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Portrait of Jeff Geronimo, smiling, in a light blue collared shirt.

About the designer

Learning experience designer · Lead Learning Consultant, Customer & Partner Education at WRITER

I design training that helps people use AI at work. I’ve been doing it for more than 15 years (in AI years, that’s roughly the Jurassic period). My favorite part hasn’t changed: the moment someone realizes they can do it on their own.

How I got here

The short version: I started out teaching technical writing. The long version involves four learning platforms, a lot of time zones, and more webinars than I can count.

Teaching taught me the lesson I still design around. People rarely struggle to understand a new idea. The hard part is Tuesday at 2 p.m., when they have to actually use it (with their inbox open and a meeting in ten minutes). Most of my career has been about that moment.

I spent ten years at Open LMS and Blackboard, helping universities and companies get real value from their online learning tools. Then came a run of very different rooms:

  • At Amazon Web Services (AWS), I managed training programs for sales and technical teams.
  • At McKinsey Academy, I facilitated leadership programs that reached more than 50,000 leaders. Not all at once, thankfully.
  • At eLearningDoc, I headed course design and first brought AI into how my team built courses.

Different rooms, same question: how do you get people from “I get it” to “I did it”?

AI didn’t replace good design. It did replace a lot of blank pages.

Today I’m a Lead Learning Consultant at WRITER, an enterprise AI company, on the team that educates and enables its customers and partners. In practice, that means multi-week courses for people building their own AI tools, onboarding for partner companies, live webinars, and Demo Lab, a library of 15 short product videos I made with experts from across the company.

I’m also a doctoral candidate in educational technology. My research looks at how course designers are bringing AI into their everyday work, which is a formal way of saying I study people like me.

How I design

Three rules I try never to break. Think of them as the movements of a piece: each one builds on the last.

  1. Start with the goal

    Before I write a single lesson, I decide what you should be able to do by the end, and how you’ll show it. Otherwise it’s just a very organized tour.

  2. Practice with real feedback

    You learn by trying things yourself. When something needs work, the feedback tells you exactly what to fix, not just that something’s wrong.

  3. Leave no one out

    If someone can’t use it, it doesn’t work. Captions, transcripts, and full keyboard support go in from the first draft, following the international accessibility standard (WCAG 2.2 AA).

A course about AI, built with AI?

Fair question. AI Conductor Academy is an independent project I created to show how I work. I wrote the lessons, the quizzes, and the feedback in every hands-on activity. An AI coding assistant helped me build the website, and we worked the same way the course teaches: clear instructions, a plan for who does what, and a person who checks the final result.

In this case, that person was me. (I checked a lot.)

Here’s the serious part. AI is changing how many people do their jobs, and most of them didn’t ask for it. The least we can do is teach it well: clearly, honestly, and without making anyone feel behind.

Education

Let’s talk

I’m always happy to talk about course design, AI training, or how your team could put AI assistants to work. LinkedIn is the fastest way to reach me. Email works too, and yes, I actually read it.

Your turn.

About 90 minutes. No account needed. And, if all goes to plan, that moment I mentioned at the top.

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