Head of Content at Promote
Ask most L&D teams how to improve engagement in their LMS, and the answers cluster around the same handful of tactics: badges, leaderboards, shorter videos, a nicer interface. None of that is wrong. Gamification can genuinely make a course more interesting to sit inside. The problem is treating it as the whole answer. On its own, it doesn’t explain why people weren’t engaging in the first place, because low engagement is usually a signal that the course wasn’t built to connect to anything beyond itself. Real engagement isn’t people spending more time in the LMS. It’s people caring enough about what’s inside it to actually use it afterward, and that depends on more than how the platform looks and feels.
Badges and leaderboards are the default because they’re fast to add and easy to point to in a report. Naming a specific outcome, involving managers, building in prework, and stretching content over time all take more coordination and show results later.
Badges and clean design aren’t the problem, and they’re not nothing either, they’re one dimension of a bigger design, not a substitute for the rest of it. Pair them with a named destination, real manager involvement, preparation before the session, and time stretched across weeks, and the platform-level tactics start working with something real underneath them, instead of trying to manufacture engagement that has nowhere to go.
Head of Content at Promote
You’ve probably heard the pitch by now: learning journeys create lasting behavior change in a way a single course doesn’t. You’re convinced, and you want to start rebuilding the courses you already run. Here’s a concrete guide to actually doing it, step by step. Hint: no need to start from scratch, and no need to throw out what you’ve already built.
Start by asking yourself a simple question: what’s this course actually for, and what should be different afterward? Not what it covers, but what someone should be doing differently once it’s over.
Most courses are built around a topic ("leadership skills," "negotiation," "onboarding") rather than a clear purpose, so this is often the first time that purpose gets put into words. Write it down as one specific sentence, every other step in this guide uses that exact sentence, not a general sense of it.
Take the material you already have and break it into stages spread over weeks instead of delivering it all in one session. Use the sentence from Step 1 as the filter: content that builds directly toward that specific result stays, and content that doesn’t can usually be trimmed or moved to optional material. Decide what belongs before the main event (context, a pre-task), what belongs during it (the part that’s genuinely better live), and what belongs after it (practice, application, reinforcement), all judged against that same sentence.
Pick two moments, right before your course starts, and a few weeks after it ends, and build a short, specific prompt for a manager at each one, written around the exact sentence from Step 1. Instead of "how did it go," it becomes something like "has [name] started doing [the specific behavior] yet?" Tie it to something the manager is already accountable for that quarter. Of everything in this guide, this is usually the single change that does the most for whether the course actually sticks.
If your course currently ends with a feedback survey, add this alongside or in place of it: a short, specific follow-up sent a few weeks later that asks directly about the Step 1 outcome, not "what did you take away," but "have you tried [the specific behavior], and what got in the way?" This is a new stage tacked onto the end of what you already run, it doesn’t touch the original content at all.
demo Before your next cohort goes through the course, decide how you’ll measure whether the outcome from Step 1 actually happened, not whether people liked the session. That might be a manager observation, a short self-report tied to the specific behavior, or a check against real work output. Put it in place before the next run, not after, so you’re not trying to measure something retroactively once the course is already over.
You don’t need to rebuild the whole course in one pass to see this guide through. Add the manager checkpoint first, or the follow-up, and layer in the rest over your next few runs. Each step you add makes the course a little more of a journey and a little less of a one-off event, and you’ll have real behavior-change data to show for it well before you’ve finished all five.
A few things to consider before trying the platform:
…there’s a Demo guide within each module, explaining all the nifty features of the Promote Platform! You can find it under resources on the right hand side of the screen.
