Marketing Your Learning: Hooks, Trust, and Real Impact at Work

What if your next “course” wasn’t a course at all - but a sharp hook, a simple habit, and a message delivered exactly where work happens?  In this episode Bill Banham sits down with Bianca Baumann, VP of Learning Solutions and Innovation at Ardent Learning, to rethink how L&D earns attention, builds trust, and drives performance with the precision of great marketing. Bianca digs into the learner-before-content mindset and why it changes everything from scoping to scale. Bianca lays out practical moves any team can make this quarter: write like a marketer, lead with the “what’s in it for me,” and end every asset with a clear call to action. Instead of chasing new platforms, meet people in channels they already use - email, Slack, Teams, or even tooltips in your CRM - so guidance shows up at the exact moment of need. We also talk trust as a strategy: crowdsourcing institutional knowledge, opening creation to the business, and earning credibility by tying learning to real outcomes. Then we go upstream. Should L&D sit inside business lines rather than HR? Bianca explains how proximity turns reactive training orders into proactive performance consulting, where many “training requests” become communication or habit challenges. We explore AI’s near-term value - faster drafting, item writing, and analysis - with the necessary human oversight, and the longer horizon of agentic systems that deliver help in the flow of work. If you’re ready to pilot change, you’ll leave with concrete steps: rewrite course titles with hooks, run a six-part email drip from an existing module, and bring back results leaders care about. If this conversation sparks ideas, follow the show, share it with a colleague who wrangles “noisy” learning requests, and leave a quick review. Your feedback helps us reach more L&D pros who want to make learning simpler, smarter, and closer to the work. Connect with Bianca Baumann:   / biancabaumann   Connect with Bill Banham:   / bill-banham-a932a0b   Voices of the Learning Network is the Learning Network podcast connecting the learning and development community. https://thelearning-network.org/