Proficiency Check | What I like most about Instructional Design

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 law, but most of them were simply "problem" students. Weird how all the problem kids were not-white and/or had learning disabilities, but I digress...

The hardest part about this job was that students came into my classroom whenever they got in trouble, and only stayed with me for about 30 days. On day one, I assessed their skills and put them in eLearning lessons I had built so I could provide personalized their learning. And before you knew it, they were gone again. It felt very Sisyphean because the ones who returned to my classroom often had forgotten the lessons I taught.

I'm a problem and puzzle solver. I like picking apart complex, messy issues and finding bottlenecks and holes in systems. And then, once I've found them, I get to create a solution.

Creating eLearning that differentiated for each learner as they entered my classroom, was a huge undertaking, but one I loved. My solution struggled to have a lasting impact, but that has a lot more to do with our school-to-prison pipeline than me. (Also, that my principal later asked me when I was going to "really teach" is a story for another day.🙄)

What I like about instructional design is that I'm building solutions where I get to see the impact. Yes, I like the creativity of building something, getting to try innovative approaches, etc. But what I like the most is that I can see my work driving business results: closing deals, decreasing support tickets, ramping up new-to-role leaders, etc.

I no longer wonder if a student is going to return to my classroom having lost all that I taught them. Now I know that associates will return to my job aid (and I can see the number of visits!) or will retake the quick eLearning module I created. And it's often embedded within their workflow because that's how I try to design everything.

Sometimes I don't get to be a part of the needs analysis, so I'm not entirely sure what I'm solving for, but even then, I can see the impact of the work, review learner feedback, and iterate. I can do that because the pace here is nothing like a school year where you have to be "on" every hour of every day. I'm given space to think through the solution and build out. And I'm no longer a department of one, trying to manage a whole program by myself. I feel like I'm truly on a team now, which is awesome.

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