Each month we shine a spotlight on a member of the Free Spirits community.

This month we’re featuring Dan Roddy, after dropping out of a computer science degree to pursue English just before the dot com boom got underway, Dan has been dancing around the nexus of communication and technology ever since. With now two decades of L&D practice behind him, Dan founded Handprint Training in March 2026.

You’ve stepped into a lift and someone asks what you do. You’ve got five floors before the doors open, what do you say?

After I have finished reflexively apologising for all the compliance training they have ever done in their lives – what most people understand to be elearning – I tell them I can help them make it better, whether through good instructional design or better, more appropriate assessment.

What challenge do your clients most often bring to you, and how do you help sort it out?

All too often my challenge has been convincing managers that most likely their problem is not a training matter – it’s either corralling the right resources or setting out the right incentives to help people find their own way to doing the thing they need to do. Or it’s worse than that – there are active reasons stopping people from doing the thing, whether that’s a poorly defined workflow or process.

Only once you have established that what is stopping people from performing is a matter of skills or knowledge are you ready to train people. And key to that working is creating effective assessment, so that’s what I focus on at Handprint – instructional and assessment design.

What are you currently building, experimenting with, or hoping to do more of this year?

Like everyone right now I am experimenting with AI. There are countless ways we are going to be able to use this as part of the toolset we use to develop the people we work with, but for now I see the value in getting it to pick up the slow, time-consuming tasks that have always stopped us from delivering the effective inputs.

Deeply uncool and flies in the face of every LinkedIn post I read proclaiming the end of L&D but I know I am never going to compete with Microsoft, or Google in creating the world in which AI replaces the L&D function completely, but while they go about that we can do what we have done up to now far better than we have in the past.