Hiring Managers, Storytelling, and Tools: ID Links 5/25/21
Curated links on what hiring managers want, storytelling, and tools from outside of L&D that can be useful for instructional designers.
As I read online, I bookmark resources I find interesting and useful. I share these links periodically here on my blog. This post includes links on what hiring managers want, storytelling, and tools from outside of L&D that can be useful for instructional designers.
What ID hiring managers want
Instructional Design Hiring Manager Report 2021
Devlin Peck summarizes and analyzes responses from 101 hiring managers surveyed about what factors influence their decisions when evaluating instructional design and elearning candidates.
When asked which top three skills the respondents look for when hiring instructional designers, they selected:
eLearning development (74.3%)
Devlin Peck
Communication skills (65.3%)
Ability to apply ID theory and science (61.4%)
Storytelling and a branching scenario example
Kayleen Holt summarizes takeaways from TLDC’s community day focused on the theme of story (including notes from my session)
Stories are the most powerful way to motivate, teach, learn, and connect with others. To develop effective stories, we need the creative mindset of a beginner, the courage to make them messy, and effective tools and processes to manage their complexity.
Kayleen Holt
Decisions, Decisions! – Engage Brain and Train!
A humorous Choose Your Own Adventure branching scenario sample by Jonathan Hill. The look and feel matches the classic books. Jonathan includes a tip to consider adding decisions in the beginning that have no impact on the outcome (just a cosmetic change), but provide a tutorial or practice on using the controls.
Tools from outside L&D
Pose – Easy Character Guidelines by Gal Shir
App for creating poses for characters. These are just outlines, which you’d have to illustrate yourself in another app. Kevin Thorn demonstrated this as a way to create custom characters for scenarios, which you can pose in exactly the way you need. This is a browser-based app, currently $19.
GitHub – bfritscher/carnac: A utility to give some insight into how you use your keyboard
Mark Weingarten used this utility in his advanced Storyline session at LSCon. It shows your keyboard shortcuts on screen so others can better understand what you’re doing. Super useful for anyone doing software training or screencasts.
