What I Wish I Knew Before Applying for Instructional Design Jobs

Feb 2

Feb 2 What I Wish I Knew Before Applying for Instructional Design Jobs

Another day, another rejection email. Say good bye to self-esteem and hello to more ice cream. I’ve been there. It’s mentally exhausting. You check your inbox 73 times a day to see if there is good news and keep on refreshing despite the fact that you know that it’s not going to make a difference. It’s not like you’ve minimized the inbox tab on Gmail, but you think checking on your phone is magically faster. What’s weird about this entire vicious cycle is the solution we tell ourselves is that you have to keep on applying to jobs again and again and again and maybe, just maybe, you’ll get lucky. “Someone is bound to take a chance on me,” you say. I won’t deny that it’s possible to land a job by constantly putting your nose to the grindstone and applying around, but I’d rather you create your own luck. I’d rather you feel that you have some sense of power and control in this entire job-hunting process.

Without a doubt, what I have seen and heard from talking with so many of you is that you don’t feel like you have this sense of control. So, I have an idea! Let’s take back control and get you on the right path to help with applying for instructional design jobs. Whether you are transitioning into ID or you are an entry level instructional designer looking for a promotion, here are my tips.

Decide Where You Want to Work and Make a Plan

Let’s pretend that you aren’t the one being interviewed. What if you were the interviewer? What would you look for in a company? I know that for most people what comes to mind is a great salary and benefits. Sure, that’s significant, but what about leadership, culture, flexibility, diversity, reskilling, and upskilling? What about an organization that values employees’ ideas and respects them?

I know that for many of you, this is the first time where you are going to be paid a real living (looking at you my teacher friends) and I won’t lie, being paid a fair amount for the hard work you put into the job is satisfying. It also felt disingenuous to me to hear that my work was invaluable, but I made 40K a year. Being paid a reasonable amount will undoubtedly aid to your “self-worth” in a sense in knowing that what you do is appreciated. While that’s all well and good, you won’t stay at an organization if the leadership team and culture are abysmal. You need to find a place that’s highly rated and will value you as a human being. If you get paid well, but the culture is to work 60 hours a week and answer questions on nights and weekends, you are buying a one-way ticket to burnout land. To counteract this, use Glassdoor. Glassdoor gives you the insider information on what an organization is really like by sharing reviews from interviewees, employees, and past employees. You can read the stories of real people about how they were treated and if they would recommend the same organization to a friend.

This website actually saved me from making a grave mistake. Years ago, I noticed that one organization was hiring up a storm of IDs and Senior IDs. I knew that the organization paid ridiculously well and that their benefits were comparable to where I worked at the time. I kept on reading the job posting over and over again to try to figure out what I was missing. Then it hit me to check Glassdoor. Sure enough, the org was hiring a team of IDs to replace everyone that had recently quit. By going back through the review timeline on Glassdoor, I saw the reviews go from 5 stars to 1 star and every employee (now past employee) were documenting the nightmare of the practices and policies of the new senior leadership team. You wouldn’t find this kind of valuable information unless if you had a direct connection to the company and that’s why I love Glassdoor.

Once you have chosen your desired destination, research what they are looking for in a stellar employee by checking out job postings and working your way backwards from there. Gather as much information as you can to make you feel more prepared for the next step in your job-hunting process. See how employees talk about the organization and look for key terms to help you talk shop. Go on YouTube and search for videos like a day in the life of an employee at XYZ company. By immersing yourself in the organization’s culture and values, you’ll break down the barriers that make you feel like an outsider. Also, if you don’t know how to break down job postings and find ways for you to connect with the responsibilities, I did a presentation with TLDC for teachers transitioning into the ID field. You can watch the whole thing for free to help you on your instructional design journey.

Practice Answering Interview Questions and Record the Process

In order to build your confidence and make you feel more comfortable during interviews, this is my best piece of advice. With interviews comes this feeling of nervousness and this is impartially to the fact that you don’t know what kind of questions the interviewers are going to ask you. Well, you can make one giant step towards reducing this feeling by looking up past interview questions on Glassdoor. Depending upon the size of the organization, you can narrow down these questions to the department and it’s quite surprising how much information is actually on there. Now, please don’t assume that these will 100% be the questions you’ll be asked because that’s simply not reasonable, but they are good practice questions.

For instructional design positions, there are also a few common ones with talking about your design process, working with SMEs, handling difficult situations, etc. You can see this list of common ID interview questions. Pick a few of them and write out a script for how you would answer them. Then put the question on the screen and using your notes, answer the question. Give yourself some time to let this information sink in. After a few days, try this practice activity again, but this time, answer the question without notes. Once again, give yourself a couple of days, and then do it again. What you are performing is based around the spacing effect. This is the technique I used for defending my oral comps during my doctorate and it was incredibly effective. If you repeat this process, you will be astonished at the quantity of information you can retrieve.

Next, record yourself answering these questions. By seeing the red flashing light and the word “recording” appear on your screen, this is going to put some pressure on you, but in a good way. You are simulating the experience of what it will be like to be asked a question on the spot. Once again, this is to build your confidence. Afterwards, review the recordings and be honest with your performance. If you noticed that you said some kind of pause filler words such as, “you know, um, uh, and like,” you be mindful of these the next time and try to reduce them. There are other mannerisms you might notice that working from home over the years and using Zoom everyday has done to how you act on camera. To give you an example, I notice that when I’m on camera, I sway side to side when I’m standing, but I don’t have this issue when I’m sitting. It’s not like any of these are a deal breaker, you are human after all, but it’s a good reminder that I wouldn’t sway side to side in person during an interview, so I should reduce this on camera. You can take notes on your own mannerisms and try to get better each time with not only your answers, but camera etiquette.

Lastly, I highly encourage you to practice speaking to visuals. The interview is the time to sell yourself and your skills. If you are applying for an instructional design role, chances are that you will be speaking to your portfolio, design process, or something else. In the before times when seeing people in person was a thing, when I made it to the 2nd or 3rd rounds of the interview process (this is normal for ID roles btw), I was asked to give a presentation every single time. It was common for me to receive a poorly designed course and walk the interviewers through my steps on how I would make it better. I’ve also been asked to walk through a part of my portfolio with taking the interviewers through each step from the first conceived idea of the course all the way until the polished product. There were a few times where I was given a summary of a course with a description, super vague outcomes, and the target audience and was asked to use my creativity to make the course come to life. The point is, you are going to have to talk about a visual and walk interviewers through the experience. If you become comfortable with sharing your screen and following through on this, it’s going to increase your chances. Also, if your area of the world is back to face-to-face activities, I would be ready to do this in front of a group of people with a projector, whiteboard, interactive screen, or anything else.

Write Down Everything You Can Remember

A common trend is that after your interview, you might feel exhausted. This moment has been building for a period of time and now that it’s finally over, it’s time to relax. Well, I wouldn’t do that yet. Instead, as soon as your interview is done, write down everything you can remember such as the interview questions, your answers, the interviewers’ names, the vibe from the interview experience, etc. You want to capture the moment and use this as feedback to help you with your potential next interview. By doing this activity, you can reflect upon what you said and how you performed. Did you absolutely nail an answer to the question and everyone in the room seemed to agree? Did you forget to say a key detail or something irrelevant? Write down everything from the pros and cons of how the interview went. If the organization also hosts several rounds of interviews, this will greatly help you to remember what you said the first time, especially if you are interviewing at multiple places at once!

Writing this information down is also going to make everything stick. After this, you can review those interview questions, how you answered them, and modify your approach for the next time. Maybe there was a great question that someone asked and you had never thought about the context in the same way before. What I found useful from this activity was actually trying to write down the follow up questions from the interviewers. I practiced and practiced answering the initial interview questions, but then having some follow up questions to practice with became incredibly valuable. The thing is you are also hoping that they do ask follow up questions! The worst is when it’s a round table with several people and no one follows up with a question afterwards. It’s painfully awkward. Anyway, whatever their questions were, you can add these to the list of practice questions. These could be questions on your design process, a part of your portfolio, how you managed a difficult relationship, etc. Become comfortable with these and you’ll be in a fantastic spot.

Rethink the Concept of Feedback and the Bigger Picture

At this point in the process, the interview has come and gone. You’ve written down the experience and have awesome notes for next time. Now, where does feedback come into all of this? It’s been pounded into our heads that we need to ask for feedback whether we performed well or not during interviews. While I completely understand where this perspective is coming from, the pandemic has drastically changed this. You might be reading online about how many people feel ghosted and they are so upset with how they didn’t receive feedback, and rightfully so. Putting in time, energy, and effort into an interview is exhausting and you want to know how you performed. However, the recruiters and hiring managers are unfortunately, in the same position. For better or worse, instructional design jobs are essentially trending and everyone wants to become a designer. What this has done though is shifted the job market to make the competition fierce, thereby, creating an overwhelming amount of responses to job postings.

Over the last few years, I’ve talked to many, many hiring managers and recruiters and they are exhausted. One of them mentioned to me that her job posting received 200 applicants in 24 hours and her team is understandably overwhelmed. I’ve seen this a few times where I share a new job posting on LinkedIn in the morning, and by the evening, it’s been taken down. It’s quite crazy to be honest with you and a good problem to have in a sense that many qualified people are moving over into this field. On the flip side of all of this though, if they are conducting multiple interviews every single day, the chances of applicants getting feedback is significantly reduced. Maybe this does or doesn’t help you, but it’s important to hear about the perspective of the people you are trying to work with.

So, that still leaves us with the topic of feedback. If you advanced to the interviewing stage, you probably did this via Zoom. If you were able to see the interviewers on camera, think about their body language. Did they seem engaged with what you were saying. Did they nod along with your answers? Did they take notes about specific points you mentioned? If yes, it sounds like you were on track. If no, it could mean that your message wasn’t resonating. If you had a phone interview, think about the tone in the interviewers’ voices. Did they seem interested as you were talking? Did they make a sign that they agreed with you? While it’s not the down to earth feedback you were hoping for, it’s at least something to go off of.

The last piece of advice I want to share with you is something that a former manager of mine told me and it’s honestly stuck with me for 10 years. I was preparing to give a presentation in a marketing course, and I was absolutely sweating it. My professor was a professional public speaker and she was critical of everything, and I mean everything. She would critique every second of your presentation and even invited industry experts to come in and observe our talks. It felt like I was on Shark Tank if I’m being honest. It just so happens that I was the last one to present in my class and the weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds were building this nervous momentum inside me. I was at work right before I had to give my presentation, and my supervisor walked past me. He must’ve noticed the look of dread on my face as he came into my poorly lit cubicle and asked me what was wrong. Some form of word vomit came out of my mouth about how this presentation is going to make or break me. He looked at me dead in the eye and said, “Did you do everything you can to prepare for this?” And I said of course. I practiced my lines for hours and I had basically memorized this 15-minute talk. He smiled and said, “Don’t sweat the small stuff and everything is the small stuff.”

I don’t know why, but those words really spoke to me. It had me rethink about why I was so nervous to give a talk to a few of my peers and outside guests. This wasn’t the end of the world. It’s not like I was going to fail out of the class or make a fool of myself. At the end of the day, I was going to be just fine. Come to find out, he took this line from a book he read about living in the moment and trying to slow down the rapid pace of life. I actually haven’t read it yet to be honest, but it’s on my list of books to read. This is a long way of saying, to not overthink things. If you did your best with preparing for the interview, delivering your messaging, writing down the experience, and planning for next time, you’ve done literally all you can. You have taken control and have put your best foot forward. All that’s left to do is get ready for the next opportunity and see where it goes.

Keep up the fantastic work. I see you. I hear you. I know how hard you are trying for this and I believe you’ll find the right opportunity in time. Luck favors the bold and luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparation. Keep on creating your own luck.

Stay nerdy out there.

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