Sarah Slade

For those of you who don’t speak or write Korean as badly as I do, the header gets translated as “It’s been a while”, but I prefer “Long time, no see”. You hear it a lot in k-dramas (along with “아이고!” and a swear word that I will not write or translate for you – but you can make a guess in the comments if you like).

The second half of 2024 got quite busy on a personal and professional level. I worked for three fantastic new clients, relearned old skills and reconnected with some old friends. This week is the first chance I’ve had to look up and take stock of everything that has happened in the past six months.

My lovely former employers asked me to work on some changes to learning programmes that I had designed when I was there, including:

• Revising, updating and redesigning classroom materials for the company’s sales training
• Restructuring the commercial leadership programme (my favourite and best of all the things I designed when I was there) into two separate half-day blended learning experiences. On the digital side that meant adding new learning videos and content. On the classroom side it meant rethinking the ‘live’ aspect to fit in all the new content and still deliver a rich learning experience.

In an on-off project that started in July and may end this month, I created a new piece of digital learning on adult safeguarding for a local authority’s joint safeguarding teams. This entailed working with stakeholders across different organisations and learning the Lifter LMS content creation tool (it’s not bad).

In September I got a chance to revive my Storyline skills! There’s still a bit of rust in the joints, but I designed and built a 20-minute culture piece for a utility company and a bunch of financial education modules with a nature theme for a multinational.

I’ve also had a sneak look at Adobe Captivate; the new tools look very sexy, but I can’t afford it just yet.

My big Christmas treat was a huge opportunity. I was part of a two-person design team for a week-long programme of virtual classrooms on digital marketing skills, aimed at African entrepreneurs. This programme went beyond the basic training, with really in-depth classes on data analytics, trend spotting and leveraging AI. It was an absolute blast to work on and I learned a lot from the local SMEs about a totally new and growing market.

January 2025 has (so far) started off quietly, but I’m looking forward to sharing more thoughts and experiences. I’ll update the portfolio this week and share my thoughts on Lifter…

But…So far my resolutions for 2025 are:

• Grow the freelance practice
• Retake the TOPIK exam and move up to the next level (TOPIK II)
• Get a new left hip (NHS willing)
• Do loads more interesting stuff.