David Mc Pherson

David Mc Pherson is a learning and development leader, digital learning designer, educator, and occasional professional survivor of PowerPoint.

For several decades, he has created learning solutions for global organisations, built corporate academies, led international design teams, and developed training for workforces of more than 35,000 people across multiple countries and brands. His work covers leadership development, onboarding, compliance, professional skills, product training, eLearning, and AI-supported learning. In other words, he has spent much of his career persuading busy adults to complete courses they insist they do not have time for.

In 2024, David was made redundant. Suddenly emancipated from meetings, organisational charts, and the cheerful phrase “moving in a different direction,” he began assembling decades of notes on digital learning. The book had been living in his head for years, occupying valuable space and refusing to pay rent.

Writing grounded him during three months of interviews, rejections, uncertainty, and the particular form of soul-searching caused by repeatedly explaining your greatest weakness to strangers. The experience transformed professional loss into creative momentum. By the time he found his next role, he had not only written a book but become a more thoughtful and ambitious digital designer.

That first publication challenged outdated approaches to eLearning and examined how artificial intelligence is changing instructional design, workplace learning, and the role of the modern learning professional. It was followed by *Ghosting the Machine*, a more personal exploration of creativity, authorship, professional reinvention, and what happens when a human being invites AI into the writing room of his soul.

David’s interest in learning is not entirely theoretical. After decades of designing and delivering education, he decided to formalise his experience with a diploma in learning design. In a cohort of sixteen, he became the first student to achieve distinctions in all four project assignments. He remains quietly proud of this, although clearly not quiet enough to leave it out of his biography.

His writing combines practical experience with an enduring curiosity about how people learn, why so much corporate training fails, and how technology can improve learning without removing the human purpose behind it.

If you are questioning your organisation’s eLearning approach, this book is a good place to begin the revision. If you are not questioning it yet, David would politely suggest that you probably should be.