Afia Darkwa

My career in learning and development started at Cape Peninsula University of Technology, where I spent six years building and delivering SAP training across Materials Management, Sales and Distribution, HR, and Finance. I got hands on with the actual transactions before I ever taught them, and later took on programme management for the whole SAP ERP Foundation offering, growing it from about 50 to 70 students a year to as many as 300. That role also had me training and mentoring lecturers at partner institutions in South Africa and Nigeria, which shaped how I think about scaling training across very different contexts and audiences.

From there I moved into corporate learning and development, first as a Master Data Analyst at Suncor Energy, working inside SAP and SAP Master Data Governance on vendor and customer data, then into instructional design and project management roles at TELUS. At TELUS I ran the full ADDIE cycle on a systems rollout, produced eLearning content using AI-assisted scriptwriting and voiceover tools, and later managed the training workstream end to end, including coordinating a full French translation of our materials with subject matter experts. Everything at TELUS was remote, which is where I really built my comfort working across distributed teams and time zones.

Most recently, at PLATO Testing, I managed apprentice training cohorts and also taught our 20 week Software Testing Foundations course directly, where I got to combine instructional design with hands on facilitation again, including building career readiness content like resume writing, interview preparation, and LinkedIn presence into the curriculum every week. That course held 86% learner retention and 95% attendance, which I'm genuinely proud of given it ran in both virtual and in person formats.

What draws me to this work is the mix of systems thinking and people development. I like sitting inside a process, understanding exactly how it works, and then figuring out how to teach it so it actually sticks for someone who has never seen it before. I'm particularly interested in ERP and enterprise systems training, adult learning design, and remote-first facilitation, and I hold formal accreditation as a facilitator, assessor, and moderator alongside a teaching qualification. I'm open to roles across instructional design, training management, and facilitation, and especially interested in teams that are already working in a distributed, remote-first way.