Technology was never the hard part. People were.
At the headquarters of Colombia’s national training system, the work looked like rolling out Web 2.0, social media, video tutorials, virtual communities, and 3D environments. The real challenge was behavioral: getting thousands of people who were afraid of these tools to actually adopt them, and building new confidence and habits at national scale.
SENA, Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje. Headquarters, multiple roles.
What SENA is
For readers outside Colombia: SENA, the Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje, is Colombia’s national public institution for technical, vocational, workforce-oriented, and entrepreneurship training. It is the country’s main bridge between education and employment, and it carries real prestige at home, which is rare for vocational training anywhere. I worked at the headquarters, where national decisions are made, not in a regional office.
Before digital learning had a name
When I started, the tools we now take for granted still felt strange and slightly suspect inside a public institution. I led some of SENA’s first moves into Web 2.0: blogs and wikis, early online communities, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google tools, and the first Microsoft online services. The point was never the tools themselves. It was access, opening a closed, institutional way of teaching into something more open, social, and reachable for people who had never really been online in their lives.
Video as access infrastructure
Video was the clearest example. I designed microtutorials and short, plain-language guidance for absolute beginners, the kind of person who needed to be shown, gently, how a new tool worked. The bet was that public, searchable, reusable video could be learning infrastructure, not a one-time broadcast. That bet held. Some of those early tutorials are still discoverable and still watched today, years later, which is the whole point: durable, open, self-serve learning that keeps working long after the session ends.
Virtual worlds, before the metaverse hype
I also brought Second Life and 3D environments into education as places to practice, a pre-metaverse where people could explore problems and rehearse scenarios safely. This was long before the metaverse became a slide in every strategy deck. That early, hands-on work with virtual worlds later became formal research, my master’s thesis on virtual worlds and learning. The practice came first, and the theory caught up to it.
National adoption, not isolated experiments
None of this was a pilot in one classroom. I helped coordinate SENA’s national videoconference network, connecting more than a hundred training centers through live, synchronous learning, and built methods to keep instructors genuinely participating rather than just watching. Earlier, I helped launch and expand TecnoParque, SENA’s innovation network, guiding people from vulnerable and displaced backgrounds toward technology-based entrepreneurship. That thread mattered as much as any platform. Technology was never the goal. It was a way for people to reach opportunity they had been shut out of.
The real barrier was fear
Fear, not skill, was what actually stood in the way. Instructors in remote regions were genuinely afraid of these tools, afraid of looking foolish, afraid of breaking something. So much of the work became translating technical friction into friendly, practical guidance that lowered the fear of error and built confidence. That instinct, lowering people’s defenses so they can adopt something hard, is the one that runs through everything I have done since.
Where it leads now
Seen with distance, this is the origin of the work I do today. The same instincts, making the unfamiliar usable, designing for the person who is overwhelmed, and building learning that holds up at scale, now live in cybersecurity enablement and simulation, where the stakes are higher and the audience is technical. The tools changed. The capability did not.
Behavioral design for technology adoption: helping people embrace what they fear, at the scale of a whole system.
Being early only matters when you know how to bring people with you.
Available for remote advisory and project-based work in behavioral design, learning systems, and technology adoption at scale.
My Compass Journey | Learning Architect and Psychologist 