An opinion on what can help you
I have heard of many teachers who want to transition to into instructional design. Teaching during the pandemic has become more difficult, and this has exacerbated an attrition problem that preceded our current situation.
The following advice applies only to teachers who want to make that transition, as I did many years ago. If you come from a different background, much of the advice here might be counterproductive to your needs.
I have heard about a lot of “coaches” who will sell you instructional design classes, usually to master ID software such as Articulate Storyline and Articulate Rise, often for thousands of dollars.
Here is the problem I have with most of those courses: they are teaching you the wrong skills. Those courses can be great for people who come from the industry and know nothing of training of teaching, but those software solutions are easy to learn. Articulate Storyline used to be a PowerPoint add-on, and if you are proficient at PowerPoint (which most teachers should be, I surmise), learning Articulate Storyline using free online tutorials should take you less than a full day of work. Articulate Rise is even easier to learn.
Those courses can help you build a portfolio that looks good, but that’s about it. And, honestly, I believe that you can do that on your own if you are willing to spend a little bit of money on a visual website builder.
Having made the transition from teaching to instructional design a long time ago, I can tell you that the skills I needed to learn to make it in my current profession were the following:
- Practical training
- Organizational Development
- Industry
Practical training
Unless you work for some kind of vocational school, as a teacher, your current job is largely to give your students a depth and breadth of knowledge and skills that will help them learn whatever specific job they will end up in, and possibly to make them better, more informed citizens.
This should remain an important part of your profession once you become an instructional designer. However, as an instructional designer, most of the training that will be requested of you will be to improve employee performance on a specific task.
I strongly suggest you learn how to do that. You have all the prerequisite skills to do so, but it is a change in perspective that can be a little daunting if you do not prepare for it. To learn this skill, I suggest you take one or both of the following paths:
- Get classes that train students more directly to perform a specific job.
- Study Cathy Moore’s Scenario Design and Action Mapping.
While I will state that Cathy Moore’s stance on never giving theoretical explanations before scenarios is excessive, the techniques she teaches are very useful to someone making the transition you are seeking.
Organizational Development
Broadly speaking, organizational development is the management skill meant to help you assess the needs of your organization, find the solutions that will improve performance, and evaluate the results. Coming into the ID field from a teaching background, this is likely to be your main weakness. Schools, generally speaking, are managed differently than other organizations. Seeing your principal or rector in action will give you little insight on how companies work.
Personally, I fixed this problem by joining the telecommunications industry at the bottom of the ladder, taking management courses, and attending communities of practice on organizational development, and holding interim ID or management positions for years before finally getting my first permanent “Training specialist” position.
You might not have the patience, or the financial situation necessary to go through that as I did.
A lot of instructional designers will argue that their job is only to fulfill whatever training requests are put on their desk, assuming that everything else has been handled perfectly, and that the request fits exactly the organization’s needs. If you want your job to matter, that is the wrong approach.
My advice is this: before you get your first ID job, read “Map It”, Cathy Moore’s book on Action Mapping. You can buy it here.
You may also review the basics of action mapping here.
Learn nothing else on organizational development before you start. You would squander any further training that you take, simply because it would be too much to take in at this moment.
Once you get your first job as an instructional designer, you will have the opportunity to apply action mapping in your work. At multiple points, you will find areas where you struggle to deal with how your employer operates. Either you don’t understand the power dynamics at play, or you will feel as if some things seem to run inefficiently for no reason anyone can remember.
At this point, apply my second advice for learning organizational development: connect with people. Talk with everybody. If a director asks you to create training to improve how they complete a specific task, talk to the director, the subject experts, the learners, the managers of the learners, the people affected by the issues caused by the mistakes that the director wants to stop, and also talk to your own manager. In every company I have worked at, there were people who had figured out what the organization’s problems were and had some ideas on how to fix them (those ideas on how to fix things were not always good, however). Being aware of what everybody thinks about an issue will greatly help you in designing efficient training.
As you start to grow into your new role (maybe within a few months of being hired), start looking for new learning opportunities. Personally, I love communities of practice, but university management courses might be more to your liking. Either way, as you learn organizational design and management while working within a company, you will be able to link your theoretical learning to actual workplace situations, making the learning opportunities that much more worthwhile. This will take you from junior to senior roles a lot more quickly than just another set of Articulate courses ever will.
If you speak French and want to learn organizational design (which the author calls by another name), I strongly suggest the communities of practice by Aliter Concept’s François Lavallée. If you speak English only, I don’t know which communities of practice on organizational development are good, sorry about that.
Learn an industry
Finally, as an instructional designer, you will create courses or training modules on something. Try to improve your knowledge of that subject matter, and on the industry that depends on it. If you teach at a university or a vocational school, you probably have some industry knowledge already, be it about law firms, chemistry, or welding.
If you teach general education high school, getting into any industry might prove a touch more difficult, however. This is the main reason why I chose to join an industry at the bottom and climb the ladder, personally.
If you do not have an industry that you believe would be specifically favorable to your set of skills, I suggest applying to any employer that you don’t specifically object to. Once you start working in an industry, if you connect with people and create training for them as I suggested earlier, you will eventually get a good grasp of that field.
The great thing about that is that, as you start mastering the jargon, the technical skills, and also the culture of an industry, you will more easily understand your subject matter experts, greatly reducing the time spent with them just to get a grasp on things. Also, you will gather an arsenal of learning activities that you will be able to use to teach some aspect of this business. For example, if you are in the pool maintenance business, you might develop a few styles of short training videos that teach specific maintenance operations, meaning that you only have to plug in the contents of a specific maintenance task into one of those to create your training. These techniques would be pretty much useless for other industries, such as call centers, but are key training solutions where you work.
By this, I don’t mean that you should necessarily stick to one industry. There are multiple reasons to change fields, market conditions being chief among them. But getting solid experience in a few industries can really help your potential as a hire, and your efficiency as an instructional designer.