Most people don’t wake up excited about “pre-work” or “post-work.”
And honestly, I don’t blame them.
In many organisations, pre- and post-learning tasks have become the spinach of L&D – good for you, universally prescribed, but rarely appetising.
Yet in the years spent designing learning journeys, we’ve also seen how powerful these touchpoints can be when we consider how people actually tend to function.
1. Pre-work can be a powerful tool if it’s permitted to be.
Table of Contents
The real purpose of pre-work is to prepare the brain for learning – nothing more ambitious than that.
From a cognitive science perspective, pre-work matters because if done well, it can both create intrinsic motivation to learn for the learner, as well as make the brain more readily process new information during a session since it was previously primed with the idea during the pre-work.
This doesn’t require a long reading or a 45-minute video.
It can be a simple prompt like:
“Think of a difficult conversation you avoided or mishandled recently. If you avoided – what held you back? If you mishandled – what went wrong?”
This single reflection establishes the immediate relevance of upcoming learning to personal and professional life which acts as a “what’s in it for me” (WIIFM). And as all learning designers know, this is a key factor which can determine learner attendance and participation in sessions.
It can even be a quick 2-min read about the relevant topic or idea the learner would learn about during the session. Once in the session, the learner wouldn’t feel the heavy cognitive load of new information and would naturally find their attention drawn to the content because of prior familiarity.
2. Post-work isn’t to burden, but to support.
When you want to learn how to fix a small problem with one of your devices, do you:
A. Do a one-week online course beforehand about all possible technical bugs which can affect your device to be prepared for moments like this?
B. Watch a quick YouTube video or jump to Reddit or Quora to find that one person who had the exact same problem 4 years ago and got a helpful answer?
Pre and post work need to be designed keeping in mind people’s actual behaviours rather than the idealistic behaviours we hope or expect to see in them. People learn and apply best when learning feels relevant and ongoing support feels…well, supportive. Yet, the tendency for a lot of us may be to plan the most elaborate assignments, mandatory heavy text readings, or 3-6-month projects for our learners to do after their sessions – and worst of all, these may need to be done over and above daily work rather than built within it.
However, Vygotsky, an influential psychologist for his works on cognitive development, proposed that learning happens best when people are supported through carefully designed “scaffolds” – temporary structures that help them perform tasks they cannot yet do alone, but can do with the right guidance. Crucially, scaffolding is temporary, light-touch & relevant, and removed gradually as confidence grows.
Once the workshop ends, learners aren’t stepping into a vacuum. They’re stepping back into inboxes, deadlines, personal commitments, team crises, and all the invisible labour that fills a workday. In that environment, even the most motivated learner will struggle to experiment with new behaviours if the first step feels too big.
The most effective post-work is the kind that is low effort, relevant to the learner’s work, and disappears into their actual workflow.
One goal of actually supportive post work is to reduce what psychologists call “activation energy”. This essentially means that the smaller the effort needed to start, the more likely someone is to follow through. So instead of asking people to overhaul their leadership style in a week, post-work can offer them something far kinder and far more effective: small, structured, doable next steps.
In short, once we view post-work as scaffolding, the design becomes gentler and more intentional. The goal is simply to help people use what they learned – not to overwhelm them with more content or to test their commitment.
A few scaffolding techniques which I’ve seen be helpful are:
1. Recaps that remind and motivate
A short recap functions the way retrieval cues do in memory research: it helps the brain reactivate the core ideas so they’re easier to access when needed. But it works best when it connects directly to the learner’s day-to-day reality.
Often the instinct is to consolidate every concept from the session – sometimes even adding new material – into a long reference document. But beware, too much information works against retention.
A few focused points work well, especially when they point the learner back to where the learning actually lives in their role. For a decision-making session, for example, the recap may simply show the “decision traps” discussed in the workshop and ask participants to identify where one recently showed up in their own project.
The purpose is functional: remind learners of what matters, why it matters, and where it applies. When recaps anchor directly in real work, they stop feeling like “review material” and start feeling like a practical nudge.
2. Reflections aimed at synthesis
Reflection sometimes gets trivialised in corporate learning, but its psychological purpose is pragmatic: it is where consolidation happens. Retrieval and application become easier when new learning builds directly on the experiences people already have.
The key is to make reflection specific and work-embedded.
We once partnered with an organization’s internal IT team who wanted to improve their communication with their users. Queries were high in volume and were often met with highly technical explanations (use of jargon) or dismissive tone, making it difficult for users to understand and implement solutions. This sometimes led to frustration and inefficiencies on both sides.
The reflection prompt in their post work asked them to take an actual user interaction they had handled recently and examine it through the lens of the workshop insights around ‘the curse of knowledge’ (the tendency to communicate in a way that assumes that others have the same amount of information and knowledge that we do about a subject).
Essentially: What did I say then? How would I say it now, knowing what I know about how little context the user may have had?
Because this was tied to real interactions, the answers were practical. People wrote about replacing technical terms with clearer instructions, or slowing down enough to acknowledge the user’s confusion before jumping into a solution. Nothing grand – just small adjustments that made their communication easier for users to act on.
That’s often all reflection needs to be: a simple question pointed at work people are already doing, helping them rethink a real moment rather than invent a new one. It creates meaning without adding extra tasks.
3. Realistic and relevant applications
Application works best when it fits into the work people are already doing. Practice activities – within a learner’s context, targeting an immediate challenge the learner’s facing, where the action asked of them feels within reach and easy enough to do – are most likely to be tested.
Behaviour change research suggests that people adopt new behaviours when the first step is small, concrete, relevant to context, viewed as important in the learner’s mind, and unambiguous. If an action looks too demanding, they simply won’t attempt it.
In the case of the IT team, the volume and repetition of queries sometimes affected the patience needed for clear communication. The application activity asked them to take a few minutes to think of a few of the recurring queries they and their colleagues receive from users, and put together a resource to proactively share with users and reduce the number of queries they get.
This directly tied to their work, addressed a specific challenge they faced, and was easy and quick for them to do. Learners reported things like creating a simple step-by-step SOP that eliminated a frequent error, and fixing a bug which multiple users would reach out for – after which queries reportedly reduced by 20%. These were all things they needed to solve anyway; the post-work just gave them a structure to approach it differently.
So application tasks are best when relevant and simple: one tool to test in an upcoming conversation, one behaviour to observe in themselves, one small modification to their routine, etc.
Remember, small wins are key for behaviour change. If people don’t see early signs of progress, they won’t be motivated to keep trying.
4. Tap into peer learning
People often understand an idea better when they see how someone else has interpreted or applied it in a similar situation. A colleague’s example can make a concept feel more real, and it can also make early attempts feel less isolating. If someone hears that another person struggled with the same challenge and found a workable approach, it reduces the hesitation that usually comes with trying something new.
A light peer component can help – something as simple as sharing one thing they tried, one obstacle they hit, or one adjustment that worked. It doesn’t have to be a big group activity or a formal showcase. Even a short exchange in a discussion forum can give learners useful cues for how to apply the learning in their own context.
Bringing it all together
If there’s an underlying principle that ties all of this together, it’s that post-work should reduce cognitive load, not add to it. The best post-work makes the next step obvious at a time when the energy from the workshop has begun to fade.
Most people aren’t resisting learning – they’re handling full workloads, shifting priorities, and the normal discomfort that comes with changing familiar habits. Scaffolding recognises this reality. It provides just enough structure for progress without making the process feel heavy.
In the end, effective learning design follows a simple philosophy: keep it relevant, keep it usable, and keep it light. The more learning integrates into the flow of work, the more likely it is to be applied.
