Job Titles: It’s Not Only Instructional Design — from idolcourses.com by Ivett Csordas

Excerpt:

When I first came across the title “Instructional Designer” while looking for alternative career options, I was just as confused as anybody would be hearing about our job for the first time. I remember asking questions like: What does an Instructional Designer do? Why is it called Instructional Design? Wouldn’t a title such as Learning Experience Designer or Training Content Developer suit them better? How are their skill sets different from curriculum developers like teachers’? etc.

Then, the more I learnt about the different roles of Instructional Designers, and the more job interviews I had, ironically, the less clarity I had over the companies’ expectations of us.

The truth is that the role of an Instructional Designer varies from company to company. What a person hired with the title “Instructional Designer” ends up doing depends on a range of factors such as the company’s training portfolio, the profile of their learners, the size of the L&D team, the way they use technology, just to mention a few.

From DSC:
I don’t know a thing about idolcourses.com, but I really appreciated running across this posting by Ivett Csordas about the various job titles out there and the differences between some of these job titles. The posting deals with job titles associated with developers, designers, LXD, LMS roles, managers, L&D Coordinators, specialists, consultants, and strategists.

 

 

Speaking of L&D-related items, also see:

Does Your L&D Team Need More T’s? — from learningguild.com by Pamela Hogle and Barry Nadler

Excerpt:

An idea that was used internally at McKinsey and Company as far back as the 1980s, the concept of a T-shaped skills profile (Figure 1) features:

  • A horizontal bar — the broad skill set comprising interpersonal, functional, and industry-specific skills
  • A vertical bar — in-depth, specialized knowledge in areas related to the employee’s field, specific role, and individual interests, focus topics, or experience
    .

Figure 1: T-shaped skills profile (Illustration by Pamela Hogle)

 

Unlocking the Secrets of Online Peer Learning — from learningguild.com by Kelly Palmer

Excerpt:

By experimenting with online, cohort-based learning programs, we learned that peer learning is one of the most effective ways to broaden horizons. People can share real-world challenges or questions that arise during the work week and get a range of advice and tactics from their peers.

Peer learning gives a way to make learning stick by encouraging people to discuss ideas, explain themselves, actively listen to others, and refine their thinking.

 

It takes a village — from chieflearningofficer.com by Joe Mitchell
Colleges, companies and training providers have a unique opportunity to work together to address tech worker shortages and create more opportunities and upward mobility.

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

But what higher education institutions and companies need isn’t a totally new approach that ignores the old systems — it’s someone to act as connective tissue between them. Fortunately, an emerging cadre of education providers are doing just that: developing the curriculum to help students earn industry-recognized credentials that can help them get good jobs right away in high-demand fields, and then working with universities to get that curriculum to their students.

The environment seems ripe for this type of collaboration.2020 survey of business leaders found that 70 percent think higher education institutions should be more involved in job training. Nearly 90 percent say colleges and universities could help their students learn industry-specific knowledge and advanced technical skills.

 

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Top challenges for L&D leaders in 2023 — from chieflearningofficer.com by Ken Blanchard

Excerpts:

From an HR perspective, survey respondents reported that the biggest challenges they expect as HR and L&D leaders in 2023, in ranked order, are:

  1. Capacity and resources
  2. Turnover and attrition
  3. Improving engagement and experience
  4. Adapting to a hybrid culture

From DSC:
I wonder if many in higher education might respond similarly…? Perhaps some even in the K-12 space as well.

Also see:

This posting from William Kennedy-Long (re: instructional design) out on LinkedIn:

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

I read Clark Quinn’s outstanding article which I highly recommend reading, entitled Performance Focus For Deeper Learning Design.

Immediately, I was captivated by what it and he had to say, such that I wrote a short piece to follow up on it.

What are on-ramps? Here’s how to build them for all adult learners to reach their academic potential — from chieflearningofficer.com by Michelle Westfort

Excerpt:

This may come as a surprise — adult learners over 25 make up nearly 40 percent of today’s U.S. undergraduate population at colleges and universities. However, these learners often find themselves treated as outliers by institutions designed for traditional students, which leads to poorer learner outcomes and, as a result, barriers to social mobility.

To ensure adult learners can meaningfully participate in your workforce education program, organizations can build on-ramps capable of accommodating all learners.

On-ramps provide employees access to high-quality academic programs, enable them to continue their educational journey toward a degree or certification by meeting them where they are, and hold a key role in paving the way for successful learner outcomes.

Leveraging 2022’s future-forward lessons to improve L&D — from chieflearningofficer.com by Keith Keating

Excerpts:

Top 4 future-forward lessons from 2022:

  1. The world changes rapidly — prepare for it
  2. Anticipate trends, events and the skills you’ll need in the future
  3. Continuously adopt new capabilities and expand your knowledge
  4. Use tech to your advantage
 

ChatGPT and The Professional’s Guide to Using AI — from linkedin.com by Allie K. Miller

Excerpt:

Real Ways Professionals Can Use ChatGPT to Improve Job Performance
Let’s dive into some real examples of how professionals across sales, marketing, product management, project management, recruiting, and teaching can take advantage of this new tool and leverage it for even more impact in their careers.

Teachers and ChatGPT

  1. Help with grading and feedback on student work.
    Example prompt: “Tell me every grammar rule that’s been violated in this student’s essay: [paste in essay]”
  2. Create personalized learning materials.
    Example prompt: “Help me explain photosynthesis to a 10th grade student in a way similar to sports.”
  3. Generate lesson plans and activities.
    Example prompt: “Create an activity for 50 students that revolves around how to learn the different colors of the rainbow.” or “Generate a lesson plan for a high school English class on the theme of identity and self-discovery, suitable for a 45-minute class period.”
  4. Write fake essays several reading levels below your class, then print them out, and have your students review and edit the AI’s work to make it better.
    Example prompt: “Generate a 5th grade level short essay about Maya Angelou and her work.”
  5. Providing one-on-one support to students.
    Example prompt: “How can I best empower an introverted student in my classroom during reading time?”

From DSC:
I haven’t tried these prompts. Rather I post this because I’m excited about the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help people teach and to help people to learn.

 

How Skills Are Disrupting Work: The Transformational Power of Fast-Growing, In-Demand Skills — from burningglassinstitute.org by Nik Dawson, Alexandra Martin, Matt Sigelman, Gad Levanon, Stephanie Blochinger, Jennifer Thornton, and Janet Chen
A “State of Skills” Report from the Burning Glass Institute, the Business-Higher Education Forum, and Wiley

On average, 37% of the top 20 skills requested for the average U.S. job have changed since 2016.

Excerpt:
By analyzing hundreds of millions of recent U.S. job postings, the Burning Glass Institute and the Business–Higher Education Forum (BHEF) identified four of the fastest-growing, highest-demand emerging skill sets:

  • Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
  • Cloud Computing
  • Product Management
  • Social Media

These four skill sets serve as a laboratory for understanding what business and education leaders can do to prepare workers and students for skills disruption. To illustrate how programs can help learners and workers acquire essential skills, this report includes profiles of recent innovations from the BHEF network.

The future belongs to those who seek to understand, anticipate, and harness the power of emerging skills, rather than maintain a posture of reaction/response.

The prospect of helping all those who are challenged by skill disruption hinges on the readiness of business and higher education to engage in understanding and planning for skill disruption over the long term.

From DSC:
“On average, 37% of the top 20 skills requested for the average U.S. job have changed since 2016.” That’s what I’m talking about when I talk about the exponential pace of change. It’s hard to deal with. Our institutions of education are not used to this pace of change. Our legal system isn’t used to this pace of change. And there are other industries struggling to keep up.

Should the pace of change be an element of our design when we think about using Design Thinking to create a new lifelong learning ecosystem?

 

The talent needed to adopt mobile AR in industry — from chieflearningofficer.com by Yao Huang Ph.D.

Excerpt:

Therefore, when adopting mobile AR to improve job performance, L&D professionals need to shift their mindset from offering training with AR alone to offering performance support with AR in the middle of the workflow.

The learning director from a supply chain industry pointed out that “70 percent of the information needed to build performance support systems already exists. The problem is it is all over the place and is available on different systems.”

It is the learning and development professional’s job to design a solution with the capability of the technology and present it in a way that most benefits the end users.

All participants revealed that mobile AR adoption in L&D is still new, but growing rapidly. L&D professionals face many opportunities and challenges. Understanding the benefits, challenges and opportunities of mobile AR used in the workplace is imperative.

A brief insert from DSC:
Augmented Reality (AR) is about to hit the mainstream in the next 1-3 years. It will connect the physical world with the digital world in powerful, helpful ways (and likely in negative ways as well). I think it will be far bigger and more commonly used than Virtual Reality (VR). (By the way, I’m also including Mixed Reality (MR) within the greater AR domain.) With Artificial Intelligence (AI) making strides in object recognition, AR could be huge.

Learning & Development groups should ask for funding soon — or develop proposals for future funding as the new hardware and software products mature — in order to upskill at least some members of their groups in the near future.

As within Teaching & Learning Centers within higher education, L&D groups need to practice what they preach — and be sure to train their own people as well.

 

Skills, Skills, Skills Now is the time. — from by Katelyn Donnelly and Eric Scott Lavin
Skills matter more than ever.

Excerpt:

For years, the importance of building demonstrable skills has been growing. The research is clear: skills acquired through work experience increase lifetime earnings. Yet, a massive shift in how learners, educators, and employers think about skills is just beginning.

Three subtrends set the stage for a massive inflection point in how we think about skills…

Learning will be the only constant throughout a career.  Success in the modern workforce is learning experiences to build skills, and the best way to build skills is to do real-world projects.

Below is a sampling of organizations and companies pushing the boundaries. Some of these are established players with mature businesses and tested business models.

Also relevant/see:

The Job Skills of 2023 — from Coursera

The job skills of 2023 -- from Coursera

Excerpt from the Executive Summary Section

  1. The fastest-growing skills are digital skills
    The top ten overall fastest-growing skills are digital skills. The ongoing evolution of technology means employers are regularly seeking new digital competencies from potential hires while also reskilling existing workers.
  2. The fastest-growing digital skills are changing more significantly than the fastest-growing human skills
    The top ten digital skills vary significantly from last year—only two have carried over year-on-year: data visualization and user experience. The human skills in demand remain steadier, suggesting an evergreen demand for skills like change management and communication.

The job skills of 2023 -- from Coursera

 
  • From DSC:
    I continue to think about the idea of wiping the slate completely clean. If we were to design a lifelong learning ecosystem, what would it look like? How could we apply Design Thinking to this new slate/canvas?

Perhaps we could start by purposefully creating more pathways to weave in and out of the various siloes — and then come back into the “silos” with new ideas, knowledge, and experiences:

  • PreK-12
  • Higher education
  • Vocational programs
  • Business and the corporate world
  • Government
  • Communities of practice
  • Other

Integrate apprenticeships, jobs, sabbaticals, rest, purpose, passions, intrinsic motivations, other into this lifelong learning ecosystem. Take one’s new learning back to one’s former silo(s) and improve things therein. Such a design would help keep curricula and learning/training environments up-to-date and relevant.

It would also allow people more pathways through their careers — and to keep learning while doing real-world projects. It would help people — and institutions— grow in many ways.

 

How to Receive Feedback With a Growth Mindset — from neuroleadership.com by the NeuroLeadership Institute

Excerpt:

A growth mindset can help us view feedback as a good thing, which ultimately makes performance reviews more effective. After all, we want to learn, grow, and improve our skills. People with a fixed mindset view criticism as an attack on their self-worth. Growth mindset, by contrast, leaves room for the possibility that we all have blind spots — and that your manager may have valuable insights on how you can hone your skills. Feedback, in other words, isn’t personal. A manager may critique our performance, but a growth mindset helps keep us from tying our performance to our identity.

The beauty of growth mindset is that it’s self-reinforcing. As you gain more confidence in your own ability to learn and grow, each feedback conversation becomes easier than the last. You become more capable of discussing high-stakes issues with honesty and transparency because neither side feels threatened.

 

From DSC:
I was watching a sermon the other day, and I’m always amazed when the pastor doesn’t need to read their notes (or hardly ever refers to them). And they can still do this in a much longer sermon too. Not me man.

It got me wondering about the idea of having a teleprompter on our future Augmented Reality (AR) glasses and/or on our Virtual Reality (VR) headsets.  Or perhaps such functionality will be provided on our mobile devices as well (i.e., our smartphones, tablets, laptops, other) via cloud-based applications.

One could see one’s presentation, sermon, main points for the meeting, what charges are being brought against the defendant, etc. and the system would know to scroll down as you said the words (via Natural Language Processing (NLP)).  If you went off script, the system would stop scrolling and you might need to scroll down manually or just begin where you left off.

For that matter, I suppose a faculty member could turn on and off a feed for an AI-based stream of content on where a topic is in the textbook. Or a CEO or University President could get prompted to refer to a particular section of the Strategic Plan. Hmmm…I don’t know…it might be too much cognitive load/overload…I’d have to try it out.

And/or perhaps this is a feature in our future videoconferencing applications.

But I just wanted to throw these ideas out there in case someone wanted to run with one or more of them.

Along these lines, see:

.

Is a teleprompter a feature in our future Augmented Reality (AR) glasses?

Is a teleprompter a feature in our future Augmented Reality (AR) glasses?

 

Global Education Market to reach $10 Trillion by 2030 — from holoniq.com

Excerpt:

The global education market is set to reach at least $10T by 2030 as population growth in developing markets fuels a massive expansion and technology drives unprecedented re-skilling and up-skilling in developed economies. The next decade will see an additional 350 million post secondary graduates and nearly 800 million more K12 graduates than today. Asia and Africa are the driving force behind the expansion. The world needs to add 1.5 million teachers per year on average, approaching 100 million in total in order to keep pace with the unprecedented changes ahead in education around the world.

 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian