Most L&D is built for a captive audience: employees who have to attend whether the training is any good or not. Emma Ackers builds for the opposite, an audience that can walk away. Her learners are external insurance brokers, free to ignore her work entirely, and that one difference sharpens how she designs it.

Adam Lacey sits down with Emma Ackers, Learning and Development Manager at Aviva and President of the Insurance Institute of Manchester. Emma is not a typical in-house L&D lead. She designs learning for Aviva's broker partners, the firms who sell insurance out in the market. It is offered to those brokers as a service, which means they only take it up if it genuinely helps them.

With 21 years in insurance, starting out as a broker herself before moving into learning, Emma knows first-hand the day job her learners are trying to do.

She explains why the first question is always the business problem the broker is facing and never the course itself, the ambassador model she uses to test an idea with a trusted group of brokers before rolling it out to everyone, and why she judges success by whether people apply the learning back at work more than by how many turned up.

What you'll learn:

1. Why building for an audience that can walk away makes learning sharper and more useful for everyone
2. How starting from the business problem, rather than the training, builds the value in from the first conversation
3. The ambassador model: testing a new idea with a trusted group of customers before you roll it out to everyone
4. Why the best insurance professionals need both technical knowledge and people skills, and how Emma develops both
5. How volunteering, including leading the Insurance Institute of Manchester, builds skills your day job never will

🔗 Connect with Emma

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmaackers/

📮 The Assembly Debrief

A short, practical email unpacking the best ideas from each episode, designed for modern learning leaders who want insight without the noise. https://www.assembleyou.com/the-assembly/newsletter

👋 Come and connect with us

We're always keen to hear what's resonating or what you're seeing in your world.

Adam Lacey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/

Richard Ward - https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardpward/

More from The Assembly & Assemble You

Learning that feels more like great content than training. Explore podcast-style lessons, video shorts, and series designed for real work. https://www.assembleyou.com

Privacy & Data

This podcast is hosted by Transistor. For more information on how your data is handled, please visit: https://www.transistor.fm/privacy/

If the value conversation happens at the end of your projects, the only question left is how to justify what you have already built.

Adam sits down with Tom McDowall, who through Evolve LD helps organisations upskill their L&D, training and HR teams in practical ways of working, to unpack a distinction that changes how a function operates: the difference between proving you were valuable after the fact and asking how you can be valuable before anything gets made.

From managing a sales team, to delivering the same induction week after week for a year and a half, to leading digital teams and chairing the Learning Network, Tom brings a practitioner's lens to measurement, with a fully worked example and real numbers to go with it.

He breaks down the metric chain that connects an intervention to a board-level objective, why line managers are already doing the observation L&D is not capturing, and where AI has finally become good enough to do the statistical work.

What you'll learn:

1. Why proving value after the fact is a conversation no other business function has to have, and what to ask instead
2. How to build a metric chain from intervention to behaviour to KPI to organisational objective, and how certain you should expect to be at each link
3. Why every learning asset needs a sunset date, and how zombie content survives in most catalogues
4. How to get closer to your own business, from reading the annual report to what to say when you ask for an hour of the C-suite's time

🔗 Connect with Tom LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-mcdowall/

📮 The Assembly Debrief

A short, practical email unpacking the best ideas from each episode, designed for modern learning leaders who want insight without the noise. https://www.assembleyou.com/the-assembly/newsletter

👋 Come and connect with us

We're always keen to hear what's resonating or what you're seeing in your world. Adam Lacey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/

Richard Ward - https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardpward/

More from The Assembly & Assemble You

Learning that feels more like great content than training. Explore podcast-style lessons, video shorts, and series designed for real work. https://www.assembleyou.com

Privacy & Data

This podcast is hosted by Transistor. For more information on how your data is handled, please visit: https://www.transistor.fm/privacy/

If your learning programmes are built on instinct and inherited habits, the science of how the brain actually learns changes what good design looks like.

Brigid McCormack sits down with Tessa Forshaw, a cognitive scientist who studies how we work, learn and create, to unpack what neuroscience reveals about how adults really learn, and the myths still shaping L&D.

A cognitive scientist, award-winning designer, TEDx speaker and co-author of Innovation-ish, Tessa co-founded the Next Level Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and teaches at Harvard's Division of Continuing Education and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She spent more than a decade designing corporate L&D before going back to study how the brain learns, and now brings that science back to real teams.

She breaks down why learning styles do not hold up, why nobody can multitask and how memory really works, then turns the science into practical design: learning that is deep, durable and practiced.

What you'll learn:

1. Why the learning styles myth falls apart under the science, and how to match the method to the content rather than the person
2. Why nobody can truly multitask, and the switching costs that break focus every time a learner dips into the side chat
3. How memory really works, and why retrieval practice beats leaving recall to chance
4. The groove in the sand model for building deep and durable learning through effort and desirable difficulty
5. Why the strongest L&D leaders are moving from content provider to strategic advisor as AI automates the rest

🔗 Connect with Tessa Forshaw

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tessaforshaw/

📮 The Assembly Debrief

A short, practical email unpacking the best ideas from each episode, designed for modern learning leaders who want insight without the noise. https://www.assembleyou.com/the-assembly/newsletter

👋 Come and connect with us

We're always keen to hear what's resonating or what you're seeing in your world.

Adam Lacey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamlacey/

Richard Ward - https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardpward/

More from The Assembly & Assemble You

Learning that feels more like great content than training. Explore podcast-style lessons, video shorts, and series designed for real work. https://www.assembleyou.com

Privacy & Data

This podcast is hosted by Transistor. For more information on how your data is handled, please visit: https://www.transistor.fm/privacy/