From Teaching to Learning Design: What I’ve Learned

When I think about my transition from teaching English to learning design, I realize there was never a neat before-and-after moment, where one chapter closes, the next one opens, and suddenly I’m designing corporate learning journeys instead of standing in a classroom. But my career never felt like that. If anything, it unfolded so gradually that I only recognized later how naturally it evolved - and how much sense the transition made once I looked back on it. What I am doing today didn’t replace teaching; it grew out of it.

I started my teaching career during my university days with private tutoring - something many on this path do. Then I moved on to teaching English in every place and format I could, and even got myself a CELTA after spending a month in London. That’s where my story took a dramatic turn: I landed a job at a major IT university in Russia. My first year there was entirely focused on teaching. I taught General English, English for Specific Purposes, Academic Writing, and courses for university staff. Those early days were supercharged by everything I learned over the years and during my CELTA training: planning lessons by the book, adjusting them on the fly, trying different approaches with different groups, and wondering why a brilliant activity worked perfectly with one group but fell flat with another. I was collecting and cataloguing data in the back of my mind. Every confused look, every “aha” moment, every unexpected question gave me clues about how people learn.

The real turning point came after that first year, when the department decided to create an internal course development team. I was offered the chance to try my hand at it, went through the interviews, and was eventually invited to join, starting August 2019. Suddenly, my world expanded. I still had “classroom hours”, but now I was also helping build the very programs we taught, designing course structures, writing assessment tasks, thinking about outcomes. This was something that fed my brain’s constant need to analyze, break down, problem-solve, and get to the bottom of things with my endless whys.

For three years, I lived at the intersection of teaching and design. One day, I might be explaining grammar constructions, and the next, I’d be sitting in a meeting about placement test criteria. During that time, I co-authored both offline and online versions of a comprehensive Academic Writing program, as well as a redesign of placement testing. In the role of lead developer, I created ESP courses for ICT and IT for Humanities, and a fully asynchronous Academic Writing MOOC. And, of course, I supported my colleagues in creating many more different specialized courses.

Before designing a new course, we would conduct a thorough needs analysis. After rollout, we would talk to teachers and students to evaluate how our programs were working in practice. All of this demanded a solid grasp of learning theory, and this is where I need to thank my mentor, the head of our Course Development team. She showed me examples, laid out the concepts, gave me reading material to study - all this to develop both my skills and my intuition. She supported me at my best and at my worst, putting her best effort to shape me as a professional.

Then life shifted, as it tends to do. After leaving Russia, I went through a transitional period where I mostly tutored privately. It wasn’t the most dramatic or glamorous part of this story, but still, even in one-on-one lessons, I kept redesigning materials, reorganizing progression, creating little “micro-courses.” But teaching alone didn’t feel like the whole picture anymore. I wanted something bigger in scope, something that would let me shape learning experiences from start to finish, and for it to be a practical endeavor.

My move into the corporate world happened through a role that, on paper, was still “teaching.” When my current company hired me, the title didn’t immediately reflect the actual reason they wanted me: my background in program design. My early days there were a mix of everything: designing online courses, live teaching, LMS support, organizing learning initiatives, helping build processes, and supporting a learning culture. It was a lot of things at once (and sometimes overwhelming), but it exposed me to the realities of workplace learning: working across teams, balancing business needs with learner needs, documenting processes, and dealing with constraints that simply don’t exist in academia.

Little by little, the balance shifted again - through my own choices and with the support of our then-head of L&D. More course creation landed on my desk. Fewer live sessions. More requests from stakeholders. More projects where I was responsible for everything: the content, the structure, the user experience, the evaluation plan. I became the person asked to “help us design this,” not “teach this.”

By the time my role formally changed to Learning Experience Designer, it felt like the title had finally caught up to what I had already been doing.

My teaching background continues to shape the way I approach design. Years in the classroom gave me a kind of intuition that makes a lot of sense in my current role: I can feel when something will confuse people, when instructions aren’t as clear as they seem, when a scenario is too abstract, when a task looks easy on paper but will frustrate real learners. It’s the instinct that comes from watching dozens of groups react to the same piece of content in fifteen million different ways.

Teaching also taught me the art of explanation. Turning complex ideas into simple steps is an essential skill for any instructional or learning experience designer. Whether I’m writing microcopy, creating a compliance module, scripting voice narration, or teaching someone how to navigate Jira, I rely on those old muscles every day.

And then there’s feedback - the lifeblood of both teaching and design. Teachers give it and receive it on the daily. Translating that into LXD was natural: building practice loops, designing rubrics, interpreting user data, running pilot sessions, adjusting content based on what learners actually do rather than what we expected them to do.

At the same time, corporate learning taught me things teaching never could. The biggest one was how much learning designers work with stakeholders. In a classroom, it’s mostly you and your students. Sure, when designing ESP courses, we consulted experts from the departments whose students were the target demographic for that program, but these instances were few and far between. In corporate environments, you have to work with subject-matter experts, managers, HR, compliance teams, IT, PMO, and sometimes entire departments. You learn to negotiate, reframe, justify, and persuade. You understand that learning design is as much about aligning people as it is about crafting content.

And now I realize how learning experience design brings together the creativity and empathy I learned through teaching with the strategy, documentation, and rigor that define corporate L&D.

If I were to give advice to teachers considering a similar path, the first thing I would say is that you don’t have to start from scratch and reinvent yourself. You already have more relevant experience than you think. If you’ve ever redesigned a lesson, built your own materials, created assessments, or adapted content based on learner needs, you’ve already done learning design. The second thing is that transitions don’t have to be abrupt. Mine certainly wasn’t. It was a slow journey on a winding path, full of hybrid roles where I was doing both teaching and design in different proportions.

Most importantly, I’ve learned that I never truly “left” teaching. I expanded and transformed it. Teaching taught me how people learn. Course development taught me how to design for that learning. Corporate LXD taught me how to create experiences that support real-world performance and that align with organizational goals.

Different contexts, different tools, different constraints - and the same core purpose: helping people learn new things.

And that, I think, is what has stayed with me through every stage of this journey.