Top 5 Things about being an Instructional Designer

5. You get to write your thoughts down, then erase them, then write them down again ... in a different way.
[gulp] ... the pitfalls of syntactical perfection. Who really likes manhandling their thoughts onto paper or on screen? Maybe some masochist do. But me? I side with Hemmingway. Ernest mused, "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” Writing instructional content is meticulous business. After all someone's career, well-being, or in some cases life hang on the ID's word choices. So being careful, correct, and judicious about how things are said is critical to meeting instructional objectives. The unintended inference is the designer's worst nightmare. No designer or SME wants students inferring something incorrect from the content. We don't want students filling in gaps the content should have addressed. Thus the onus of scribing ideas and concepts transparently and thoroughly is the designer's responsibility. No sentence nor word of the content should be above revision when it comes to clarity. Instructional designers are used to writing down their thoughts, erasing them, and writing them down again ... in a different way for the sake of instruction.

4. You get to play with puzzles.
Designing instruction is part performance art, part scavenger hunt, part novel writing. The pre-assessments and gap analysis give direction over what needs to be developed. But actually developing what needs to be developed is where rubber meets road. How do you assemble seemingly disparate procedures, facts, processes, interview notes, and photos into something that instructs? Which skills are terminal? Which are enabling? How many learning domains do you address? Pulling from best practices in curriculum development, pedagogy, educational assessment, the ID assembles information into a logical sequence for third party learning of an intellectual or psychomotor skill. Gagne, Kemp, Dick, and Carey all mapped out ways to deal with developing instructional material out of pieces of associated data. The puzzle for the ID is his or her curriculum and/or content outline. Before the narrative writing begins, the outline suffers the sequencing and re-sequencing, the arranging and re-arranging of topics until there is logical, pedagogical progression. Where there is logic and proper sequencing there is learning.

3. Experts respect you.
Sometimes projects require significant interaction with SMEs. We interview them; we study their work; we learn their business. And good or bad we develop relationships with them. The well-working SME / ID team grows from trust and integrity. Still it's not a stretch to say that most folks have no idea what instructional design is or what instructional designers do. So to some SMEs, an ID asking rounds of questions can be seen a threat or a hindrance. "You're here to watch and report me," or "Good luck trying to understand what I do," may be on loop in the SME's thoughts about the ID. But the ID isn't there to judge, nor is he there to document steps or video-tape activities or screen-capture desktops necessarily. While those things are part of the data-collection process, more accurately the ID is there to learn from the SME. That learning includes learning the task(s) and the "universe" in which they are performed. It means learning enough to ask informed and important questions about the task(s) and of the task-performer. And it means taking what the ID has learned and weaving it competently back into the SME / ID dialog. It means researching the topic outside of SME meetings. On any given project, the ID serves as - documenter, researcher, writer but none more important than learner. The conveyance of knowledge from SME to ID is unavoidable. But the ID that exerts energy to speak with growing confidence in the SME's occupational language is due to capture the SME's attention. The result can be earned respect for the instructional design process and the instructional design practitioner.

2. You get to tell people about stuff ... in a pedagogic kinda way.
The ID is a middle-man. He stands between the SME / trainer and the learner. The ID records, researches, observes, and then assembles the information into a format that conveys knowledge from one person to another, as in from engineer to technician or from craftmaster to novice. Respective task-skill experts know their game; they know what they do. IDs experiment with communicating an experts' knowledge, assembling and presenting it in ways that support learning. IDs love being part of the both communication and learning process that exists between instructor and learner. IDs facilitate the learning transaction by expertly sequencing, organizing, and interrelating information so that it tells a learnable narrative to the student - be it a process, a procedure, a practice, a concept, a theory, or a policy.

1. You can get your curiosity on!
Curiosity is the nine iron in the instructional designer's (ID's) golf bag. Why? Because it's curiosity that ultimately powers content development. And it's the ID's questions that evince curiosity. The conscientious instructional designer isn't a just a documenter and step-explainer but she's an investigator. She peels the steps back to understand what the steps mean in context to the performer, to the task, and to the overall job. Asking questions -the right ones at the right times- is perhaps the easiest way to unpeel a job. SMEs are ripe with answers about the tasks that they do. But SMEs are also great for forgetting about how they came to know what they know. Within that forgotten bank of information are perhaps entry-level skills and knowledge that influence their performing of a task or their mastery of some knowledge. Refusing to leave questions on the table, allows the ID to broadly consider the SME's real association with the featured tasks on knowledge. This "real association" includes how the SME knows to do something that's not evident in the worksteps and why the SME knows to do it. Exploring the SME's knowledge base can help the ID determine what entry-level or prerequisite knowledge and skills could or should likely be addressed in the training content.

Can Informal Learning Be Captured and Evaluated?

I’ve always struggled with how corporate training is evaluated. It seems like hours and hours go into the complex developing of and communicating about training, only to be followed up by end-of-class smile sheets or just a checked box beside some LMS hyperlink. And fairly much the smile sheets tell the course owners how well the classroom or web-based experience was for the respondent. In the real world of application training, does anyone ever go beyond level 1 evaluation?

Well at least when talking about formal training there is record and possible evaluation of said training interaction. Informal work-place training/education, however, –like the kind you get from a talk with a colleague next door or a chat in some social media forum-  doesn’t lend itself to the same easily. But companies want to know the impact informal training (in all its modes) has on their workforce. And that’s because maybe informal training will affect the organization’s bottom line or its training culture somehow. So despite its existing in the ether, can informal learning be documented and quantified by the organization? 

I think informal training interactions (again in all of its modalities) can be assessed qualitatively and quantitatively - to an extent. Informal educational interactions are squirmy. We don't know when they’re going to happen, where they’re going to happen, or how meaningful they’re going to be when they do. But we can assume maybe that informal learning will happen to nearly every employee at some point throughout the year. So if we want to document that, then why not just ask the people to whom it happened to talk about it. End of the year performance assessments could be a viable place and time to do that. It’s when organizations are counting performance numbers, work quality, and such that they could ask employees about their work related informal learning experiences.

The organizations’ questions about those interactions would solicit employees to provide enough meaningful detail (aka narrative) that an identifiable theme could be deduced from each interaction. A theme could be “got re-enforcement training on how to perform accounts payable transaction in our new version of SAP”. Besides the narrative, the employee would state her own perceived work-performance outcome stemming from said interaction – and that maybe is the money shot. And lastly, the employee could provide some numerical rank for the interaction’s overall quality and impact on that employee’s performance.

Between the narrative, the narrative's theme, the outcome, and the ranking a profile for each interaction could be constructed. And dare I say that this profile might be measurable and documentable. To wrap it up, this profile becomes part of the employee’s training record in a learning management or HR system – something that could pick out trends among many profiles. Could this be this be impact organizations are looking to measure regarding informal learning? This is all kind of like IBM project assessment tool in a way, where employees provide a narrative of their project experiences and those experiences are ranked.

Ok so while in an analytical sense, the measuring of informal learning’s frequency, quality, etc. is a great thing for business, it could be with met with resistance from those it solicits. Informal learning is a telling thing, yeah … in addition to being a squirmy thing I  know. So revealing it to a third party, like a boss, could be threatening. Here’s a scenario. Boss says to employee, “So we paid for you to go to three days of training and you still had to get Mary’s 30-minutes of informal learning help with that transaction?” Ok maybe that’s an extreme supposition, I don’t know. But it goes to say that asking employees to report or document informal learning could be perceived as a threat. So if the organization wants to know about or measure informal learning within their walls, they need to ensure that they have the support structure to foster this learning mode.

Informal training probably drives business more so than formal training. Where planned, formal training is organized and relatively static, informal training is nimble, reactive, and personalized. Where it lacks certification is pushes quick outcomes. That’s because the results of informal training can be immediate. In short and convenient time, the worker learns what he wanted to know and implements such learning post haste. Informal and formal training are not in competition. If anything they are in compliment of each other. Thus the dynamics of informal study should be studied if organizations implement ways to document them. 

Instructional what?

The 21st century can be a conflicted place when it comes to work and careers. In centuries past it was expected that your barber would moonlight as the local doctor, specializing in bloodletting and leach therapies to balance the humors. Or it was common for the parsons to double up as the village undertaker too, or the local jeweler to pull duty as a gun dealer. Perhaps the times of earlier centuries dictated multiple occupational skills over single occupational skills.

The nature of a post industrial America has, with its complex tools and processes and ever increasingly complex job roles, forced the widening of the line between the division of labor and occupations. So now it's rare to have the type of crossover that was seen in times before. Now everything from car mechanics to medicine men and women comes specialized. A mechanic can specialize in electrical systems inasmuch as a physician can specialize in nephrology - thanks to mankind having discovered enough about the complexities of our world to appreciate its granularity.

But all isn't necessarily lost to the ages. There's still some job sharing in the 21 century. Here's an example, instructional designers and corporate trainers. A lot of times on job websites and projects the terms are paired, if not used interchangeably, as if to increase chances of the post being found. But really the two couldn't be more distinct in their job tasks, skills, and objectives. 

Let's go back to the example of the singer/songwriter. There are some wonderfully blessed savants who do both very well (depends on how you define well - I won't go there). From back in my day, I viewed Lionel Ritchie and James Taylor as songwriting beast. Back in the 70's and 80's they could do no wrong. They wrote for themselves; they wrote for other people. They were the bomb. While they both could hold a note and had enviable tone they were probably more respected for the compositions they wrote.

Then there's Whitney Houston, Adele, and Audra MacDonald. All known and respected more so for their voices and the interpretations they bring (brought) to a songwriter's idea.

Summarily, songwriters write songs and singers vocally interpret them. The mastery behind each discipline is confirmed in the fact that higher ed outfits offer degrees in music composition like they offer degrees in voice.

So here we are with instructional designer versus trainer. Each job title says what it does. Instructional designers create instruction. Trainers train or deliver instruction. In the same way a songwriter develops an idea into a tune, constructing it out of sound, time, and words, an instructional designer develops an idea into instruction. She uses her best senses to construct meaningful instruction from disparate procedures, rules, and guidelines. Trainers are the deliverers of what instructional designers produce. Like the singer, the trainer interprets and follows the ideas of the instructional designer.

The important thing is that instructional designing and training (as a trainer) are two completely different disciplines. The art of instructional design can be learned in institutions. You can get a degree in it, like a B.A., MAEd, M Ed, etc. Expertise in training, however, is developed only from doing and experiencing the actual job or product at hand.

Say a brilliant surgeon comes up with an idea to decrease stroke risk during a particular surgery. He performs the procedure successfully tens of times, proving its effectiveness. A medical school approaches him about developing a three-day workshop on his procedure, training other surgeons. While this medicine man knows much about anatomy, medical tools, and what he does in the OR, he may know little about creating three days worth of instruction. Not to worry, that's where the medical school assigns him an instructional designer, with perhaps a specialty in medical communication.

Now we have a symbiotic relationship between two very different practioneers. 

In the end, the doctor operated as trainer, which is what he should be doing because he is the SME. And the instructional designer operated in her correct capacity - not delivering the training but giving the trainer scope, form, and function for the trainer to deliver. The two worked together to help the trainer deliver the message he wanted to deliver in a way that was clear, interesting, and cohesive for the trainee. An instructional designer is to a trainer, as a songwriter is to a vocalist, or a playwright is to an actor, or an architect is to a builder, or a ... ok you get the idea. Instructional designers develop pedagogic infrastructure for trainers. And trainers, who always ought to be subject matter experts in their discipline, interpret and follow that instruction to deliver the content their audience expects and the trainer wants.

Yeah it's true that in one trainer you could find decent or exceptional instructional designer skills. But maybe that's the exception and not the average. Just like in the arts, you could find in one artist both a decent songwriter and singer - kind of like Michael Jackson or Elton John. Those guys are (were) all-in-ones.

So if it's so clear that there is a line between instructional designers and trainers. Why do some job posts not recognize that? I've two ideas. 1) The organization assumes the trainer is always an expert in both disciplines or at least the trainer can put together an ok curriculum and can operate Articulate. 2) The organization doesn't understand what instructional design is exactly.

The field of instructional design has a duty to continually educate the public and employers on what the occupation really is about. Instructional designers have expertise in designing training to support what subject matter experts (trainers) want to say and do in their training events - instructor led or web-based. When hiring an instructional designer/trainer, an ad ought to read, "hiring for instructional designer/subject matter expert". Because that's really what's being asked for - a subject matter expert. Unless the firm is looking for subject matter in the art of instructional design itself, the prospective applicant may want to ask ... "a subject matter expert in what?".

In the training process, the function of speaking to and leading the learner, audibly or in text, should be the domain of the trainer role. In the same process, the function of developing curriculums, materials, validation, and basically providing pedagogical support to the trainer role ought to be the domain of the instructional designer.

Training Reconn - Capturing What Matters

In a lot of environments, corporate training is like the city fire department. When the organization realizes there’s an emergency, like invoices routinely being inaccurate, equipment being mis-operated, sales not being made, etc, training whirls to the scene. Instruction is designed and classes are taught. And the transfer of knowledge is validated.

Over time, fire departments expanded their functions - going beyond mere extinguishing. Pro-active prevention is now a staple aspect of most fire departments. Pro-active action leads to less fire emergencies, findings being rolled-up to city management and product developers thereby influencing change, and fire departments educating citizens on best practices and behaviors.

So what if corporate training operated in the same way – pro-active training? Sure training would be there for the emergencies and planned training events like always. But training could be there in a more constant way as well, not just reacting to problems but sniffing them out.

Management gets a lot of credit for identifying problems and more so for identifying the causes of problems. But problems are sneaky and stealthy. And a lot of times they live in the heads of workers well before management detects them. So how could training become more of a pro-active force?

If you hook a hot network cable to a computer’s network card, the active network will constantly poll the card to assess the card’s status. Is it still there or not?  In a pro-active model, training could do much the same – performing something like a performance reconnaissance mission among the workforce.

This recon-ning would initiate with no assumptions about anything being wrong or broken within the organization. In this activity, training would be polling the workforce, at all levels of the organization, for their insights and assessments about the tasks, tools, and processes that impact corporate performance.

The feedback would be analyzed for trends and illuminations on matters that could be the tellings of burgeoning issues. This isn’t a reformed gap analysis. Because that would imply that we know where we are and where we need to be. And we just need to figure out how to fill in the middle. This reconnaissance would know no start, middle, or end.

Its objective would be to ask intelligently designed questions that gain from workers (all workers) what they think works well and the things that work not so well regarding the tasks, tools, and processes that impact their work. While there are numerous predictive analytics and statistical models that can predict friction points and even behaviors, this type of surveying could  work to gain insight into workforces’ thoughts and sentiments.