches, even though we don’t yet have a full picture of who we’re designing for. That’s the tension I’m working through right now.

One of my biggest interests in L&D and training is how impact gets proven over passive activity and I believe storytelling is a big part of this.

How do you think impact can be proven in L&D with storytelling and showing the qualitative data side of things and not just the quantitative?

As of now, I’m a big believer in the LTEM framework the Learning Transfer Evaluation Model. It’s essentially an evolution of the Kirkpatrick model, which a lot of people are familiar with. I used it myself for years, but LTEM builds on that in a way that feels more practical and credible.

What it does is take you from the initial reaction, things like engagement, what people thought and felt, through to deeper levels like decision-making capability, application of learning in role, and then ultimately the impact on departments and the business itself.

We’ve implemented this at WebPros, and it allows us to track that journey. For example, in a recent leadership programme, we had a 97% relevancy score. Now, relevancy is absolutely critical, arguably the most important factor in learning, because if something feels relevant, people are far more likely to apply it. And if they apply it, you start to see departmental impact, and then eventually business impact.

Another key point is language. You can’t go into a business and talk about “learning transfer” or “relevancy scores” and expect people to understand or care. If I’m speaking to our head of finance, they want to know: What time has been saved? What costs have been reduced? What revenue has been generated? You have to translate learning impact into business impact.

At the same time, you need to know your audience. Some people want the numbers, but others need storytelling. Personally, I need stories to feel the impact. I need to see what’s changed for people. So you need both: the data and the narrative. That’s how you make impact land.

That’s something I’ve really seen through my freelance work as well, particularly with charities. I’m currently working with the Resuscitation Council, which is the UK’s leading resuscitation organisation. They train healthcare professionals across the NHS, anyone who might need to put their hands on someone to save their life. In that kind of environment, yes, they care about the numbers like how many lives have been saved, compliance, all of that. But what really lands for them is the story. They need to see the human impact.

It was the same in the charity sector more broadly. When you’re pitching for funding, it’s rarely the stats alone that win it. It’s the story. It’s what I’d call the empathy gap, which is helping people truly understand the lived experience of the end user.

That’s where learning designers are actually in a really strong position, because through proper scoping and insight gathering, we understand the problems people are facing, the impact those problems are having on their real lives, and then we can show the contrast of what it looked like before, and what it looks like after the intervention.

So when you combine that storytelling with the data, that’s where it becomes powerful. The stats give you credibility, but the story gives it meaning. And you need both if you want impact to truly land within an organisation.

What are your thoughts on learning styles vs preferences?

Fundamentally, I don’t believe in learning styles. The reason for that is because it was never really founded on robust research in the first place, but it’s become one of those systemic beliefs that’s just been washed through education and training. Anyone that’s gone through a PGCE, teacher training, or even apprenticeships in more recent years will have seen things like VAK still being pushed. I saw it myself on an apprenticeship I did about two years ago, so it’s still very much out there. That’s why it sticks because people are continually being fed it as if it’s fact.

What it tried to do was modularise people into neat categories of visual learner, auditory learner, kinaesthetic learner, but we know that’s not how learning actually works. People don’t operate in those fixed boxes, especially when it comes to applying learning in real-world contexts.

Now, preferences is a different conversation, but even that is something I get stuck on. Usually, when we talk about preferences, it’s coming from the learner i.e the person receiving the learning. They’ll say, “I prefer video,” or “I prefer podcasts,” or “I prefer this format.” But as a learning designer, you know it’s not that black and white. It’s much more nuanced than that.

Because ultimately, it depends on what you’re trying to learn and what you need to do with it. The outcome should dictate the experience, not the preference. And that’s where I think the whole conversation starts to break down, because once you focus on the outcome, the idea of preference becomes less relevant.

Here’s an example. The other day I needed to fix my car. Now, if you’d asked me my preference in that moment, I probably would’ve said I’d rather go for a walk and listen to a podcast. But would that have helped me fix the problem? No. What I needed was a step-by-step video that I could follow in real time while I was actually doing the task. That’s what got the job done.

It’s exactly the same in a business context. If we’re delivering something like leadership development and we need someone to go away and complete a task within their team like apply a framework, use a template or have a specific type of conversation, a podcast might give them some nice insights or opinions, but it’s probably not going to help them execute. What they might need instead is a clear, structured guide or a tool that walks them through it step by step.

So yes, people can have preferences, and I don’t completely dismiss that. But as learning designers, we shouldn’t be designing purely for preferences. We should be designing the right experience for the right outcome, which is what is actually going to enable someone to do something differently in their role.

Because ultimately, that’s what matters. It’s not whether they enjoyed the format or whether it matched their preferred style. The truth is it’s about whether they were able to apply the learning and get the result. 

How do you feel AI is changing the L&D industry? 

I love AI. I’ll say that outright. I’ve been on a a journey with it, and I do genuinely think it’s a really powerful companion for an L&D professional. I use the word companion deliberately. It’s a friend, an ally, a tool. It should sit alongside us, just like any other tool we’ve got in our toolkit, like Articulate or any of the platforms we use. But it’s a tool and shouldn’t replace what we do.

Where I see it working really well is in doing a lot of the heavy lifting, particularly around administrative or time-consuming tasks that we either don’t particularly enjoy or that don’t necessarily require deep human creativity. 

A good example is something we’re working on at WebPros at the moment. We’re building a skills matrix. Now, typically, that would take us a couple of months to pull together properly. But with tools like Copilot and Claude, we’re doing that in a couple of weeks. All it’s really doing is helping us combine existing frameworks, structure things, and get to a solid starting point much faster. This is something that we can then sense-check, refine, and shape as humans.

That’s where I think AI is at its best. It frees up that cognitive load so that we can spend more time doing the things that actually require human thinking like creativity, problem-solving, understanding people, designing meaningful experiences. That’s where we add value.

Where I’ve seen it not work so well is when people start to over-rely on it or use it to mask a lack of capability. I’ve seen that happen, even within my own team. People leaning too heavily on AI as their design tool, rather than using it as support. 

You can spot it quickly if you know what you’re looking for. You can tell who is a strong learning designer and who isn’t, because the fundamentals just aren’t there. In one case, that became a real issue because the individual wasn’t actually capable of operating as a learning designer without AI, and that’s not where we want to be. I do think there’s a slippery slope there if people aren’t careful. AI is incredibly powerful, but it shouldn’t become a crutch.

At the same time, I think we absolutely should be embracing it and thinking about how we use it more intelligently. For example, we’re currently exploring building a learning coach in the form of an AI agent that can support people across the organisation. Because the reality is, we can’t coach everyone one-to-one at scale. An AI agent could help build healthy learning habits, prompt reflection, support line managers who aren’t learning professionals, and guide conversations around things like what have you learned, how are you applying it, how is it contributing to your goals, and where should you go next?

That’s a powerful use of AI, because it’s extending what we can do as a function without replacing the human element. But for me, the most important thing, and this is something I’m really clear on in our strategy, is that learning design should always be human-centred first, and then technology-enabled. The technology comes after.

I also think we need to be honest about the fact that content already exists. AI has made that even more obvious. So as learning designers, our role isn’t just to create more content, but to design how people learn, how they apply, how they change behaviour. That’s where we need to focus.

That’s another great nuanced answer. If you could change one or two things about L&D, what would they be and why? 

The first thing I would change is how well we prove impact. I’ve seen entire L&D teams being laid off because they couldn’t demonstrate their value, especially with the rise of AI. That’s a real risk. We need to be much better at showing what we as humans bring that technology can’t. Because there will come a point where companies are effectively “paying” for AI tools alongside human salaries. At that point, you have to justify your existence in very real terms.

The second thing I would change is the industry’s attachment to traditional learning solutions. We have to move beyond the idea that everything is a course or an e-learning module. Content already exists. People can access information instantly. So the role of the learning designer needs to shift towards solving problems.

Since I joined WebPros, we’ve only built two e-learning courses. Before that, they were building them every month. Now, we’re focusing more on toolkits, AI-enabled resources, and solutions that fit into how people actually work.

For example, people might just want to jump on a Teams call and talk through a topic. That’s learning. Communities of practice are coming back, those informal, conversational spaces where people share experiences and ideas.

So L&D needs to be open to anything. It’s not about being the “sage on the stage” anymore. It might be about facilitating, guiding, or enabling conversations. If you truly understand the problem, if you scope it properly, understand the people, their workflows, their challenges, and how they interact with the world, you can design something that actually works. That is where the real impact is.