Hello,

This blog post is meant to be a powerful reality check that may be unpleasant to read, but that can greatly improve your job perspectives over the long term.

Teaching does not prepare you for instructional design. Teaching prepares you to become a trainer for an organization, assuming that you first get the job you want to train people in and become better than most of the people doing it. Once you become a corporate trainer, this usually comes with light responsibilities in instructional design or management. You learn where the cracks are in the performance of the employees you train, and how to fix it.

At some point, if you make the effort to develop your skills, you become good enough to be able to do this full time as an instructional designer.

This is the path I took to instructional design, and I suggest you do the same. Especially, avoid working for agencies like the plague. Begin in-house, and you may eventually go for consulting jobs, if you are able to carefully select your consulting firm, after you have been an ID inside the organization.

Instructional Design is not a junior position. Of all the ID projects I have handled in my career, none of them would have been accessible to me directly from my teaching job, not even a little. To be honest, I think most of you have been thoroughly exposed to this fact through your applications. I’ve seen many of you panic and complain when seeing a list of skills and requirements like this one:

• Business need analysis
• Setting learning objectives
• Learning theories and instructional design models
• E-Learning design tools (Adobe Captivate, Articulate 365, Lectora, or other)
• Microsoft Office 365
• Copywriting
• Visual Design skills (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or other)
• Animation and video (Vyond, Adobe After Effects, Camtasia or other)
• Learning Management System management
• Attendance reporting
• Return on Investment Evaluation
• Asset: Project management skills
• Asset: Customer service skills
• Asset: Experience in our industry

Dividing instructional design

The truth is, the job of instructional designer can be split into 2 parts:

• Instructional design
• Multimedia production

Having a great multimedia artist to produce your designs is an immense boon to somebody who doesn’t have those skills, and there is little overlap between the two jobs. As long as the instructional designer communicates well and has a good idea of the capacities of their multimedia artist, the two jobs can be separated safely.

For major projects, you can even have the multimedia production spread out across different specialties, if the project is major enough to warrant it (A Storyline document with text and images with basic animations doesn’t really warrant it in my opinion, but a 3D virtual reality simulation of a surgery that includes both VR glasses and a physical mannequin will take a whole multimedia team to produce).

The instructional design part, however, CANNOT be spread out among multiple people without significantly damaging the project, creating a lower quality product in a far longer time frame, unless it’s a massive project like the multidisciplinary surgery training mentioned above, with multiple people of different specialties all trained in one session. The reason for this is simple.

The job of an instructional designer is not to create the pedagogy of the training. This is a complete misconception of what an ID does.

An instructional designer’s job is to find out how to improve employee’s job performance and make it happen. You will never, ever get a good understanding of what employees need to improve, in a field you don’t know, by reading the report of some business analyst. You need to dig in way deeper than that, directly with the learners and their immediate supervisors, to learn what needs improving in a very detailed way. Broad strokes given to you by somebody else will never do the trick.

For example, in customer service, you have to know that, in your company, if a customer says that the product is too expensive, many employees tend to refute the customer’s objection (by saying something like “the prices are actually lower than our competitors!”), while they should be asking the customer what they want exactly, in order to establish whether the customer really needs only what is offered in the cheaper option, or if there is something that the customer wants that does make the higher-priced product worth the additional expense.

This is situational knowledge, and you will not get a strong enough idea of what needs improving if somebody else does the needs analysis for you. Context and the realities of the job matters. As an instructional designer, beyond just presenting theory, you will have to design simulations that mirrors the person’s work context as closely as possible to create the practice activities, showcasing the issues caused by making the bad decisions as well as the advantages of doing things the right way, so that the cognitive effort to take the theory and actually apply it in their work is not hopelessly daunting. This means you have to have both feet on the field with the people doing the work to learn from it.

Isn’t that unfair to teachers?

The truth is: it sucks, but it’s not unfair. It’s a different job with a different set of skills. For comparison, let us check the skills and requirements a chemistry teacher needs to have in order to do their job, based on my own experience:

• Pedagogy in the classroom
• Creating interactive pedagogical activities
• Writing clearly on the blackboard (old) or smart board (new)
• PowerPoint, and possibly other software
• Classroom management
• Knowledge of the subject matter and how to teach that specifically
• Designing homework
• Designing exams
• Designing experiments
• Grading homework
• Grading exams
• Grading experiments
• Adapting to students with disabilities
• Offering emotional support to students in difficult situations

How do you react when you hear someone say they could be a great teacher just because they can explain stuff clearly, but they are missing everything else?

The truth is, some of those items are so important that missing just one of them will send the whole classroom into a downward, toxic spiral. Bad classroom management? You lose control and nothing else can happen. You can’t explain stuff? Your students won’t understand anything. Your exams are way too difficult because you are unable to gauge them properly? You will fail a bunch of students who deserved to pass, hindering their career path. Note how little overlap there is between this job description and the ID one. Teaching is not instructional design. Teaching is training. An unprepared instructional designer cannot take over a teacher’s job any more than an unprepared teacher can take over an instructional designer job.

Does it really mean that I should start at the bottom?

Nyes.

You have a lot of experience that will make learning instructional design a lot faster than somebody else who starts at the bottom. You are like a professional athlete running a 400 meters dash on a racetrack while the others who start at the bottom with you are average people running through a swamp. You may begin at the same line, but you are equipped to outrun them significantly.

And that is where the value of your educational experience lies. In reaching higher positions faster. You know a lot about cognitive theory, pedagogy, psychology, and learning. You might also be older and more mature than many colleagues who are just starting out.

Now, if you are a teacher in a well-paid permanent position, starting over a new career from the bottom might not be financially viable. Most people cannot afford to drop their salary from 85 000 $ per year to 35 000 $, because of prior financial obligations. However, if you are in one of those school districts in the USA that pay teachers 13 $ per hour, or if you are a substitute teacher with very unequal paydays, that first corporate job might be better for you financially than remaining in teaching. If that is the case, strongly consider that option.

Personally, I started in a call center. 18 months later, I was a corporate trainer. I got a bunch of interim positions (management and instructional design), realized that my company was going to always give me the tasks but never the job and salary that came with it, started job hopping, and now I’m doing very well for myself. My salary almost tripled in 11 years. I am a senior L&D consultant now. Climbing the ladder from the bottom was the right plan, even though it was sometimes painful.

Photo by Abbie Bernet on Unsplash