Long before AI, customer education, or learning experience design became industry buzzwords, Justin was obsessed with the intersection of creativity, technology, and teaching. Growing up in western Kentucky during the early days of the internet, he spent countless hours experimenting with graphic design, websites, and video production, discovering that explaining complex ideas was often just as rewarding as creating them.
That curiosity eventually became a career.
Justin entered the learning industry at Total Training, where he helped produce software training during a period when online education was still finding its footing. It was there he discovered that education could reach people at a scale that traditional classrooms never could, and it changed the trajectory of his career.
In 2011, Justin joined Lynda.com, later acquired by LinkedIn, during one of the most important periods in online learning. Over the next several years he became one of the platform's most prolific instructors, authoring more than 100 courses covering graphic design, Adobe Creative Cloud, marketing, branding, business, productivity, and web design. His courses ultimately reached more than 200 million learners around the world, including hundreds of thousands who began their creative careers through his Introduction to Graphic Design course.
Working with millions of learners taught Justin something that would shape every role that followed. Great learning wasn't about producing more content. It was about removing friction, building confidence, and helping people accomplish something they couldn't do before.
That realization pulled him away from being an instructor and toward something much bigger.
Rather than teaching individuals directly, Justin began designing learning systems inside some of the world's fastest-growing technology companies. At InVision, he built enablement programs supporting global customer support teams during a period of rapid product expansion. At Twitter, he helped transform Flight School into one of the world's largest advertiser education platforms, serving more than 150,000 monthly learners across nine languages while supporting certifications, onboarding, and global advertiser success.
At Walmart Marketplace, he led the creation of Marketplace Learn, consolidating fragmented seller education experiences into a single learning destination that helped hundreds of thousands of merchants find answers faster and become more successful on the platform.
Every organization presented a different challenge, but they all shared the same opportunity: designing learning that helps people build confidence, solve real problems, and perform better on the job. Over time, those experiences shaped Justin's perspective on what modern learning should be. That perspective eventually became the foundation for his work today.
Today, Justin serves as Senior eLearning Evangelist at Adobe, where he works with learning leaders around the world to explore the future of AI, customer education, learning strategy, and capability development. Through keynote presentations, workshops, consulting engagements, and conversations with organizations across nearly every industry, he helps teams rethink how learning fits into the products they build and the experiences they create.
Justin is also the creator of The Academy Engine™, a framework that helps organizations design customer education ecosystems instead of disconnected learning initiatives. Built from two decades of experience creating learning programs for global technology companies, The Academy Engine™ provides a practical approach to connecting strategy, content, technology, engagement, and measurement into a system that helps customers succeed.
Justin's writing and speaking are grounded in practical experience rather than theory. Over the course of his career he has designed learning programs, built customer education platforms, launched certification programs, produced digital products, spoken on stages around the world, and worked alongside some of the largest technology companies in the industry. Those experiences continue to shape his perspective on where learning is headed next.
Today, his work sits at the intersection of learning, technology, AI, storytelling, and business strategy. Whether he's advising an executive team, delivering a keynote, or writing his next article, Justin's goal remains remarkably simple: help people build learning experiences that people actually use because they genuinely make them better at what they do.
After more than twenty years in the profession, he's still convinced the most interesting questions about learning haven't been answered yet. And that's exactly what keeps him coming back.