Getting Into Instructional Design
May 27, 2007This is post #2 in a series about the instructional design. Read the first post, What does an instructional designer do?, for the introduction.
As I see it, there are two different ways to move from another field into an instructional design career: the direct way and the indirect way.
The direct way is to get your masters degree in instructional design, educational technology, or something similar. I have hired a people who have those degrees, even ones who have little or no actual work experience. Some of those instructional designers were fabulous right out of the gate. If you have no education or training experience, this is probably the way to go.
The other way is the indirect route. Most of the IDs I have hired and worked with (probably about 75%) came from an education or training background. That’s my background too; I taught public school, then switched to corporate software training before finding ID. The majority of IDs I know didn’t originally set out to enter this field; they started teaching or training or writing technical manuals and found instructional design along the way.
If you are currently working in education or training, you are probably already developing a lot of the skills needed for instructional design. The exception would be if you’re not doing any writing or planning yourself, and you are only teaching things other people have developed. I found that most of my lesson planning and curriculum planning skills from when I taught were very relevant when I moved to instructional design. When I did corporate training, the bulk of what I taught was from published books. I was fortunate to have some flexibility to stray from the published lesson plans at times, but I didn’t do a whole lot of writing while in that position.
If you teach or train somewhere where the lesson plans are provided for you, it’s going to be harder to move into instructional design. Anything you can do to create your own materials as supplements or special lessons will be helpful. I created some short job aids and extra handouts while doing corporate training. Even writing one-page handouts helps you gain experience and gives you something to talk about in an interview (and maybe show in a portfolio).
Teachers and trainers who want to change careers to instructional design have two major areas where their skills may need to be developed further:
- Instructional design
- Technology
Those skill areas will be later posts in this series.
Update: Other Posts in this Series
- What Does an Instructional Designer Do?
- Getting Into Instructional Design
- Instructional Design Skills
- Technology Skills
- Professional Organizations and Career Options
- Is instructional design the right career?
Update: Read all my posts about Instructional Design Careers here.
Technorati Tags: instructionaldesign, e-learning, education, training, career
Free Subscription
If you enjoyed this post, consider a free subscription so you can receive automatic updates. Don’t worry, I hate spam as much as you do, so I’ll never share your email address with anyone.
Hi Christy,
I got into Instructional Designing through the second route mentioned in your post; I was a software trainer and the client requirement made me move into this field. I didnt even know at that time that such a profession existed :).
Anyway, soon I realized that being an ID was what I was meant to be and have completed 7 successful years in the industry.
I also feel that its a better way to transition from Trainer to ID as you then can use your trainer experience and way of thinking while creating or designing programs.
I agree that there is a definite advantage to having seen that side of the classroom when you’re doing instructional design. It’s easier to envision the training environment when you’ve had that experience. I know that I would personally have a much harder time developing for K-12 teachers if I had never worked as a teacher. It’s just more natural to understand their perspective.
That said, I have known a few tremendous instructional designers who went the first route. One in particular really helped bring up the level of instructional design in the whole team, partly because her own work provided great examples for others to build on, and partly because she was willing to share and coach others.
I’m curious, Shweta, what your experience has been with the technology skills. That created some debate here. Where do you fall in that discussion? Do you think instructional designers should learn technology skills and work at all stages of the process, or should we focus on just a narrow stage of the development and let programmers and graphic designers do what they do best? I wonder if the situation in India is more similar to what I’ve experienced or what Cammy Bean has experienced in her career.
Interesting post!
I do not have any experience teaching or preparing course material. I just got started with instructional designing and learnt a lot on job.
I have written a short post on the role of an instructional designer here: http://writersgateway.wordpress.com/2007/02/28/the-role-of-an-instructional-designer/
Please do check that out.
Cheers
Rupa
Hi Rupa,
I have seen people move from tech writing into instructional design before, although not as often. It seems to be a different enough approach that not everyone can make that transition successfully. Obviously, you have, which is great. That’s a path which I didn’t include here though, and perhaps I should have.
I found an interesting article called Identifying the gap between technical writing and instructional design that talks about this difference between tech writing and ID.
Hey Christy, this is first time I have come across instruction design in a blog. I am so glad to see this.
In my country, people are not so aware about instruction design yet. They tend to confuse it with technical writer or content writer.
I did journalism, it was even before I received results for my masters, I took up this job without knowing what instruuction design was..Later I got hooked, I like designing training programs, it gives me a hiigh and sense of creativity…We plan to soon bring out a blog on easy to use ID strategies…sumthng taht had ready to information…
Hi Poonam,
Glad you found my blog! There is definitely some confusion here in the US sometimes too, and not every company expects the same thing from IDs. I hadn’t heard of instructional design myself until 2003.
If you’re looking for more instructional design blogs, check out Cammy at Learning Visions and Natalie at Design for Learning.