A selection of L&D and organizational performance engagements led by Dr. Brantley — each structured around a single question: what changed because the work happened? Every case below follows the same Context → Challenge → Action → Result → Impact structure.
A note on context. Most of these engagements were delivered inside federal agencies of 200 to 2,000+ employees — the same headcount band as the mid-market private-sector companies Dr. Brantley works with today. The frameworks, measurement discipline, and change methods transfer directly. The constraints are often harder; the principles are the same.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Supervisory Certificate Program was on the brink of fragmentation when Dr. Brantley took it over. He cut 64 hours of passive PowerPoint to roughly 20, built role-play and case-study modules around the agency's own Supervisor of the Year submissions, and replaced a tedious HR-functions day with an interactive expo. A return-on-investment study — verified by USPTO's Office of the Chief Economist — found the program returned roughly $11 for every $1 invested. Training Magazine recognized Dr. Brantley as one of its Top 25 Emerging Training Leaders for the redesign.
Read the Full Case Study →Engagements where the central deliverable was a defensible answer to leadership about the value, ROI, or measurement integrity of an L&D investment.
Dr. Brantley was assigned leadership of USPTO's Supervisory Certificate Program at a moment when the program was in serious trouble. Vendor performance was slipping, and key business units — most notably Trademarks — were threatening to pull their supervisors out and stand up their own version, citing wasted time and poor learner experience.
The mandate was to redesign the program, hold the vendor accountable, and restore enthusiasm before the agency fragmented into multiple competing curricula. The existing format was eight sessions of eight hours each — 64 hours of largely passive PowerPoint that supervisors openly disliked.
Dr. Brantley audited every session, cut the PowerPoint footprint in half (and ultimately to roughly 20 hours), and rebuilt the curriculum around active learning. He reframed unpopular content — for example, repositioning a strategic-planning module around how supervisors execute and sell senior leadership's plans, taught through role-play. He converted USPTO's annual Supervisor of the Year submissions into in-class case studies, then brought the actual award winners in to debrief their decisions with each cohort. He also replaced a tedious day of back-to-back HR-function PowerPoints with an interactive HR Expo featuring booths, swag, games, and one-on-one access to specialists from each function.
Participation scores climbed, supervisor sentiment turned sharply positive, and the program retained agency-wide buy-in. A return-on-investment study, validated by USPTO's Office of the Chief Economist, found the program returned roughly $11 for every $1 invested.
Training Magazine recognized Dr. Brantley as one of its Top 25 Emerging Training Leaders for the redesign, and the program became a national reference point. USPTO retained a unified supervisory pipeline, avoided costly fragmentation, and gained third-party-verified evidence of meaningful productivity gains.
Dr. Brantley was placed in charge of USPTO's Training Needs Assessment (TNA), a process mandated by the Office of Personnel Management to identify the training needs of the agency's roughly 2,000 employees. The first year operated as a traditional annual survey: a single long instrument, a brief response window, and a one-shot view of demand.
The first cycle drew about 700 responses — statistically usable, but unsatisfactory to the Chief Learning Officer. Annual TNAs are inherently slow: by the time results are analyzed and acted on, the underlying needs have shifted. Worse, USPTO was suffering acute survey fatigue, which depressed response rates and threatened the credibility of the data.
Dr. Brantley redesigned the entire TNA system. He shortened the master survey, segmented questions for distinct audiences such as patent examiners and trademark examiners, and rewrote items so that findings translated directly into actionable training decisions. He extended the response window from one month to four, and ran a sustained marketing campaign — visiting each of the eight departments in person — to communicate the survey's purpose, brevity, and downstream impact. He layered quarterly pulse surveys on top of the annual instrument, turning a once-a-year snapshot into a continuous read on training demand.
Response rates and data quality improved markedly, and the redesigned instrument produced findings the learning organization could act on with confidence. The pulse-survey cadence gave leadership in-year visibility into shifting needs rather than a stale, annual rear-view picture. The data also overturned internal assumptions: employees consistently preferred case-study-based training to mobile learning, prompting Dr. Brantley to make case studies a centerpiece of USPTO's training design.
USPTO transitioned from a compliance-driven annual TNA to an agile, evidence-based intelligence system that continuously informs training investment. Decisions shifted from intuition to data, and curriculum design — including a strategic move toward case-study learning — was grounded in what employees actually wanted and used.
Engagements where the constraint was time — and the work had to ship fast without becoming sloppy.
Operating as a freelance HR consultant, Dr. Brantley was engaged by FedLearn to develop 25 online courses on space, power, and defense topics. The portfolio drew on a large body of source material — reports, briefings, and technical documentation — that needed to be transformed into structured, production-ready learning experiences.
FedLearn needed all 25 courses delivered in three months. Most learning teams would scope a portfolio of that size at a year or more. The work also had to hand off cleanly to a downstream Articulate developer, meaning every storyboard had to be tight enough that the developer could drop in images and narration with virtually no rework.
Dr. Brantley designed a production system rather than a sequence of one-off courses. He standardized a single storyboard template across the entire portfolio, then sequenced the writing so that review and revision cycles ran in parallel rather than in series. He set a consistent voice and structural pattern so the 25 courses would feel like a coherent curriculum, then personally read every source document and built the course outlines, scripts, and storyboards — including suggested visuals — for the development team.
All 25 courses shipped on time. Scripts and storyboards arrived production-ready, with images specified and narration written so that the Articulate developer needed only to assemble assets and record audio. Final published courses launched roughly two months after handoff, on the original schedule.
FedLearn moved an entire defense-and-space curriculum into market in a fraction of standard industry time. The standardized storyboard, parallelized review cycles, and disciplined voice gave the organization a repeatable model for high-volume course production — and a 25-course catalog that immediately strengthened its training portfolio.
As part of his role with the Kentucky Department of Corrections, Dr. Brantley was tasked with managing CrimCast, the learning management system used to deliver training across the state's correctional jails. CrimCast had been built in the early 2000s and had not kept pace with modern e-learning standards, particularly SCORM (Shared Content Object Reference Model) — the standard that lets a course be authored once and deployed across many learning systems.
Without SCORM support, every course had to be assembled inside CrimCast slide-by-slide. Building something as routine as a Prison Tattoo Training course required exporting every PowerPoint slide as an image, uploading each one, and retyping the narration as on-screen text. The result was static, visually dated training that took one to two weeks per course to produce — a poor fit for a corrections environment that needed agile, professional content.
Dr. Brantley scoped the technical gap, identified the SCORM player components CrimCast was missing, and partnered with the system's contractor to integrate a compliant SCORM player into the LMS. He provided ongoing technical guidance through the build, validated the integration with authoring tools such as Articulate and Captivate, and modernized the course-development workflow end to end.
CrimCast became a SCORM-compliant LMS. Course development time collapsed from one to two weeks to a single afternoon or a few days, and the resulting courses were more interactive, more visually engaging, and reusable across other learning systems. The agency gained a true content library rather than a collection of one-off slide decks.
Kentucky DOC's training operation took a generational leap forward. The jails received noticeably more modern, professional content; the training team gained the ability to drop SCORM packages into CrimCast with only minor adaptations; and the department positioned its LMS as a long-term asset rather than a legacy liability.
Engagements where the technical solution was the easy part — and the cultural reframe was the actual work.
Leadership at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) decided the agency needed a career coaching program, and Dr. Brantley was brought in to design it. There was no template, no precedent, and no firm definition of what the program should look like — only the directive to build it.
Two cultural obstacles had to be cleared first. USPTO already operated a highly regarded mentoring program, and employees often confused coaching with mentoring. Worse, "being coached" had taken on a punitive connotation, as though it signaled poor performance. To succeed, coaching had to be repositioned as something elite performers seek out, not something underperformers are sentenced to.
Dr. Brantley spent six to nine months reframing how the agency thought about coaching, drawing parallels to how elite athletes use coaches to get better, not to be corrected. He stood up the program from scratch, sourced two external coach-training vendors, and ran a rigorous double-blind selection process in which senior management — not Dr. Brantley alone — chose the inaugural cohort of 13 supervisor-coaches. Candidates competed for the role and were assessed in part on prior coaching experience. Trained coaches went through one of two paths: an intensive fast track (full-day vendor sessions every Friday for two months) or a six-month online track of three to four hours per week.
The 13 supervisors completed certification and began coaching across the agency. Within Dr. Brantley's tenure, more than 200 of USPTO's 2,000+ employees had been coached; in the years since, roughly half the agency has had access to a coach. He also laid the groundwork for an in-house coaching academy capable of training coaches for other federal agencies.
USPTO now has a durable, in-house coaching capability and a positive, performance-oriented coaching culture. The model Dr. Brantley designed positions the agency to extend coaching expertise across the federal government.
Engagements that designed the underlying career, competency, and curriculum architecture an organization needed to grow its workforce on purpose.
Engaged through Evans Consulting and embedded as a W-2 contractor at the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), Dr. Brantley supported the Chief Learning Officer in standing up career development infrastructure on the Cornerstone platform. The program goal was to give IT and HR employees clearer, more credible career options inside the agency.
The agency did not need another generic career handbook. It needed agency-specific roadmaps that showed IT and HR professionals exactly how to plan the next five to ten years of their careers at FHFA, including the variations and lateral moves that real federal career paths involve.
Dr. Brantley deconstructed FHFA's existing IT and HR job descriptions, mapped how roles connect to one another, and reconciled them against the Office of Personnel Management's federal career-path guidance. He layered in the experiences, credentials, and certifications that meaningfully accelerate advancement, then synthesized the analysis into two comprehensive 80-page career development guides — one for IT, one for HR — built around the competencies an employee must master at each stage, how to assess that mastery, and how to position themselves for the next step.
The agency received two 80-page career development guides anchored in FHFA's actual structure, with stage-by-stage competency expectations and concrete advice on how to grow into senior IT and HR management. The guides were specific, role-aware, and immediately usable inside Cornerstone.
Evans Consulting and FHFA leadership gave the work strong reviews. IT and HR employees gained a clear understanding of how to enter, progress, and ultimately lead within the agency, and FHFA strengthened its ability to retain and develop talent in two of its most strategically important workforces.
Dr. Brantley designed and delivered AI curricula for three organizations: the Product Management Academy, Simpliv, and the University of Maryland Project Management Center for Excellence. The portfolio spans foundational generative AI literacy through hands-on programming via "vibe coding," with role-specific tracks for product managers, project managers, attorneys, and paralegals.
AI training has to clear a high bar. It must cover the mechanics of generative AI honestly, demystify the technology for non-technical professionals, and translate immediately into the daily workflow of busy practitioners — without drifting into hype or vendor talk.
Drawing on hands-on AI experience that began in the late 1980s with expert systems and a 1992 application built on Grammatik to automate regulation reviews at the Kentucky Natural Resources Cabinet, Dr. Brantley built the curriculum from a practitioner's standpoint rather than a theoretical one. He authored more than two dozen courses ranging from a general introduction to AI through Product Management AI for Entrepreneurs and Project Management AI for Lawyers. For Simpliv alone he produced roughly 12 to 25 hour-long sessions for attorneys and paralegals on AI-assisted research, case management, and witness interviewing — moving past theory into specific, workflow-level techniques.
The combined catalog gave each partner organization a current, role-specific AI curriculum delivered by an instructor with deep personal experience in both classical and generative AI. Learners came away able to evaluate AI tools, integrate them into their workflows, and avoid common adoption pitfalls.
Product managers, project managers, attorneys, and paralegals across three institutions now have a practical onramp to generative AI — not just an explanation of what it is, but a working playbook for using it in their day-to-day responsibilities.
Start with the $4,500 Organizational Learning Diagnostic. Two to three hours of focused work, a written report in your hands within a week, and a clear next step — pilot, retainer, or a polite "you don't actually need me yet."