Your Chief Virtual Learning Architect

Learning to Performance

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Custom Design & Delivery

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Predictive Evaluation

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Enterprise Learning Strategy

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Dave Basarab Consulting has elevated the training experience, offering an end-to-end comprehensive approach that includes training strategy, instructional design, development, delivery , post program training transfer, and evaluation (via the unique Predictive Evaluation methodology). Virtual Chief Architect Dave Basarab has combined all of these individual training elements with his user-friendly, comprehensive Learning to Performance approach, which significantly increases companies' training ROI.

Why we are different

Innovation: Our primary focus is creating learning programs using a Learning to Performance approach.
Expertise: Dave offers the depth and breadth of his experience, including working internally at prestigious companies (Motorola, Ingersoll Rand and Pitney Bowes) as well as his knowledge and expertise as a highly-respected, sought-after consultant.
Partnership: Basarab collaborates with companies, serving as their own Chief Learning Officer whenever they need to plan, strategize, or implement training initiatives.

Training Services

Enterprise Learning Strategy

Enterprise Learning Strategy

At Dave Basarab Consulting, we're experts in creating Enterprise Learning Plans. We work with you to develop your company's learning strategy and direction.

Custom Design, Development, & Delivery

Custom Design, Development, & Delivery

Custom training is an effective way of developing the capability required to execute your strategy. We are a custom design house that creates programs specific to your business.

Learning Burst Development

Learning Burst Development

We can create and deliver your courses via our unique Learning Burst Method - keeping your employees at their jobs while receiving world-class training.

Predictive Evaluation

Predictive Evaluation

We predict the ROI for your courses and establish success gates. We then evaluate the course against the success gates to show value realized and continually improve results.

Leadership Development

Leadership Development

Turn-key virtual custom leadership development program that combines world-class leadership speakers/educators with post-event personalized coaching to provide you with a cadre of highly skilled leaders.

Predictive Evaluation

Designing Training That Respects Cognitive Load

Effective workplace learning depends on more than accurate content and attractive slides. People must be able to notice information, make sense of it, connect it with existing knowledge and retrieve it when work demands it. When training overwhelms those mental processes, completion rates and assessment scores may hide weak understanding.

Cognitive load refers to the amount of mental effort required at a given moment. Some effort is essential for learning, while other effort comes from cluttered screens, unclear instructions, irrelevant detail or poorly sequenced activities. Good training design reduces avoidable effort so employees can focus on the capability that matters.

This is especially important in Australian organisations, where learning may need to serve office teams in Sydney, regional staff in Queensland, FIFO workers in Western Australia and employees completing modules between customer calls. Training must be practical, accessible and suited to the realities of distributed work.

Why Cognitive Load Shapes Learning

Working memory has limited capacity. If a course presents a dense policy, a complex diagram and several instructions at once, learners may remember fragments without understanding how to apply them. This can produce familiar workplace outcomes: repeated questions, inconsistent decisions and low confidence after training.

A cognitive-load-aware approach breaks information into manageable units and gives learners time to process each one. It uses examples before abstractions, short explanations before practice and clear transitions between tasks. The result is not “simplified” learning in a superficial sense; it is learning designed around how people actually build knowledge.

Where Training Design Goes Wrong

Many courses overload learners through unnecessary animation, decorative graphics, long narration and paragraphs copied directly from policy documents. A compliance module might require employees to read a screen, listen to narration and interpret a flowchart simultaneously. Each element competes for attention.

Overload also occurs when learners lack prerequisite knowledge. Asking a new manager to complete a difficult scenario without explaining the decision framework creates avoidable frustration. Pre-assessment can identify what people already know, allowing a course to skip familiar material and spend more time on gaps. This approach is illustrated in adaptive e-learning design, where learning experiences respond to pre-assessment results.

Designing Around Working Memory

Chunking is one of the most useful techniques. A long procedure can become a sequence of small decisions, each supported by an example and a brief practice activity. Consistent layouts, plain language and visible signposting help learners recognise patterns rather than work out the structure of every screen.

Instructional designers should also manage intrinsic, extraneous and germane load. Intrinsic load comes from the complexity of the subject itself. Extraneous load comes from poor presentation. Germane load is the productive effort involved in forming useful mental models. The design goal is to reduce distractions while preserving meaningful thinking.

Retrieval practice, feedback and spaced reinforcement strengthen those mental models. A short scenario followed by targeted feedback often teaches more effectively than another page of explanation. Learning bursts can support this rhythm, particularly for sales teams that need quick refreshers between meetings; research on learning bursts shows how short activities can reinforce performance.

Adapting Learning To Australian Workplaces

Australian organisations often operate across wide distances and varied working conditions. A mining employee near Port Hedland may have different connectivity and time constraints from a professional in Melbourne’s CBD. A health service in regional New South Wales may need learning that works on shared devices, while a national retailer may train staff through mobile phones during busy trading periods.

Language and tone matter as well. Clear, direct wording tends to work better than corporate jargon, especially when teams include apprentices, frontline staff and workers who speak English as an additional language. A practical example framed around a toolbox talk, a customer issue or a handover can feel more relevant than a generic case study.

Accessibility is part of cognitive load management. Captions, transcripts, readable contrast, keyboard access and downloadable resources help people concentrate on the learning rather than struggle with the interface. These features also support workers in noisy environments, on variable internet connections or using assistive technology.

Connecting Mental Effort With Business Results

Training evaluation should examine whether learners can perform the target behaviour, not simply whether they enjoyed the course. Useful measures include time to competence, quality scores, error rates, supervisor observations and adoption of new processes. Predictive Evaluation can help organisations forecast likely uptake and connect learning activity with operational outcomes.

A useful design review considers the following dimensions:

Design question	Low-load approach	Risky approach
How is content presented?	Short sections with clear signposts	Dense screens with competing elements
How is practice used?	Relevant scenarios with feedback	Passive reading followed by a final quiz
How are differences handled?	Pre-assessment and flexible pathways	Identical content for every learner
How is support provided?	Job aids and reminders at the point of need	One course with no reinforcement
How is impact checked?	Behaviour and business measures	Attendance and satisfaction alone

Evaluation data can reveal whether poor performance reflects a knowledge gap, an unclear process, limited manager support or excessive task complexity. That distinction prevents organisations from responding to every business problem with another course.

Design Choices That Reduce Overload

A strong learning experience usually combines several small decisions rather than relying on one technique. Useful recommendations include:

Remove decorative content that does not support the learning objective.
Present one key idea or decision at a time.
Use worked examples before asking learners to solve unfamiliar problems.
Add retrieval activities across the learning journey, not only at the end.
Offer pre-assessment so experienced employees can avoid unnecessary content.
Provide job aids that support performance after formal training.
Test modules with real employees across different roles, locations and devices.

Designers should review every screen, instruction and activity by asking what mental work it requires. If learners must search for the next step, decode vague language or remember instructions from several screens earlier, the course is creating unnecessary load.

What Learners Should Remember

Cognitive load should be considered from the first performance question through to evaluation. Training needs a clear purpose, a realistic sequence and opportunities to practise decisions in conditions that resemble the job. Managers and subject matter experts also need to support transfer once the course ends.

The most effective design does not try to make learning effortless. It directs effort towards understanding, judgement and application. When organisations respect working-memory limits, tailor pathways and measure real-world adoption, training becomes easier to use and more valuable to the business. The key point to remember is simple: reduce avoidable mental effort so employees can spend their attention on performing well.

Learning to Performance

Learning to Performance, a complete training approach, gives companies world-class training to drive significant return. This approach includes upfront work (Impact Mapping, design), training (for staff and company executives), and post-training efforts to ensure training transfer. This unique recipe - the key for successful training and adoption - is changing the way companies implement training. This methodology could work with any content for organizations in any industry.