Fulfillment in Higher Education / Other Roles Besides Instructional Designer / Confused Subject Matter Experts

Sep 1

Sep 1 Fulfillment in Higher Education / Other Roles Besides Instructional Designer / Confused Subject Matter Experts

The best part of producing content has been to connect with you, learning nerd nation. And many of you write to me on LinkedIn or email about some fantastic instructional design related questions. They are so fantastic, that I want other learning nerds to hear them so I thought it would make more sense to create an entire episode based around some of these questions. If you like the format of this feedback episode, let me know. And by all means, if you have a question you would like featured on the show, write to me on LinkedIn or email luke@drlukehobson.com. I will of course keep your question anonymous So, let’s get started.

Question 1:

Hi Luke!

Not sure how often you check this inbox bc I know you're big time now! 😁 Just wondered if you ever feel like you're missing out by being in higher ed (HE). Not a whole lot of eLearning tools to play with, generally lower pay, etc. Most importantly, I'm seeing a lot of courses that are 80% a firehose of content/lectures and 20% actual learning activities instead of the other way around. I'm concerned that this may frustrate me and I won't be as free to make changes in HE context. Do you ever think of going into corporate? I'm still trying to decide on whether I want to stay in the familiar territory of HE or make the switch. On most days are you more fulfilled or frustrated in HE?

Answer:

There are multiple great questions in here so I really want to take the time to unpack all of this and also provide some guidance around your own organization too. So first, have I ever considered leaving higher education for corporate? Sure, I have no problem saying that whatsoever, but as you can see, I’m still in higher education so let me explain why. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a deep network with friends and colleagues in instructional design and they work everywhere. You can name any sector and any organization, most likely, I know someone there. What I’ve learned from talking with so many people is that the grass is not always greener on the other side.

And if you have never heard of that phrase before as I know I speak in so many idioms, this means that things we don’t have seem better than the things we do have. When I thought about making the transition, I reached out to some close friends and colleagues to ask them what it was like working in the corporate sector. I basically kept getting the same answers of that they traded in their higher ed problems for new corporate problems. In higher education, this typically means playing the political game, dealing with a lower salary, and others. In corporate, while you might make more money, you could get far less time fully developing products, not having access to the right resources, etc. Of course, these are super general statements, because we can’t define roles by the sectors. What it really comes down to is not the sector, but the organization.

And I would say we need to take that one step further, in that it’s not just the organization, but also the division, the team, and the leadership. How do they (leadership) value instructional design? Do you have a say in how decisions are made? How much influence can you wield? For some organizations, they still consider instructional design order takers and your fulfillment in your job will be absolute zero. For me personally, I have been lucky enough to have incredible leadership at all three institutions I have worked at. Whenever I thought about leaving and moving on, I always thought about leadership. Would I get lucky again and find another person who has a strong sense of emotional intelligence and also deeply cares about learning experiences? That’s a legit calculated risk that I would be taking. Without real leadership, the pay, the benefits, the accolades, the everything isn’t worth it.

And that, is why I’m in higher education and why I’m at MIT. I have the best boss on the planet. Under her guidance, I’ve grown tenfold. You know the podcast you are currently listening to? She encouraged it and told me to build my brand and get my name out there. Is this typical of higher ed? Nope. Sure isn’t. Some leaders encourage this since the brand in turn makes the school look better. Other places want no part of this. Anyways, I’m going off on a bit of a rant here, but would I personally leave to go somewhere else? Not likely.

The other part I did want to mention that I don’t think gets touched upon enough between the differences of higher ed vs corporate America is the benefits package. Higher ed’s benefits are out of this world good and if you are in higher ed and thinking about leaving corporate because of a higher salary, I totally get it, but you should really calculate what this looks like at the end of the day. To give you the best example I can think of, one of my closest friends, who works in higher education, broke his leg in 16 places. Yes, his leg is now basically all metal and screws and by a miracle of modern medicine, he was up and riding a bike again in 2 months. In total, his leg cost 200K to put back together. You know how much he paid out of pocket? Less than 1K. I mean, that’s just absurd.

Now, I didn’t get the most important part of your question which centered around fulfillment. For my job, the focus is on creating real learning experiences. This means doing the research, conducting pilot programs, partnering with subject matter experts that deeply care about the content, and putting this whole product together. However long it takes is how long it takes. Because this is the mentality around instructional design for my department, I personally feel fulfilled with what it is that I do. Even though you work in higher education as well, it seems like you don’t have this same kind of experience. Dealing with that firehose of lecture after lecture and poorly designed learning would absolutely be frustrating.

What I’m about to suggest next could take a bit of time, so I would consider if this is going to be worth it for you or not. With that being said, it sounds like a much more significant conversation needs to be had with your leadership team and find out why you are creating courses in this manner. Since I don’t have an inside perspective, I don’t want to make assumptions. You could be doing this because of a lack of people power, budget, or say. My first step in this process would be to create a plan and to gather information on how you would design these courses differently. Gather the data from students and pitch your case to your leadership team about how you would like to try something differently. This could end with you saying that you would like to try a pilot program with designing courses in a new way. I actually did this with creating my first pilot program years ago where I told leadership that I felt like we were missing out on key opportunities by launching a product into the world without having student feedback.

I was able to collect enough evidence to show how it would provide ROI for the students, professors, SMEs, and staff that it became a part of the process. You could absolutely replicate my steps and make this happen to create a permanent change. However, you want to attentively listen to your leadership team as you are talking about the current processes, because I would imagine that they may have tried something similar before. If that is the case, I would want to know the results and why it wasn’t deemed as being sustainable. Either way, that’s the first step towards change and overtime, this change could spread from your leadership team, to the SMEs and your other staff members.

Back to my other point though, this is going to take time to change. You are going to need to identify the right stakeholders, network with folks in power, and know when to pull certain levers to make change happen. If this isn’t worth it for you, I’d start doing some research on Glassdoor and using your network to find organizations and teams that wouldn’t put you in this firehose issue again. If this is worth your time because you love your employer, but hate this one part of the job, just know that it will take some time to see the results. If you really care about this though and make this work, it could not only lead to a deeper satisfaction of your job, but other opportunities, promotions, and more. I’ve seen this happen many times where someone leads a pilot program for a change. It ends up going extremely well so they inturn get asked to continue the pilot program in a larger capacity and with a leadership position. You never know! Good luck with everything!

Question 2:

Hi Dr. Hobson,

I’ve been lucky enough to take your course on Eduflow, and have been following your insightful posts for some time. I’m reaching out because I am at an inflection point in my career. I was laid off from a role that I truly enjoyed- I was a training program manager in a bustling retail space. I facilitated, onboarded, and a portion of my role was content development- presentation decks, learning tools, participant guides, etc. Later on, I began a role in strictly content development. This role has been less than ideal- I thought that ID was going to fill my bucket, that I would be able to create learning experiences with high output. In all honesty, I’m terrified and angered by eLearning in equal measure at this point. I came into a role where 20 courses needed to be updated and converted into full Articulate experiences. My question here is: is there a place in learning and development that is not being an instructional designer? I have a background in business management and project management. For the undertaking of my current role, I feel as though there should be a project manager, content developer, and instructional designer rather than just a single human. I feel as though I’m going through a perpetual cycle of frustration, self-doubt, and then back around. Any insight would be incredibly helpful.

Answer:

Ugh, I'm sorry to hear about your experiences with your role and everything you would be going through. I would absolutely be the same way if someone told me I had to revise 20 courses using Articulate. I'm going to answer your questions about different L&D roles, but first I did want to mention one thing around the instructional design field and that is that employers and organizations are not properly using the skills of instructional designers. I actually created a YouTube video recently that is called why the instructional design field is so confusing, because I have heard of similar tales were the org thinks ID is one thing, but the actual ID can do so much more. A true instructional design position should indeed be building off of your creativity for designing amazing learning experiences. This means that you should be partnering with SMEs and having your opinions valued on how to design courses in the best way possible. And to this end, there is a substantial amount of project management taking place. Also, I did want to mention that the workload for all of these tasks needs to be properly distributed. It can be great that an organization knows you are capable of doing everything, but also, you are going to drown in work if you are asked to do this in an extreme capacity.

From what you described above, it sounds like none of that is taking place and your org is just asking you to only focus on the e-learning development side of instructional design. There are plenty of instructional design positions that do focus on andragogy, learning techniques, and everything else that makes instructional design exciting. If I had to only focus on e-learning, I wouldn't enjoy it. So my best educated assumption is that you aren't being fulfilled because you aren't being challenged in the right way. However, I can understand why it could be appealing to focus on what you love more or want a fresh start.

So, let’s answer the question, are there other roles in L&D that aren’t instructional design? Absolutely. You already mentioned your love of project management, and there are always positions available for project managers. There are also program manager positions, which depending upon the organization, could do different or similar tasks. Some organizations in L&D have you literally manage and own completed programs. Others, have you managing the projects all the way through their development. With your background, I would suggest looking into learning and development manager positions too. This kind of position would focus more on what your first position was like with onboarding, training, facilitating, and all of those fun activities. I also want to give a shout out to Sarah Cannistra, the host of the Overnight Trainer podcast. She posts some extremely helpful posts on LinkedIn talking about how to identify with your skill sets and what positions those could be in an organization. I’ll include a link in the show notes that actually has 50 different L&D kind of positions that aren’t just instructional design.

Question 3:

Hi Dr. Hobson, not sure if you take questions but let me give it a shot. Can you please point me to your best resource that can help me sort out my current dilemma: I’ve been asked to put a course together on X but the subject matter expert(s) I’m working with are not at all clear about specifically what they want to teach on this topic. It seems left to me to figure out how to shape the general content they’ve provided into some kind of actionable concrete learning. I am relatively new to this work. In both previous cases, it was very clear what we were teaching people how to do. And the learning was based on published work. Is it typically the role of an ID to curate and shape general topics into a course? If yes, any tips on how to do that in a way that keeps the SME as the ‘e’? Thanks for pointing me in the right direction if possible!

Answer:

Now this is a fascinating question! Usually, it’s the opposite problem where SMEs want to put everything under the sun into a course, but for you, your SMEs need guidance on what to include. So before I dive in too deep, let me answer your overall question: is it typical of the instructional designer to shape the topics of the course? Well, this all certainly depends upon the course, the organization, the leadership team, the SME, and the overall processes you follow.

What it should come down to though, is what problem you are trying to solve with training and education and then figuring out the appropriate next steps to take. This will then typically dictate how long and intense the course should be. For instance, if the problem we have identified is that middle managers at an organization are lacking leadership abilities, then we can center the course around creating those leadership skills for this intended target audience. That will then give the SME an idea on who to focus the content for while remembering the overarching problem that they are facing.

We can then work with them to provide the context and determine how long the transformation could take. I would also add in here too if a course is the most viable option. Not every problem needs a course. Sometimes, just a workshop or a quick series could greatly benefit everyone, but I know it’s more common for senior leadership to ask about an entier course or program.

From here, I would work with the SMEs to create definable goals and ask plenty of questions around what a leader needs to know, how do we know when leadership training is effective , what frameworks do they follow, etc. Depending upon the SME, they may strongly believe in a framework and that becomes the guide for what the learner’s journey is going to look like. However, if they don’t know and they need help with mapping this out, the ID can definitely help with this too.

For your points in particular, I’m curious as to why they aren’t clear on what they want to teach. That’s a bit unusual. So, I would first define why you were asked to make the product. Was this based around data or a necessity? Are you trying to create a brand new offering that the market doesn’t have yet or are you trying to solve a problem? Once you have this information, work backwards. I practice a model known as backward design and it’s basically this problem. I’ll include a link below for a resource on backward design and I do have a course on this model too that I’ll also include below if you want my feedback.

From here, try to put on your interviewer hat and ask plenty of questions. Once you have a general idea of the main problem and how these SMEs can help, then you will have more information to draft up a rough course description and a course outline. The outline will provide you with the appropriate topics and I bet this will help your SMEs to focus a bit more. Once they see the familiar terms covering each week, it will click. They just need a push in the right direction. Once you have these conversations, I would continue to have them each week until you feel ready. If you are also curious to learn more about my strategies and tactics with SMEs, you can sign up for the waitlist for collaborating and building relationships with SMEs.

Well folks, those were all of today’s questions. What did you think? Did you enjoy this kind of feedback show? Let me know if you did and like I said before, if you have a question you want on the air, write to me on LinkedIn or luke@drlukehobson.com. That’s all I have for you today. Stay nerdy out there, and I’ll talk to you next time.

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