CELab – Ep 192 – DevLearn 2026 – Customer Education Meets L&D

For years, customer educators have been the handful of people in the back of every L&D conference wondering if anyone else teaches customers. So CELab went to DevLearn 2026 with one mission: Find the others. In the first of two DevLearn "minisodes", recorded live at booth 668, Dave sits down with Mark Oehlert, a DevLearn speaker and former SaaS customer education leader, and longtime friend Matt Pierce of TechSmith, plus a lightning round with three practitioners from the expo floor.

You’ll hear why customer education should be an awareness gate for every product release, how to tie certifications to revenue, and Mark’s fox-and-hedgehog take on how customer education and L&D differ, and why each needs the other. Matt makes the case for what it really takes to earn a seat at the table: speaking the business’s language. It’s built for customer education and customer success teams, and for any L&D, enablement or support pro creating learning for an external audience.

Highlights from this episode:

• The fox and the hedgehog. Why customer ed knows many things, L&D knows one big thing, and you need both.
• “I didn’t know you guys still existed.” Making customer ed an awareness gate on every product release.
• Revenue, not completions. Dashboards that compare certified and uncertified customers.
• A home for customer education. Matt Pierce on finding critical mass at DevLearn.
• Earning the seat. Why the table opens up when you speak the business’s language.

Thanks to Lenore Higgins and the Learning Guild for bringing CELab to DevLearn. Stay tuned for Part 2, on the craft of teaching. Prefer to watch? The full episode is here on the CELab YouTube channel.