In this video, I sat down with Dr. Theresa Brough (who I’ve known since she came through my bootcamp back in 2021) to break down what it actually looks like to go from “solo ID” to building a strategic, business-aligned learning program from scratch. Theresa shares how she moved from K-12 teaching into instructional design, landed her first role before her portfolio was even finished, and then worked her way up into senior leadership—without having a huge L&D team behind her. We get into the real work: how she handled the flood of training requests, why she started by meeting with department leaders to understand pain points, goals, values, and culture, and how she prioritized what would make the biggest impact. A big theme is relationship-building—earning trust, asking better questions, and having the humility to understand why current processes exist before trying to “fix” them. Theresa also shares practical change management tactics (testing, soft rollouts, and getting buy-in early), plus one of the most important learning design takeaways: people learn best when they make connections with each other. Designing manager/peer conversations around the training made the learning stick and shifted how people perceived the program.