Most learning and development practices are designed for internal employees—people who have access to corporate systems, are required to complete training, and share organizational context. When those same assumptions are applied to customers, learning often fails. Customer education operates under very different conditions: Learners are voluntary, time‑constrained, globally distributed, and access learning across multiple platforms. Treating customer education as if the same conditions apply often results in low adoption, poor access, unclear value, and missed opportunities to support customer confidence, product adoption, and long‑term success. 

This session reframes customer education as external‑facing learning that requires a fundamentally different approach than internal L&D. Drawing on real‑world experience leading global digital customer education, we will explore how learning design decisions may change when the learner is a customer. You will learn how to design customer education that is accessible, credible, and scalable, while navigating constraints such as multiple delivery channels, legal and privacy considerations, and complex data visibility. You will participate in guided decision moments around customer‑education design choices (e.g., access models, delivery channels, and data tradeoffs) amd enagage in short peer discussions to share challenges, patterns, and lessons learned from designing learning for customers.

In this session, you will learn to:

• Explain why customer education is fundamentally different from internal training
• Identify key design and delivery considerations for external‑facing learning
• Find pathways to display learning to customers in their time of need, outside of an LMS, while still gaining valuable data
• Apply a customer‑education mindset to an existing learning initiative  
• Connect with peers who are designing learning for customers, building awareness of shared challenges and opportunities within this often‑overlooked practice area

This session is appropriate for learning professionals who are new to customer education as well as those who have been designing external‑facing learning for years and want to refine their approach. The session focuses on often-overlooked strategic and design considerations that apply across industries, platforms, and levels of experience.