Comment by Mezzie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mezzie | Hacker News Reader

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Good luck convincing organizations to invest in this + finding people to do it. I have the background to organize this (I'm actually doing this for my own, smaller organization right now just because the situation is driving me insane) and the main problems are:

1.) The people who can do this aren't going to do it for 30k or $10/hr. Properly solving this problem requires an understanding of tech and the development process, pedagogy/communication/instructional design, and information management. Lacking any one of those would result in a system that's an unusable vanity project. I have a couple of decades of small-shop coding experience, experience as an instructional designer at an Ivy, and graduate education in information management, but if you want me to use all of those it's going to cost you and companies are resistant to that. (See: How a lot of non tech product companies treat their IT teams since they don't generate revenue). Now imagine if the project were led by someone more qualified, which it should be for a company of your size.

2.) Most companies don't have a culture which would allow this to be done well. This is the sort of work which requires both a lot of honesty and a lot of careful planning. A lot of information ends up hidden or inaccessible due to people's egos, or executives not being able to handle the information so it's buried. People need to be honest about their workflows and what they don't understand, and they need to feel comfortable being honest about such things. This gets really messy. On the dev side, a common cultural issue is "I had to learn it, they should too" or the urge to make understanding the complexities into a shibboleth for the in-group.

So I agree with you, but it's unlikely to change soon in my opinion.

Can I ask how you got started in the field of instructional design? This is a field that I've not really heard much about until recently, and I'm curious how someone breaks into that field.

Unfortunately, I'm one of the old 'I fell into it because I had experience in both the field's components (tech and education)' stories: I've been coding (mostly but not exclusively front-end) since the 90s and been teaching techy things on and off about that long (I taught my first programming class in '99 when I was 11), and then I went and worked in libraries/studied how people learn outside of formal classroom contexts.

So I already had all the skills needed once the field started. I cheated.

If I were getting started now, my advice would be to remember that the human element and the tech element are of equal importance in Instructional Design. So you'd want to take stock of what skills you currently have and how best to a.) get the necessary knowledge you don't have and b.) take advantage of your particular skill set.

Since you're on HN, I'm assuming you're of a techy bent vs. an educational/people bent. So if you have any teaching/tutoring/etc experience, I would lean on that. If not, I would get some. You can do this by volunteering somewhere + doing some basic research. I highly recommend this since a large portion of instructional design (like most front-end things) is planning for all the weird things humans do when interacting with your stuff and, more importantly for instructional design specifically, how people who can't computer at ALL think. When doing ID, you're often designing for people who can't figure out how an email works and are taking a work training, for example.

Also since you're techy, I'd recommend spending some time with UI/UX and specifically focus on designing for different populations/audiences. From a tech perspective, your competing instructional designers are worst at the 'boring' things like accessibility guidelines, making sure things can run on terrible machines, coding fall-backs, etc. So a tech background is of great assistance as long as you communicate the problems it can help you avoid.

As for the actual 'how to get a job', I literally applied for my first job off of Indeed out of grad school and I'm a first-generation student so trust me that was not the most polished resume or CV.

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