Ellen Wagner and I are collaborating on few ID-related sessions for the eLearning Guild’s upcoming Learning Solutions Conference & Expo in Orlando.
As we prepare for our session, we’re thinking a lot about ID competencies and eLearning in the real world.
We’re interested in looking at what’s being advertised for in ID positions – perhaps compared to what people are actually doing. What skills and competencies are ID positions actually asking for? Do they align with what you’re actually doing? Do they align with how people are prepared to do their jobs?
Would you be willing to share your current ID job description with us? I promise we’ll keep it anonymous. Of if you hire IDs, would you send me the posting?
We’ll be doing some Wordles and analysis of these job descriptions and will be sure to share our results with all of you.
Either post in comments or send directly to me at cammybean @ gmail dot com.
Thanks!
3 comments:
Boy am I glad someone is doing this, and I sincerely hope organizations take note of the results.
It's used to be that IDs were IDs, and eLearning Developers were Flash Programmers or Multimedia Developers, or in the old days Authorware programmers. These days, nearly every ID job posting I see is looking for eLearning development experience, or the eLearning positions are looking for ID and in some cases facilitation experience. Job roles have become convoluted in the last 5 or 10 years and it's like companies want all of these skills in one person that used to be in three. Frankly I think it's unrealistic.
I saw a position last week that wanted a experienced ILT facilitator that could also program Flash eLearning. Oy.
I agree with Anonymous above. I think we've allowed the industry to create a set of unrealistic expectations where ID's are concerned. We've overloaded most design shops with a general labor currency that should be focused on one layer of the outcome and validating that the other layers are built on good science.
I haven't met very many ID's that are good experience designers, interaction designers, writers, or assemblers. But I routinely see ID's spending 90% of their time doing these things. The results are a very expensive labor resource being leveraged poorly.
I contend that we would all be better off focusing these resources within their specialty. It takes an ID longer to do things that are outside of their skillset. This equates to spending more time and money for mediocrity and where i've been - it's common.
Focus ID's on ID stuff. We'll collectively build better solutions.
Here were some good Learning and Development job descriptions that I ran across:
http://vignettestraining.blogspot.com/2008/01/list-of-e-learning-job-descriptions.html
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