“What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming an Instructional Designer.”
Update: Since writing this post, I created an ebook to answer all of your questions! You can find it here.
When you listen in to an interview or read a blog post about successful people, there is always one question that makes an appearance. It revolves around going back in time and telling themselves a piece of advice. “What do you wish you knew before becoming an (insert position)?” is usually how the question goes. For instructional designers, this is such a valuable question as many of us never planned to be in this field. We love education, teaching, and learning and those passions led us to becoming IDs. Surprisingly, searching for what instructional designers wish they knew before starting their roles yielded little results. My sample size was one video by Ant Pugh and one blog post.
With more teachers and educators looking to transition into the instructional design space, finding these answers are critical. Luckily for me, my network consists of some of the best and brightest instructional designers. I connected with 50 IDs and asked, “What’s one thing you wished you knew before becoming an instructional designer?” After tallying up their answers, here are the top 5 results and my commentary:
Explaining What an Instructional Designer Does
As an instructional designer, your first responsibility is to be able to eloquently explain what you do for a living. I know this sounds bizarre, but it’s true. Even though the field of instructional design has been around since the 1950’s, it wasn’t until 2000 that online learning/e-learning became common household words. Even then, it still took a significant amount of time for the role to develop and now 20 years later, we have multiple disciplines and positions within the ID space. Our titles only seem to confuse the average person even more with learning experience designer, e-learning developer, curriculum developer, program manager, and more. You will inevitably face the question, “So, what exactly do you do?”
The simplest answer I’ve found to give to this question is that I understand how people learn. Using this knowledge, I work with a subject matter expert or professor, and extract their knowledge to create a meaningful learning experience. This leads me to designing and developing curriculums, resources, and materials that link to course outcomes, competencies, and skills. Feel free to edit this in your own way and find what’s comfortable to you because I guarantee this question will be asked of you time and time again.
Learning Project Management Skills
Beyond being a master of learning sciences, instructional designers need to know how to lead a project. Depending upon the role/organization, this greatly differs. For my role, I need to not only manage my time, but I need to communicate with professors, SMEs, the multimedia team, marketing, customer support, course TAs, and other departments. With all of these communication channels, it’s easy to see how a project could go off the rails. Right from the start of the project, clear outcomes, check in points, deadlines, and quality assurance processes all need to be established.
For every project I work on, there is always a blueprint, checklist, and timetable. These documents keep me grounded and provide the necessary information I can always refer back to if I have questions. They are essentially my north star. Developing patterns and routines around these processes will keep you on track. There are an insurmountable number of project management techniques that I will not explore because we would be here all day. Just know that there are some simple strategies around staying on track and there are far more complexed paths if you want to pursue them.
Developing a Brand and Portfolio
As the instructional design field grows, you need to ask yourself this question, “What makes me stand out from the crowd?” There are several different ways of approaching this question. It all starts with your expertise. Let’s take a step back and think of a different field to help with navigating this question. Take the concept of marketing for example. When you Google marketing podcasts or blogs, you’ll find marketers who don’t claim to be the best at everything. They all have their own niche. You can find an expert marketer in affiliating marketing, membership sites, SEO, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, etc. The one person who claims to be the best at everything is the one who won’t stand out.
The ID space is transforming into this same mindset. For instance, here are some folks in the ID world that have built a personal brand:
Julie Dirksen – Design for How People Learn
Peter Shea – Instructional Designers in Education
Dr. Robin Sargent – Idol Courses Academy
Dr. Katie Novak and Tom Thibodeau – Universal Design for Learning
Notice how none of them claim to be the world’s greatest instructional designer. They found a passion within designing courses and took it to the next level. Other IDs should follow suit by furthering their skill set. This in turn will further develop an amazing and robust portfolio. With every challenging project, we grow as designers. It’s one of the coolest side effects of the job is that you are constantly learning. Use this to your advantage.
Knowing Instructional Design is a Career and is Worth Pursuing
Yes, you can make a career out of caring for students’ learning experiences online. Some people actually do very well for themselves financially in the public sector or in consulting. It’s a valuable skillset, especially with what’s happening in the pandemic. I’ve been noticing more job postings for companies you would never dream of needing an instructional designer, but those jobs are out there! Learning and development divisions are growing and with the right direction an ID can be an excellent asset to that learning environment.
Being an instructional designer is worth it. I’ve been asked before what the most rewarding experience is being an ID. Without a doubt, the answer is hearing from students about how they changed their lives because the learning experience I created. You’ll hear from students that your words have given them more confidence and developed their skills to unimaginable levels. Is it worth it change someone’s life for the better through education? Definitely.
Working with Difficult SMEs and Building Relationships with Faculty
I would argue that this should be #1 on the list. To be an instructional designer, you must have excellent relationship management skills. The SME or faculty member needs to feel like they have an equal voice in this partnership to design the best possible experience. Notice how I also said the word “equal” because proper boundaries and guidelines must be followed to have the project run smoothly. Having tension in the project because of the SME or faculty member being disengaged or not believing that an online course can be an effective teaching method will lead to chaos. To find ways to collaborate more effectively, I would highly encourage you to pick up the book, “Mindmeld: Micro-collaboration Between eLearning Designers and Instructor Experts” written by Dr. John Aleckson and Penny Ralston-Berg. It has all the strategies you need such as instructional methods, communication channels, culture, politics, and more.
My best piece of advice I can provide is to keep an open mind and try to understand their perspectives. I heard from one faculty member before that he was afraid of a course replacing him and that he didn’t see the value of a short online course. Months later, I collected data from the students and showed it to him. I had testimonials saying how much they enjoyed his presence and teaching style along with stories about how the knowledge they gained from his course allowed them to move up in their organizations. He was floored. After that, he became an online learning champion and spread the good word to his colleagues. It was absolutely astounding.
In short, being an ID is such a rewarding experience. If you are a nerd who loves people, loves to learn, and loves challenges, you found the right job.
Are you surprised by the top 5? Let me know what you think!
Want to take your instructional design skills to the next level? Check out Instructional Design Institute.
