By Amber Vanderburg, Founder, The Pathwayz Group
At The Pathwayz Group, we’ve worked with over a million learners across 75 countries, and a common mistake we see organizations make is trying to teach everything at once
The skills gap is growing. And a common reaction is to create twenty different learning focuses crammed into a 6-month plan. The result is divided focus, unclear action steps, and diluted ROI because you're trying to measure too many things at once.
It's like walking into a gym and trying to become a runner, a weightlifter, and a yoga expert all on the same day. You don't get stronger. You just get tired. I used to be a soccer/football coach and we would often say that the team with the biggest playbook is not necessarily the team that wins the games, it’s the team that can execute the plays with excellence. Same thing with learning, you don’t need everything at once, you need a few solid plays to move the ball closer to the goal line.
Find your focus first
Before designing anything, I ask: What direction are we going? What's the purpose - are we trying to fix something, improve something, or learn something entirely new? And what's actually motivating the people in the room (WIIFM)?
That last one matters more than people think. We interviewed a few hundred learners coming into our sessions and asked what motivated them to be there. Career advancement and salary increase were predictable. But the next answer surprised us: community. The social aspect was a huge driver. Every learning is different, identify the motivation for investment with each learner.
The WAYZ model
Over the years, we developed something we call the WAYZ model. It's the structure behind every learning journey we build.
Wander Start with community. Bring people together in facilitated sessions where they explore the big picture, set shared expectations, and connect the content to their real world. I don't give a lot of pre-work at this stage. What I've found is that front-loading pre-work before people understand the why can actually hurt that early momentum. Instead, I set clear expectations and then dive in. In the Wander stage, alignment, connection, and understanding/buy-in are my main goals. I had a mentor challenge me to advance “Connection before content” to “Connection is the content” and it really elevated the way we build community at this stage of the WAYZ model.
Apply After a facilitated session, people need space to make it personal. My situation is different from yours. My team has different challenges. This is where self-guided learning comes in - but not a library of 127,000 resources where you don't know where to start. We ask a few questions to identify the most pressing challenges/goals and, with AI-sorting, send over the top 3 resources that are most relevant. We also learned a lot from educational television - Sesame Street, Blue's Clues, Dora the Explorer. Sounds funny, but these shows figured out engagement decades ago. Our online learning is “Discovery Channel meets Harvard Business Review.” We started building more cinematic learning - story-driven, gamified, community-built content that people actually want to engage with.
Yearn After facilitation and self-guided learning, momentum is at risk of a dip. That's where one-on-one coaching comes in. We look to internal coaching first and only use external coaches where necessary. Pair people up. Keep the conversations to 5–10 minutes with a simple coaching guide. We have found this stage to be the most effective in building engagement, accountability, retention, and follow-through.
At this point we also collect data about action steps. Use a simple 3-point scale: did you complete your action step? Yes, halfway, or no. That's it. Simple data collection that tells you whether learning is actually translating into action.
Zealous celebration Too often, wins go uncelebrated. If 85% of your people followed through on their action steps, say it out loud! Share the testimonials. Show the data. This is how you build momentum for the next cycle and how you get buy-in from leadership for continued investment.
The real measure
People always ask me: how do I prove the value of a learning culture? My answer: stop trying to measure everything. Pick 2 to 4 focus areas per year. Measure the actions taken, not just the content consumed. And tie it back to whether you're fixing, improving, or building something new because the metrics will be different for each.
Scoring Goals
I used to coach a youth soccer team. One of my 6-year-old players came running onto the field on his first day yelling "Pass! Pass! Pass!" — even when the other team had the ball, even when he was nowhere near the action, even when he was the one holding the ball.
I asked him, "Why are you yelling “pass”?" He looked up and said, "Miss Amber, I do not know what it means. I only know it is a soccer word."
Sometimes organizations sound a little like that. We hear all the right words - AI, leadership, communication, culture but if we don't know our direction, those words aren't just ineffective. They're just noise.
But if we take the time to identify the learning focus and purpose, create engaging action focused learning, and build community for support in follow-through - we’ll be in a position to say pass, receive the ball, move forward, and score really big goals.
