One of the recurring themes on this blog is instructional design careers. These posts are written from my own experiences both as a job seeker and employee and as a former manager hiring instructional designers.
My original series on instructional design careers:
- 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?
- Do Instructional Designers Really Need Technology Skills?
- Two Big Technology Skills
Instructional Design Degrees, Certificates, and Certification
- Formal or Informal Masters for Instructional Designers?
- Instructional Design Degrees
- Multiple Paths to Instructional Design Careers
- Instructional Design Training Programs
- Instructional Design Certificate or Masters Degree
- Overqualified Instructional Designers?
- ID Badges: My Experience with TIfPI’s Certification
Consulting, Freelancing, and Remote Work
- How Freelance Clients Find Me
- Security for Freelancers and Consultants
- Blogging to Build your Business
- Podcast Interview on Freelancing and Consulting
- Tools that Make Consulting Easier
- Consulting Isn’t My Backup Plan
- 6 Tips for Staying Productive While Working Remotely
- My Typical Week as a Consultant
- Telecommute Instructional Design Jobs
- Getting Started as a Freelance Instructional Designer
- Tips for Starting to Freelance
- Freelance Instructional Design: More Tips from the Trenches
Portfolios
Teaching to Instructional Design
- Transitioning from Teaching to Instructional Design (presentation recording)
- Teacher to Instructional Designer: Interview Questions
- Adapting Resumes from Teaching to Instructional Design
Salary, Experience, and Other Topics
- Instructional Design Hourly Rates and Salary
- Instructional Design Experience Before Your First Job
- Questions about Instructional Design Careers
- Demand for Instructional Designers
- Do You Need a Mentor or a Network?
- Finding a Good Fit in Instructional Design
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eLearning Freelancer Bootcamp
Interested in becoming an elearning freelancer? The eLearning Freelancer Bootcamp is all about the business side of freelancing and consulting, specifically geared for instructional designers and elearning developers. This program helps you grow your business through live weekly workshops, recorded videos, resources, templates, and activities to build skills and get organized. Enrollment includes an online community for ongoing support.
Enrollment is currently closed, but you can join the waitlist to be notified when we open up for the next cohort in 2023.
Hello Christy,
I am an L & D consultant with over 20 years of experience. My full-time project ended recently, and, I am finding it very tough to get new projects.
Is it ageism bias or outsourcing has become difficult somehow?
Ageism could be a factor. There are also lots of new instructional design consultants in the US, and there may be some push for American companies to use US contractors.
If you’re consulting, it’s risky to take on full time projects because of the very issue you’re having now. You commit all your time to a single client, and then you aren’t working on your pipeline of future projects and working on your business.
So, there are a couple of things it could be besides just ageism or bias against Indian consultants, and these are things you have control over. First, are your skills up to date? You’ve been working for 20 years, but are you keeping up with new technology? Are there opportunities working with new technology like AR/VR that you could explore to give yourself an edge over others?
Second, at least in the US, most consultants have a website and portfolio that is linked from their LinkedIn profile and social media. I don’t see one on your profile. Actually, I can’t quite tell from your LinkedIn profile what kind of ID consulting you do and what services you offer, and that may be part of why you’re having trouble finding new projects.
Third, maybe the methods you use to find new projects need to be updated. The job market has shifted, and the ways that people find work now are different from how it worked even 10 years ago.
I’ve discovered a talent for making online courses. I’d like to become an eLearning Designer/Developer or instructional designer. How much do they start out making? Are they the same thing? Can anyone tell me more about that type of job? Is it actually fun? How can I get into it?
The learning field has a significant amount of inconsistency in job titles, but usually an elearning developer is more on the technical side of the process. They might only build courses using authoring tools like Storyline and Captivate, or they might have more advanced technical skills like Javascript, custom HTML5, H5P, video development, animation, etc. An instructional designer is either on the front of the process (doing needs analysis, planning, outlining, storyboarding, and script writing) or does the whole process including development. In smaller organizations, it’s more common for an instructional designer to do a bit of everything. Both roles are mostly “behind the scenes” writing or creating, rather than trainer or teacher jobs where you interact directly with learners. I think it’s a lot of fun. I’m always learning new things. I love the variety and the opportunities to be creative.
You can use the eLearning Guild salary calculator to compare salaries based on different variables.
The posts above have quite a bit of information on how to get into the field. Many people start their transition to this career with a graduate certificate or a masters degree.
Great. How good is this article, a greeting and thank you!
You should also be aware of http://www.simpletelecommute.com a search engine for telecommuting and work at home jobs. There are many job opportunities for designers
This site turned up a whopping 7 instructional design jobs in my search, two of which are actually multimedia developer jobs. While that’s nice to find a few, it’s not the “many” jobs that you claimed. This doesn’t look like a particularly useful site to me.
Thank you for the information. While it is very helpful I need to see an example of an instructional design project.
Check out my portfolio. I have several examples there.
I am currently reading through, and enjoying your site.
My experience with Instructional Design was a pleasant surprise. An ID class was included with the IT curriculum I had chosen.
I was fortunate to have an excellent instructor, who forced us to expand our thought processes to grasp the detailed concepts of designing instruction.
At the time, I had no prior higher learning experience, and my professional background is fairly blue collar…Landscape design, construction, and maintenance.
Our class split into various teams of roughly four people. My group was assigned with the task of designing an effective teaching tool, for people unfamiliar with basic functions corresponding to a PC keyboard. Our solution was to print a schematic of the keyboard with the pertinent information, on a mouse pad. My contribution was the use of simple color coding on the schematic, to facilitate with the learning process. Each step was given a color, which corresponded to a specific key.
I borrowed the practice from my habit of incorporating color codes, to help clients visualize two dimensional landscape plans.
Our instructor was impressed with our efforts, and I experienced a sense of satisfaction, that was quite unique.
I chose not to pursue an IT career, but I’ve never forgotten the positive experience with that Instructional Design course.