Instructional Design Careers and Trends Webinar

I recently had the pleasure of speaking in a webinar on instructional design careers and trends. On the panel with me was Val Quezada, ISD at Takeda Los Angeles. We answered questions about both instructional design career pathways and where instructional design may be heading in the future. Val’s background and career journey is quite different from mine, so I think it was helpful to have our different perspectives.

The UC-Irvine Division of Continuing Education hosted the webinar. I’m on the advisory committee for the UCI Elearning Instructional Design certificate program. Also, I co-teach the optional portfolio course in that program. Thanks to Lisa Hoang from UCI and Kristie Infantine from the University of San Diego for hosting this panel discussion!

Recording

The recording of the webinar is now available. If you don’t see the video embedded below, you can watch it on YouTube.

Questions answered

Most of the webinar time was spent answering questions. We had a list of questions to start, but we also addressed a number of questions from the attendees.

• How did you get into instructional design?
• What does your typical day or week look like?
• What is your go-to tool for file sharing and managing the projects you’re working on?
• Which career types are available and how does the pay compare?
• What types of projects are your favorite and why?
• What do you dislike most about your profession?
• How do you view the difference between Learning Experience Design and Instructional Design?
• Are there any skills gained during your time as a teacher that helped you venture into LD?
• What advice do you have for building a portfolio?
• Which trends do you see affecting instructional design?
• What are some of your favorite software applications?
• What conferences/webinars can I attend that are free/relatively inexpensive?
• Which organizations should I look into joining or learning more about?

Thanks to everyone who attended and asked questions! It’s always more interesting to have an active audience and thoughtful questions.

More information on instructional design careers

Check out my collection of instructional design career posts for more information about getting into the field and specifics like freelancing.