Margot Sprenkels is Training Optimisation Lead at aNewSpring, where she builds and leads the company’s third strategic pillar alongside Platform and Customer Success. Her focus is the layer most organisations skip: the governance that decides whether a learning investment actually changes behaviour, not just completion rates.
With over a decade of building learning environments from the ground up, a background in evidence-based learning design and trend research, and years as an independent e-learning and behaviour-change specialist, she works at the intersection of learning architecture, impact measurement, and behavioural transfer.
Margot shows up as a practitioner with a view, not a thought leader on a stage she has not earned. She talks honestly about the gap between what organisations spend on learning and what they actually get back, from the work she does every day. She is optimistic about what AI will unleash in learning, and realistic about how much still has to change first.
What will you be speaking about at the Learning Conference, and why is this topic particularly relevant right now?
I am going to show L&D professionals how to build their own AI workspace: what to feed it, how to instruct it, and what it can actually produce. Not the hype version, the working version. This is relevant right now because AI is moving faster than our sector is willing to admit. Most L&D people are stuck between fear and hype, and neither gets you anywhere. The ones who set up their workspace properly this year will quietly pull ahead. I want to give people that head start in sixty minutes.
What do you think most organizations still misunderstand when it comes to learning today?
They think learning is a content problem or a platform problem. It is neither. It is a governance problem. Organisations build a learning environment and then measure completion rates and satisfaction scores, which tell you almost nothing. Roughly ninety percent of learning happens after the course, in transfer and in the culture around it. If you only measure whether someone finished the module, you are measuring the wrong thing. The real question is whether behaviour actually changed in the long run, let’s say, months after the training ended. Not what people remembered, but what they concretely do differently in their day to day practice.
What distinguishes organizations that truly succeed with learning from those that only talk about it?
The ones that succeed treat impact as a shared responsibility between the organisation and the platform, and they govern for it on purpose. They design for behaviour change, not for a finished progress bar. The ones that only talk about it buy a tool, launch a ’learning journey’ that is really four modules in a row, and hope. The difference is not budget or technology. It is whether someone owns the outcome.
If you could give just one piece of advice for creating learning that drives real impact, what would it be?
Start from the behaviour you want to see weeks/ months after the training ends, and design backwards from there. Not the module you want to fill, the change you want to last. Everything else is decoration. If you cannot name the change you are after, and how you will still see it a quarter later, no amount of content, gamification or clever technology will save the programme.
What are you most looking forward to about being part of the Learning Conference?
Meeting people who are actually doing the work. I learn most from practitioners who are elbow-deep in the same problems, and I love being challenged on what I think I know. The hands-on format of the workshop is exactly my kind of energy, and I am genuinely curious about the Swedish L&D scene. Also, being part of the Swedish Learning Awards evening sounds wonderful.