Workforce Development and Behavior Change

How do you design training that actually leads to a job, not just a certificate?

In this episode of Learning for Good, I sit down with Amina Mohamed, founder and executive director of Cameras for Girls, a Canadian charity advancing gender equality in media across Africa, to talk about designing learning around the change you want to create.

So many nonprofits build training programs and hope people walk away better prepared, but hoping isn't the same as knowing a program creates real employment outcomes. For Amina, a training program only matters if it ends in a job, and that standard shapes every phase of how she builds and evaluates her work.

▶️ Key Points:

00:00 Career Training Reflection

03:11 Introduction to Amina: From Film and Television to Cameras for Girls

09:07 The Mission Behind Cameras for Girls

12:38 Inside the Four-Phase Training Model

20:52 Amina's Vision for Cameras for Girls: Training Isn't the Goal, Change Is

25:03 Turning Training Into Lasting Impact

Start with End in Mind

Most training conversations start in the wrong place. Someone asks for a workshop, a curriculum, a certificate program, and the well-intentioned learning and development leader gets to work building it. But if you start with the deliverable instead of the destination, you can build something polished that still doesn’t move the needle on the outcome people care about.

Amina Mohammed, founder and executive director of Cameras for Girls, built her entire training model the opposite way. Her nonprofit equips young women in Uganda and Tanzania with cameras, ethical storytelling skills, and business training so they can build careers in media — a field that has historically shut them out. When she and I talked on episode 204 of the the Learning for Good podcast, she described a design process that nonprofit L&D and talent development leaders can learn a lot from, whether you’re training staff, volunteers, or the people your organization serves.

Her approach shows what happens when you design learning around the change you want to create, instead of around the training itself.

Design Training Backwards

Before Amina wrote her lesson plans, she identified job placement as her goal and worked backwards.

What does it actually take for a young woman to get hired in a male-dominated media industry?

A portfolio. Technical skill with a camera. Ethical storytelling ability. Business literacy. Confidence to put themselves in front of an employer.

Only after mapping that out did she decide what the training itself would include.

What does this look like in L&D? If your organization is worried about staff turnover, customer complaints, or inconsistent service delivery, the fix isn’t automatically a training module; it’s whatever closes the gap between where people are now and the specific, observable change that solves the problem. Sometimes that includes training. Sometimes training is a small piece of a bigger fix involving expectations, tools, or manager support.

Working backward from the change also gives you something to measure. Amina can tell you her program's success rate — 80% of graduates find work — because she knew from day one what her intended outcome was. If your goal is fuzzy, your data will be too.

Why One Training Doesn’t Create Behavior Change

Cameras for Girls runs a year-long program in four connected phases: an intensive four-day, in-person workshop; weekly online learning with guest instructors; monthly assignments that build a real portfolio; and six months of one-on-one mentorship with a working professional in the student’s chosen field.

It’s not a single training event with no reinforcement, which is a trap we often fall into in L&D. Amina’s students don’t attend a workshop and go their separate ways. They practice with a camera in hand from day one. They complete recurring assignments that force repeated application, not a one-time demonstration. They get monthly feedback. They’re paired with a mentor who holds them accountable long after the formal curriculum ends. And when they stumble — which she says happens constantly — the response isn’t remediation, it’s normalized: "It didn't work. Try it again in a different way."

Amina has created a behavior-change system, not a training event. Information plus a single workshop rarely produces lasting change on its own; repeated practice, feedback, real-world application, and ongoing support are what make a new skill stick. If your organization’s training strategy is a library of one-off sessions with no built-in practice or follow-up, you aren’t likely to see behavior change.

How to Create Sustainability in Your Training Programs

Amina shared that she was out of the office for an extended period this year. She couldn’t run day-to-day operations for a stretch. The program kept going because she had already invested in documenting everything — the curriculum, the ethical storytelling framework, the reasoning behind each phase — well enough that four former students, now trained as trainers, could carry it forward without disjointed messaging.

If your organization’s training programs live mostly with one facilitator or one slide deck owned by L&D, it might be time to create a train-the-trainer system. A program that depends entirely on a single person to explain it, deliver it, or keep it consistent isn’t a system, and it isn’t sustainable. Documenting the what, the how, and the why is what allows a program to survive turnover, leave, or growth. It also creates consistency across the organization.

To learn more about the training program they run at Cameras for Girls, tune into episode 204 of the Learning for Good podcast.

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