What started as a “simple idea” turned into the most challenging thing I’ve built, and it honestly reshaped how I think about eLearning, my business, and what it should look like to learn instructional design the way real instructional designers actually work. In this video, I pull back the curtain on what I’ve been quietly building for over a year: the Instructional Design (ID) Project Lab. I share the story from the end of 2021 (when I built the Storyline Project Lab) to realizing there was still a massive gap—people could build “pretty eLearning,” but they were still struggling with analysis, stakeholder conversations, storyboarding, and solving real business problems. The big shift was moving from disjointed mini-projects to one cohesive, simulation-driven experience. You get “hired” at a fictional company (Chic Avenue), receive a training request, run a kickoff call, collect messy real-world data, and then justify learning and non-learning solutions. From there, you build the actual deliverables: needs assessment report, design doc, evaluation plan, scripts, storyboards, VILT materials, and job aids. I also talk about the hard parts: perfectionism, capacity limits (including jaw surgery), and learning to say no. Then I show what changed in the 2025 revamp—more interactivity, deeper analysis, better templates, and replacing AI talking-head videos with emails and custom GPT simulations based on student feedback.