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Experience Points

Instructional design stories/tools, wellness strategies, and job hunting guidance to progress your journey! I’m Mandy Brown, an autistic nerd right outside of Austin. I empower individuals to find work they love, heal from burnout, and grow professionally—all while staying true to themselves. If that's your jam, join me and 300+ readers every Monday morning for radical self-care and gentle professionalism.

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Featured Post

Rooting for You! 🌟

Hi Reader! I hope you had a restful weekend holiday. My life is still a little disjointed managing without my house and all our stuff. Living in suitcases sucks y'all... but I do have some good news! On Friday I got a message from one mentee that they have accepted an offer. And then on Sunday, another mentee shared that they accepted an offer! 🥳 Another mentee's contract is ending so they're starting to look again. In honor of all their hard work, I'm thought I'd share the ID Agency List...

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Hi Reader! I'm taking a moment to recognize a small win business. It’s so small it’s almost embarrassing to share. But then I realized with the housing disruption going on right now, any win I make is huge. I've started creating a new course, From Inbox to Offer, the email blueprint for job seekers. I got one lesson done last week, with plans to build out everything from the cover email to negotiating the salary. Building a business is really hard. Most people focus on the really big wins to...

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Saving Throws | Mindset & Goal Setting While Burned Out In this lesson, I refer to the "Valley of Despair" within the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I'll share more about it in future ID lessons, but for this lesson specifically, all you need to understand is the concept of the "Valley of Despair." The Valley of Despair is a phase where a learner’s initial confidence dips sharply as they confront the complexity of a new skill or topic. Feelings of frustration, overwhelm, and self-doubt are common....

cracked toilet tank

Hi Reader! Did you know that toilet tanks can crack? If your house is plumbed a certain way, the hot water from a shower can back up into your toilet tank, heating up and expanding the porcelain. The cold water that replaces it then cracks the tank. And that tank will run all night trying to refill itself. And you'll wake up to a flooded house.... I'd like to put in some metaphor about how we can't continually try to fill ourselves up when there are cracks in our self-care. But seriously,...

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Proficiency Check | Types of Subject-matter Experts & the Pros/Cons of Each Whether they're new to the process or a long-time SME, it's our job to guide them through the project so they know what to expect when. Let's discuss the SME types and how knowing these types supports your project's progress. (Seriously, figuring this out for me was 🤯) Whether you're using ADDIE or another design process, our subject matter experts aren't necessarily aware of what instructional design is, how the...

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Hi Reader! Holy cow, how is it almost the end of our first quarter?! I don't know about you, but for me, it feels like this Q has been a year... business stuff in flux, politics doing stuff nowhere on my bingo card, family chaos (though much of it good like my new nephew 😍). It's been a lot. And I'm sure life has been super lifey for you too, Reader. One way I've been calming my nervous system lately is by putting on my sleep mask and using my noise canceling headphones to listen to an...

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Proficiency Check | Let's Talk About ADDIE Here's a quick lesson on ADDIE, a design process in Instructional Design. One thing to keep in mind while I share all this is that ADDIE may feel like the ideal, but IDs hardly ever have an ideal scenario within their projects. While it's important to have all the stages, they aren't exactly linear in action. But here's my quick explanation. (If you need to read the transcript of this, click here.) You can explore ADDIE more with the interactive...

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Guidance! | Positioning for Executive Roles A while back, I had an email AMA (Ask Mandy Anything😉). And someone sent a really good question: “ How do I position myself for an executive role with no advanced education? So today I thought I'd answer this. I have interviewed for executive roles since earning my EMBA. I have yet to accept one so take my answer with a grain of salt (as always). Of all those interviews, none of them listed my EMBA as the reason they wanted to talk to me. Here's...

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Proficiency Check | SME Preference Sheets A while back I shared about personal user manuals and how having one supports SMEs in knowing how to work best with you. But it wasn't until a coworker shared one of their strategies for working with SMEs that I learned about a SME Preference Sheet. What is a SME Preference Sheet? Sometimes as an ID, you're working with the same SMEs on multiple projects. A SME Preference Sheet is a collection of the notes you've taken from that SME across projects,...

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Proficiency Check | What I like most about Instructional Design “ What do you like most about being an instructional designer? - question asked of me at a networking event Before I answer this, let me give some context for my teaching role. I worked as the English department for a Discipline Alternative Education Program (DAEP), which is a fancy way of saying I worked with kids in trauma who made poor decisions and were caught by adults who cared more about their ego. Some of them broke the...