About
Anyone can do
production.
That is what I was told. So I built a playground to prove otherwise. This is that playground - and then some.
Origin story
Where Skills Issue came from
I was working as a multimedia developer inside an L&D team, pushing for a more expressive, production-led approach to learning design. The kind of work where the interaction is the learning - not a wrapper around it.
Someone in marketing told me that production was easy. That anyone could do it.
So I built a playground. Internally. On my own time. Mini games, micro-interactions, experiments in scenario design - all wrapped in a platform I called Skills Issue.
The name is a gaming term. When you fail at something in a game, other players tell you it is a "skill issue" - meaning the problem is you, not the game. I flipped it. The skill issue was not mine. It was a gap in how the industry thought about production craft.
then the job ended.
Before the internal version could launch properly, I was let go. The platform sat backed up on a hard drive. The experiments were brand agnostic, the code was clean, and the idea was too good to shelve.
Skills Issue went public. This is what it became.
The craft
What I actually do
I sit at the intersection of instructional design and multimedia production. That is a less common combination than it should be - most people do one or the other. I do both, and I think the gap between them is where most eLearning goes wrong.
I came up through production, not through instructional design theory. That means I reach for a mechanic before I reach for a template, and I think about what the learner is actually doing rather than what the slide deck is saying.
Game design thinking
Mechanics, progression, and juice - applied to learning contexts.
eLearning development
Authoring tools, xAPI, LMS ecosystems, interactive content.
AV production
Video, audio, and motion - built for learning contexts.
Instructional design
ADDIE, SAM, action mapping, cognitive load, retrieval practice.
Frontend build
HTML, CSS, JS - experiments built from scratch, no templates.
AI in L&D
Practical application and honest critique - not just the hype.
Background
The story so far
2026 - now
Skills Issue goes public
Playground, podcast, field notes. Building in the open, sharing what I know, and proving the point.
2024 - 2026
Lead creative and multimedia developer
360-degree scenarios, interactive learning, the internal Skills Issue prototype. Pushed the craft as far as the budget would go. Got let go.
Earlier
eLearning and multimedia development
Building the toolkit across authoring tools, LMS platforms, video production, and the instructional design fundamentals that hold it all together.
The beginning
Came up through production
Not through instructional design theory. That is the lens everything else gets filtered through.
Explore
Where to go from here
The playground is the point. Start there.