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

Adam Portsmouth is a Husband and Father who took the leap to freelancing at the start of 2025. He founded Pathway Talent Development with the one goal: to make L&D impossible to cut – a goal close to his heart after a redundancy risk 2 months before his wedding in 2023.

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?

So a business (at least the business I would be working with) is at its core a network of people completing a complex series of tasks, processes, or actions in order to achieve its goals.

I ensure these people have the knowledge, skills, awareness, and ability to function optimally within said business, thus increasing the likelihood of business growth.

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

Speaking from my current contract, the main theme running through conversations with Executives is

What’s the word on the ground? How is this all being received? What’s happening from this?

Investing in any large scale people development project comes with the expectation that something positive will come out of it – rightly so. Positive for the learners, the culture, and the eventual business growth.

This is the challenge that I have faced in a particularly ‘set-in-their-way’ workforce to create systems that encourage, observe, reinforce, and reward behaviour change and process improvements.

Constant communication, expectation-setting and relationship building with both learners and leadership to ensure everyone is on the same page in how to interact with learning products professionally and appropriately.

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

Other than continuing to find work to support my family, my main focus is the development and distribution of The L&D Credibility Toolkit. A framework which I have developed, tested, and verified that bridges the gap between L&D professionals and the expectations of the ‘seat at the table’ conversations.

We know we need to be tracking more than just quiz scores and completion reports, but the majority of practitioners realistically don’t have the skills, relationships or influence to either get and analyse core business data, or get in-front of senior leadership with any results.

The L&D Credibility Toolkit helps people start from zero and build up the skills and influence to not only get awareness of the impact they have, but to also make them stand out in an endless sea of CVs and Portfolios.