The State of Instructional Design in 2014

You may have seen the serious elearning manifesto.  It opens an important discussion in the instructional design and development world.  It also underlines the chaos that exists in that field; a cohesive field would not need a manifesto that addresses only a fraction of the work within the field – only the e-learning portion, in this case. It also begs the question of why a manifesto is needed and creates a tension between ‘typical’ elearning and ‘serious’ elearning.  This manifesto underscores the fact that field of instructional design and development has charlatans, wannabes, the tired masses, and top-notch professionals – within just the learning portion of the field.

The Instructional Design and Development Workforce Marketplace  

From the market perspective, instructional design and development (ID) is a diverse, fragmented, and undifferentiated market.  This is an international marketplace workforce with a wide variety of skill levels competing against each other for work and recognition. Whether instructional designers and developers work as internal consultants (a.k.a. staff) or as external consultants, they struggle with the fallout from this complex market. 

What is a diverse, fragmented, and undifferentiated market?

Diverse

Instructional designers and developers (IDs) work in every industry from military to social work, from finance work to entertainment, from government to energy, and everything in between.  IDs work for non-profits, military, government, colleges and universities, public schools, every industry every invented, as well as consulting house that serve the world.    They may be one-person self-supporting businesses or they may members of large teams working multi-million dollar projects and every workplace variation in between.  Diversity in workplace creates a huge variance requirements and expectations.

IDs come to the field through two paths – higher education degreed and lateral movers with subject field experience.  While the degreed members are on the rise, the vast majority of the field comes in with native talent and expertise in an industry’s content field.   This highly diverse background experience makes it difficult to compare even entry-level candidates. 

Then, there is the work itself.  Some IDs specialize in one type of solution – just elearning, or just instructor-led, for example.  Others are tasked with creating unique solution sets that address specific needs.  Some are expected to be expert technical writers, while others are expected to be graphic artists and technologists, and some must be everything to everyone.  Some use complex software to create their solutions, with others work with minimal resources in very resource-restrictive environments.  Diverse working environments and expectations create uneven and often unrealistic expectations in employers.

Geography, industry, the size of organization all work to create a very diverse workforce. In addition, this is a creative workforce that often brings the diversity of the creative -- music, art, color, flow, drama, and more. 

Fragmented

US Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS) list one role within the Professional and Services sector, the Training and Development Specialist. There is no national labor role for Instructional Designer or Instructional Developer or Instructional Technologist, even though there are degree programs in colleges and universities across the United States and around the world.  However, BLS indicates that the demand for Training and Development Specialists in expect to increase by 15% between 2012 and 2020, adding more than 35,000 new jobs in the United States alone.  That this important government organization does not even recognize the field of instructional design and development creates disenfranchisement, as well as misunderstandings between employers and workers. 

Within the field, there is a certain amount of distrust between instructional designers based on training.  Those with degrees, tend to trust and value IDs with degrees more than those who come to the field without.  The lateral movers with field experience tend to distrust the degreed practitioner who brings academic knowledge of learning theory, but is weak in business acumen.  Since different backgrounds mean that individuals come with different languages and ways to describe their work, the wedge of terminology creates an internal fragmentation.  

Undifferentiated

Check out the job boards for Instructional Designer.  A quick review of job listings will show that most instructional designer job listings are wish lists consisting of a general statement of work asking IDs to be all things to all people – especially, senior leadership.  These job descriptions go on to list a smorgasbord of tools in which the ID must be an expert.  Then, the typical ID job listing is capped off with a need for expertise in a specific development methodology – ADDIE, lean, six-sigma, SAM, etc. – and perhaps even the need to be an expert in the business field, as well.

Add to this, the growth of off-shoring in instructional design and development.  Many employers are willing to choose the cheapest ID resources for their project rather than choosing the ID that best matches their work. 

To this, we can add the fact that there are dozens of names for similar roles – Instructional Designer, Learning Developer, Elearning Developer, Learning Specialist, Learning Developer, Learning Analyst, Learning Architect, Learning Strategist, Education Specialist, and more.  In some cases, there is an implied career progress with position titles mark I, II, III, IV. 

As with every workforce, there are charlatans.  Unless a manager or client is, themselves, and instructional designer, they will find it difficult to distinguish the professional who produces quality work from the charlatan with a good line of schmooze.   This inability to discriminate is the greatest challenge in the industry and increases the fragmentation.

Standards Guide Capability Building

A key to building cohesion, capability, and capacity within any distressed workforce would be defining standards.   The Institute for Performance Improvement, L3C (TIfPI, www.tifpi.org) has just completed a practice analysis of instructional designers.  Watch for the whitepaper, coming soon. 

Out of this analysis comes a set of nine international, theory-free, model-free standards for learning solution development.  Note that these standards focus on development and do not include front-end analysis (needs assessments), delivery, project management, content management, or technology.  Starting with a definition of development standards focuses the field on production standards.  

TIfPI’s instructional design and development experts working with TIfPI’s credentialing experts defined a series of certifications for the learning and solution development portion of the field.  These nineteen certifications are microcredentials – a credential focuses on a subset of the greater field. Whereas a full certification addresses the breadth of the field, microcredentials, often called endorsements, highlight a strength in a specific area.  Today, these credentials have digital icons, called digital badges, which allow credential earners to promote their qualifications through social media.  For more on these credentials see https://tifpi.wildapricot.org/IDBadges.

Coming soon…

Watch this space for more on the emerging international, theory-free, model-free ID standards and access to the practice analysis behind these credentials, or attend the free webinar, Overview of ID Badges.   

Watch for the next in the series -- How Standards Build ID Workforce Capability.

Teachable Moment

Remember back to the last time you realized that you were lacking a specific skill. Perhaps you were tackling a software… or a career skill important for your job… or a life-skill like cooking or home maintenance… or a hobby-skill. When someone realizes that they need to learn something, a teachable moment has occurred.

There are several essential elements to this moment:

1. The learner (you/me/anyone) has received feedback that creates an ah-ha moment when it is clear that something key is missing.
2. For the moment to be a teachable moment, the gap must be clear.
3. Resources are available to allow the learner to move forward.

Let’s look at that again.

Feedback is important. Without feedback there is no information that says to the learner “you need to change.” Without a need to change, there is no motivation to learn. The more important the desired change, the greater the personal motivation to “learn.”

Either the feedback itself or the learner’s reflection on that feedback must lead to a clear picture of the gap and what is needed in order to cross that gap. That is learners need to see clearly their current skill level as well as seeing the desired skill level. Skills gaps that appear to be attainable are more motivating than those that appear unattainable. However, some individuals are very motivated by the apparently unattainable, while others are very de-motivated by even the smallest degree of challenge in that skills gap.

Between feedback and awareness of need come a cascade of emotions. For many, any awareness that they are less than perfect feels punitive – is hurtful or creates a sense of losing face or losing authority. At times, the specific skill gap involved brings up deep seated feelings of pain. Individuals who say that they “love to learn” often embrace the feeling of having a void and dig deep for the feeling of success derived from previous teachable moments and learning actions. Dealing with the feelings may need to be part of the learning involved.

This is when resources come into play. Resources can help learners organize the steps to learning, making the learning more attainable. Resources can run a wide range of options; they might include another person (a teacher), a job aid (step-by-step guides, process charts, checklists, etc.), or just a library of possible options. Without resources, there is no “teach” in the teachable. Resources are the source of the information about successfully bridging the skill gap.

And, resources may be the feedback that drives out the need for the next level of change. Around we go to more learning.
Now try identifying three or four times when you experienced a teachable moment as the learner. Can you identify what caused the ah-ha moment (the feedback), what you felt during that cascade of emotions that came with the ah-ha, and the resources that gave you courage to cross the gap to learn?

Can you identify one time when the resources you needed were not available? What happened when you were aware of a need but could not act on it? How did you feel? What action (or inaction) did you take?

Now try it from the other side. Identify three or four times when you were the present at someone else’s teachable moment. You might have provided the feedback that caused them to realize that they had a gap or you might have provided some of the resources or both. What actions or behaviors told you that this person had just moved from unmotivated to learn to very motivated to learn?

Watch for teachable moments. They happen to all of us regardless of age, gender, race, religion, ability/disability, job title, wealth, or any other classification we could invent. Teachable moments are part of our humanity.

Who Decides Who The “Master” Is?

Eons ago in the days of guilds and somewhat more recently in the heyday of unions, workers were identified by experience rankings such as apprentice, journeyman and master. A master artist with vision and technique created this art deco window from the 1940s that I found in Vancouver. The artists are still with us and, yes, they still become masters of their craft. How about the employee in non-artistic businesses? Is there vision, skill, technique or craft in his or her work?

We’ve done away with the apprentice/journeyman/master designations in favor competency-based job descriptions (another rant, but I’ll leave it alone today) and longevity-based wage scales. Skill designations appeared to create a kind of prejudice and, even, a kind of an entitlement viewpoint where employees feel that they are entitled to jobs and living wages in return for years of experience, increasing knowledge and expertise... and that managers who no longer do the work may be of less value (which merely about not seeing the craft inherent in management but raises hackles anyway.)

In the switch over we lost track of the master craftsman among us. Who and what constitutes a master in your field? Is this the person with a PhD and 30 years of experience but no “field” experience? Someone with 10 years of field experience but no degree? Or is there a better way to get at the underlying differences that makes someone a master of their craft.

Consider proficiency. In HR terms 'proficient' means that the person can do the job well with little supervision (i.e., with little or no intervention by a supervisor, team lead or more experienced worker).

Dictionary.com defines proficiency as: A noun -- the state of being proficient; skill; expertness: proficiency in music.

I thought that the idea of a definition was to use words OTHER THAN the one you are defining. How can we define proficiency by saying it is the state of being “proficient”. This begs the question. Skill an expertise don’t help much either.

Merriam Webster.com defines proficiency as: 1: advancement in knowledge or skill: PROGRESS 2: the quality or state of being proficient.

We’re making progress here aren’t we? Does that mean we’re becoming (moving into the state of being) more proficient? I think not. ‘Advancement of knowledge and skill’ misses the point by a mile. One can be advancing their knowledge and skill and still not be proficient. One can also be proficient and continue to advance their knowledge and skill.

Wikipedia references definitions for ‘expert’, ‘progress’, ‘skill’ and ‘proficiency testing’ but has no definition for proficient or proficiency.

It would appear that we have a real and basic human issue with defining proficiency – we don’t know how to define it.

If we don’t know how to define it how we judge whether someone is proficient or not?

What do we know about proficiency?
1. Time and experience are highly related to proficiency -- that which we do frequently and in all the possible variations in work methods, tools, designs, and artistic intents, eventually leads most of us toward some degree of proficiency (if not mastery). However, this proficiency can be lost when tools change or the culture (or business demand) around us change leaving us with a proficiency in something of lower value (a whole ‘nother issue but worth mentioning here.)
2. Repetition is highly related to proficiency – drill and practice can provide enough iterations that we can develop proficiency in a short period of time and than might have been expected without it. This is why elementary schools still use worksheets… and why physical therapist and physical trainers give us specific exercises to do in order to build our muscle capacity, balance, and agility.
3. Innate talent can speed up the process of gaining proficiency and even allow individuals to “jump” over their peers and teachers allowing them to become more proficient more quickly than others.
4. Lack of proficiency is visible. It’s always easy to see someone who is not proficient. Even if we do not know much about the field, we can look at someone who is not proficient and recognize their distress.

Okay, let’s go with that for now. Consider #4, that proficiency is visible. If it’s visible, then we should be able to agree on the characteristics of someone who is not proficient.
• Awkward movements (lacks agility)
• Signs of stress and distress (fear, pain, anxiety, tears)
• Makes mistakes
• Takes a long time to complete a relatively simple task
• Has to stop and think hard about the next step
• Frequently asks for help or bogs down (freezes) and is unable to work until help is available
• Has difficulty figuring out how to correct the problems he or she created when making a mistake
• The product that is being produced is obviously flawed both during the process of creating and at the end of the process

Why can we describe lack of proficiency but not proficiency? Is this really about a much more ancient talent that humans have – finding prey. We recognize these behaviors as being those of the inexperience (the young) or ill and either feel the need to nurture or attack based on our own pre-dispositions for such things.

So, knowing what signals lack of mastery and lack of proficiency, can we flip them around to create proficiency? Probably. Let's think about having something preying on us. What characteristics would be watching for?

I would propose that proficiency includes these characteristics:
• Agility – fluid movement between discrete parts of the task and the ability to adjust to changes in the environment
• Flexibility – being able to execute under different circumstances, with different tools and different environmental conditions and being able to change approaches and tools based on feedback from the environment.
• Speed – execution in shorter than standard periods; the ability to change directions or actions with little or no apparent thought
• Quality – produces work that has few if any flaws; produces results that are acclaimed by other experts in the field and by those receiving their work output
• Accurate problem identification – quickly and accurately defines problems with very small amounts of data indicating that a problem might exist
• Creative problem-solving – quickly reconfigures available skills and resources to solve new problems for which he or she does not yet have experience but where the problems exhibit characteristics of similar problems that he or she has experienced
• Joy and passion – loves the work getting strength and pleasure from executing it and from getting better and better at it
• Self-challenging – drives oneself for continuous life-long learning
• Confidence – willing to back their work and commit to their product’s quality

Confidence may be the one area where we can judge our own proficiency. Think about it. What work products are you willing to back with your personal commitment to their quality? Would others judge you as proficient? As a master of that field?