ADRIAN
DANE

My target is the intersection of e-learning design, instructional design, content strategy, and digital training — roles where at least two of those overlap. The ideal project is one where someone has a clear learning or content objective and needs a person who can take that from brief to finished product without a lot of hand-holding.

I'm particularly interested in onboarding programme design, digital learning development, and content-led learning experiences. On the content side, I remain open to iGaming football and sports content work, editorial strategy, and ghostwriting. I'm also genuinely interested in roles within EdTech or training companies where L&D expertise and strong writing are both valued, rather than treated as separate departments.

Practically, it means I take a brief, deliver against it, and communicate clearly throughout. I've been working remotely and managing my own deadlines for over a decade, so the mechanics are well established. The engagements I'm most interested in are ones where my skills genuinely serve the company's goals — a short-term e-learning build, an onboarding content project, an ongoing content retainer, or a longer instructional design contract.

I'm not looking to be a pair of hands on a pre-specified task list. The most productive arrangements are ones where there's a clear objective, some trust, and room to bring actual expertise to bear. Drop me a message and we can figure out fairly quickly whether there's a fit.

Twenty-plus years at BT Group as a Learning & Development Specialist. That covers the full training cycle — needs analysis, curriculum design, material development, programme delivery — for both new hire induction and ongoing workforce development. During the UK's national broadband rollout, I was the specialist translating complex technical content into training that non-technical staff could actually use.

Later I moved into instructional design for digital learning, storyboarding interactive modules, building content in e-learning authoring tools, and making the internal case for replacing face-to-face delivery with scalable digital alternatives. I also managed large-scale change management programmes — retraining hundreds of people for new roles when the business restructured — and led two extended assignments in Kolkata to bring offshore team performance in line with UK standards.

The most recent demonstration of these skills is the Learn Bulgarian in 60 Days course I designed and published in 2025 — a complete 60-day language programme built from scratch, proving the capability is current and isn't limited to corporate contexts.

Primarily ghostwriting. The work appears under other names or as unsigned editorial — that's standard in iGaming content and I've been doing it for over thirteen years. Day-to-day it means planning a content calendar, writing match previews and predictions across multiple competitions, editing contributions from high-profile sports contributors, and publishing directly to WordPress. The output is consistent, the deadlines are firm, and the quality has to hold up to ongoing scrutiny from clients.

I hold full end-to-end ownership of the predictions content strategy for a major betting platform — everything from planning through publication runs through me. Beyond the predictions work, I've demonstrated broader editorial capability through published interviews and feature writing. I've also proactively integrated AI tools into the production workflow to handle volume without sacrificing the quality that clients rely on.

I've been based in Shumen, Bulgaria since leaving BT in 2014 — well before remote work became mainstream. The practical impact is minimal: Bulgaria is two to three hours ahead of UK time depending on the season, which means I'm typically working earlier in the day than UK-based counterparts. Every client and employer I've worked with remotely over the past decade has found this a non-issue in practice.

What remote work does require is discipline, self-management, and reliable communication — all of which I've had to develop properly because there's no office structure to fall back on. If anything, a decade of fully autonomous remote working is a stronger signal of those qualities than someone who's only done it since 2020.

It started as a practical challenge. I'd been living in Bulgaria for years without formally tackling the language, so I applied the instructional design instincts from my L&D career to structure the problem: clear daily objectives, phonetics first, grammar scaffolded progressively, vocabulary built around practical usage, sixty days of structured progression.

The result is a complete curriculum, freely available at whatchan.co.uk/bulgarian. It's a useful signal for anyone assessing instructional design capability — it shows the ability to take a subject with no pre-existing course material, design a logical learning path through it, and produce something genuinely usable. That process is identical whether the subject is Bulgarian grammar or onboarding a new software platform.

For clarity: my Bulgarian covers the fundamentals well enough to teach them. Fluent conversation is still a work in progress.

More directly than it might appear. Managing The Village Rejects as a working music project involves the same skills as running any creative digital operation: artist development, production coordination, release strategy, platform distribution, and brand management — all entirely self-funded and self-executed. Writing and publishing two books in 2025, in different genres and to professional standard, demonstrates sustained output discipline and the ability to work across registers.

These aren't hobbies that happen alongside professional work. They're the same underlying capabilities — creative vision, structured execution, independent delivery — applied to different domains. Someone who consistently produces to professional standard in their own time is likely to do the same in yours.

Pragmatically and with clear intent. I've been integrating AI tools into content workflows for several years — primarily to handle volume, improve consistency on repeatable tasks, and free up cognitive effort for the work that genuinely requires human judgement. The key distinction is knowing which parts of the work benefit from AI assistance and which parts it degrades.

In a learning and development context, the possibilities are genuinely exciting: personalised learning pathways, adaptive content, faster prototype iteration, more efficient content modularisation. I'm actively curious about these applications and keen to explore them in any future engagement. The risk to manage is the same as with any tool — using it where it helps, not where it's just convenient.

The combination of genuine breadth and operational autonomy. I don't need close management — I take ownership of objectives, set my own standards, and deliver. But what makes autonomy valuable rather than just self-directed is the range underneath it: corporate L&D experience, professional content production, digital product development, and creative output that holds up to scrutiny.

Concretely: I can design the onboarding programme, write the content that goes inside it, build the digital delivery mechanism, and understand the organisational context it needs to serve. That combination in one person is genuinely uncommon — and it's what I bring to any engagement, whether that's a focused freelance project or a longer-term role.