The Not-So-Accidental Interview: Cammy Bean on the 2nd Edition of The Accidental Instructional Designer
This week, we've done something a little different at The Pedagogy Toolkit. Cammy Bean, instructional designer and author of The Accidental Instructional Designer kindly sat down with James and Amalie to discuss her career, the industry, and why she wrote a second edition of the book.
Cammy's book is available for purchase, and highly recommended by us-- in fact, we both read the first edition and thoroughly enjoyed the second just as much!
Transcript
Amalie
::When you log into your online course. Do you ever wonder what goes into instructional design? What's happening behind the scenes? How did these people even end up in this career this week on the pedagogy tool kit, Emily and James interview, Cammy Bean, an instructional designer and author of the
Accidental designer.
Amalie
::Cammy recently released the second edition of The Accidental Instructional Designer and was gracious enough to sit down with us to talk about her journey into the business changes in the industry and why she decided to revisit her original text.
Cammy
::So tell me about yourselves. Who are you? We haven't even talked James. We just like communicated. I was like, great, I'll do it. I'll talk to anyone.
James
::It was so cool, you know. Yeah. So I'm James Martin and I'm an instructional designer here at Global Campus where my kind of piece of ID is a little different than yours. Most of what I'm building are 100% synch, 100% asynchronous online classes, you know, 16 week higher for credit stuff. So, yeah, but I know I, I discovered you years ago when you were blogging instructional design stuff.
James
::And when, when blogs, when blogs were a big thing and I was following a lot of ID people and, and then, when I got this job in, I guess I read your book a year ago in
January year in change because I thought, well, I should refresh myself a little bit. See what's new in the field, right? Or what, what I'm not thinking about.
Amalie, …
::And so when I saw that the new one came out and we had already launched or we were about to launch the podcast, I thought, well, hey, I mostly build classes for education here and I used to do some for English until came along and, and yeah, that, so I'm also instructional designer at Global Campus here and also doing mostly for credit higher ed, 16 week classes right now, mostly asynchronous.
Amalie
::But we are starting to work on some synchronous and some hybrid James. And I both have worked with with the English department quite a bit and I, we both have degrees in English. So it's, and we're both English teachers too.
James
::I, I read your bio. I scratched down a few questions. But we should start off by just having you tell us a little about your career up to this point and how you, how you got into instructional design.
Cammy
::Excellent. All right. So I'm Cammy Bean. I have been in this business and instructional design since the mid nineties. way back before we called it e- learning online learning. We just called it C BT computer based training. I fell into it quite accidentally, like many of us do.
And back then there weren't graduate degree programs, at least that I was aware of in any of this.
Cammy
::so I was working at a company here in
the Boston area and I was doing, I was young, I was fairly early out of college and I was working back office kind of stuff, helping with reporting and systems. And it was, we were getting our computers for the first time. I mean, this is the the dark ages, right? Like, you know, and those big boxy computers that people were getting for the first time.
Cammy
::So we had a call center, we had call center agents and they were doing everything by paper back then. It was very archaic and we were creating a new call center system on the computer so they could enter everything. So I got involved with the design and the development of that product we called it Aces. I was able to do that translation between the the counselors who were teachers and child care workers and elder care workers and adoption counselors to the IT department.
Cammy
::So many of us who get into instructional design have this unique translation skill. We can talk many languages and, and communicate and, and you know, cross gaps. So I was part of this like, you know, helping design the system. And then as the system was ready to launch, it, just kind of became clear that I should train on it because I knew it so well.
Cammy
::And I had the jazz hands and I could stand in front of the class. And as an English major, I was an English major and a German studies major in college, I could communicate, I could write. and I did have aspirations to become a teacher. So kind of while this was all going on, I continued to defer a master's degree in secondary education and I deferred it and I deferred it and I deferred it.
Cammy
::
And then finally, I was like, you know what, I really like having a paycheck and I don't want to go back to school right now and this seems kind of cool being on the, you know, out in the world as a big girl with, you know, getting a job and benefits. So I was super lucky. After five years at this company, I knew somebody who knew somebody who worked at this cool ed tech company that, you know, in Massachusetts, there's there, there is a very renowned institution called Harvard
Cammy
::University and they did have an educational technology program. So there were people coming out of that and they were working at this company that I ended up working at and it was, we created cd roms. You know, a CD ROM training program. But what was really exciting to me about it and why I made this move, it was training, but it was also this very creative element.
Cammy
::There was gonna be video production and script writing and creating C DS and it seemed really cutting edge and creative to me. Yeah. So I started at the CD ROM multimedia company, we were called Video Information Systems VIS. And back in those days, back in the mid nineties, we did not have the tools L MS s were not invented yet. Tracking was not invented.
Cammy
::Sco M was not invented yet. There were not tools like articulate storyline and captivate. There was just none of that. So we were doing everything hardcore from scratch it. You know, we had developers who had Codex and Linux and programming and, you know, they, they built these things and it was expensive.
So I was at that company for about five years.
Cammy
::
My, my job title was junior instructional designer. The first day on my job, I got on a plane. I, I, you know, I've never done this before. I get on a plane and I go to a bank in Washington DC and I started doing a content gathering session. So it was kind of trial by fire, but it was great. really creative, young people just, you know, had a lot of energy.
Cammy
::We did not weather the dot com boost boost but boom burst all together. Yeah. So early two thousands, the company just kind of started to splinter away. I went to massage school and became a muscular therapy instructor for a while and a practicing massage therapist.
Meanwhile, I was still doing freelance instructional design. You gotta, you gotta pay the bills somehow.
Cammy
::Massage is not, not great for that. So I was freelancing, working for small mostly vendors. I've always been on the vendor side of the business. And which I really love because you have this outside view looking into organizations and every project is different and the content is always different. I mean, probably similar to you in a higher ed setting.
Cammy
::You're doing classes for English, you're doing classes for this team, this department. every project is different. So I was doing that for many years as, as kind of freelancing and massage therapy. And then I started having kids and I needed to make this intentional move back into a full time job and, you know, health insurance and all that kind of stuff.
Cammy
::And we had our first baby and my husband, we opted for him to stay home with the kids and I went back to work So
I got a full time job at a small what I call boutique e learning shop here in Massachusetts. And I was the head of their instructional design team. We were small. At first, we were three or four people. And when you're at a place like that as the instructional designer, you are helping write sales proposals, you are the face of the company to the client.
Cammy
::You are doing Q A, you're doing content writing, you're doing design. I wasn't doing graphics work and we had a developer but I was kind of doing all the other pieces of it. So project management, right? That all falls under your under your hat while I was at that company. So this is 2005, 2006. This is when I started blogging, James. So you mentioned that you came across me through blogging in the early days and it was this moment where I had been practicing, I was a practicing
Cammy
::instructional designer. That was my job title for 10 years. I probably had not, I had not cracked open a book about instructional design. I had not taken a class, I had just been doing it on the job for 10 years. And I realized that I was probably going to be doing this for the rest of my life and that, you know, in some shape or form, this is the path I'm on, right?
Cammy
::And not that we can't reinvent ourselves because of course we can. But I, I decided that I wanted to do this with more purpose and passion and, and actually learn a little bit about, about what I was doing instead of just hearing what people had whispered in my ears all those years. which many of us do in instructional design, right? We just do what we're told, we do what the other people have told us to do.
Cammy
::So I started reading books. that was my path and connecting with people online. So my bookshelves are filled with instructional design books. I, I kind of took this seriously and I said I really want to get an informal degree in instructional design. I had at this 0.2 or three kids.
James
::I actually have an instructional design degree as well as an English masters. Whereas, whereas mily went into it, you know, from her master's in English doesn't have the and I know that you, I mean, of course, the whole theme of your book is sliding into this from different angles and, and mine has a gap too because I kind of started off in the field when I, I mean, I, I gave up on the English degree or I finished it, but I gave up on the idea of getting a phd and then went into this instead.
James
::But then I took a sideline for about 10 years where I was a web developer and a Comms guy in a corporate space. So, so I just recently came back to back. So we all have weird backgrounds.
Cammy
::Yeah. And I was not going to go back to grad school. We didn't have it still in the early two thousands. There weren't a lot of online options to go get, you know, this certificate or this, you know, six month program or whatever. And it just, it wasn't, that wasn't appealing to me at the moment. Plus I had been practicing for 10 years. I was like, I kind of know what I'm doing.
Cammy
::but I wanted to formalize it and speak the language a little bit more, you know, really understand when people are talking about Bloom's taxonomy. What
are they really talking about? And get into some of the learning theory. So I, I spent more time just reading, connecting. This blogging community was super awesome because I just tapped in at the right moment to some of the great minds in the industry, right?
Cammy
::Still today, like people, I consider my friends mentors made real connections that turned into my next opportunity. So I was blogging and connecting and I found this company called Kino Kineo out of the UK. And this company, like I fell in love with this company. There was just these cool sassy guys who were sharing all these great tips about building amazing programs.
Cammy
::And, you know, tips for instructional design. I connected up with them at a conference. A couple of years later, they reached out to me and said, hey, do you wanna come work for us? Basically, so I helped start us operation back in 2009. I was employee number one. I led our instructional design team for the first six years. I was my, my job title then was VP of Learning design, which sounded very impressive.
Cammy
::it is very fancy and, yeah, it sounded good to be a vice president at the time. but whatever. anyways, we, so, so is a global learning company. I've been with them now for 14 years. About seven years ago, I made a shift though, which is not always recognized because my book is, you know, I wrote this book, The Accidental Instructional Designer and then I became a sales person. So today I actually lead our US sales team and work really closely with clients. It's, it's still
Cammy
::instructional design heavy. This is an
industry where credibility counts. We're not selling widgets, we are selling services, we're selling, you know, how to get better results out of your learning experiences. So I work just early with clients. There's a lot of collaboration, I'm account managing our portfolio of content clients essentially. So, that is like quickly who I am and that was not quick. That was probably like 10 minutes.
James
::Yeah, so, I mean, you know, your book comes up in, in pretty much every online discussion of what are books I should read to get a handle on instructional design. Yours always comes up. design for how people learn always comes up. Sometimes Michael Allen's book comes up, you know, the, these are, you, you're on the short list of, I want to get into ID. What should I read? So congrats, I think I want to say about that. First off. And so what one of the things I've noticed some of these
James
::books, the, you know, the textbooks, they get regular editions because that's part of their, their model. But some of the books that are geared more toward a practitioner audience, usually they arrive and then they're just there. They, they, they never get a second edition. So what, what was it that inspired you to, to decide to hit it again because you didn't just tack an extra chapter on or anything in this book because I've read both versions. It's a, it's a thorough rewrite.
Cammy
::Thank you. I'm glad I'm glad that's your sense. Because I felt like I might have been cutting some corners. Yeah. So I wrote, I wrote the first edition in, well, the first edition was published in 2014 and it's called The Accidental Instructional Designer Learning Design for the digital Age. And it really came out of a lot of conversations that I had been having over the years about instructional design
Cammy
::Can you, do you need a degree in instructional design? Do you, you know, can you practice without having a master's degree or a phd. I was always on the side of Hello. Yeah, you can.
That's what I've been doing for 10 plus years. I've built a career on it. I don't have a degree. I'm not planning on getting one. Thank you very much. and that we can learn as we go.
Cammy
::It doesn't mean that you can't, that you shouldn't be learning about instructional design. Absolutely. But do you, do you need a degree that was kind of came out of that and also this obvious not to say that it's a trend. It's just the reality is that people are tapped in the corporate sector and I don't know if this is true in the higher ed sector, but people are tapped to, to like fulfill training duties because they have subject matter expertise.
Cammy
::Oh, you know, this content really? Well, therefore you should create the training program. There's this, there's this assumption and misconception perhaps that because we all went to school at some point in our life, therefore, we should all know how to teach and therefore you should know how to do instructional design, right? There's this kind of naive view that like anyone can do it's just teaching, right?
Cammy
::And so a lot of people get tapped in organizations to fill that role, to play that training role. Some people have an obvious skill set that lends itself really well to it and, and we'll talk, we'll come back and we'll talk about pie in a minute. But it could be, you know, I'm really good at Power Point and, you know, oh, you're so good at powerpoint. Well, you should
learn how to use this tool called storyline and now you can create courses in it.
Cammy
::Now you're gonna be our instructional designer. Yeah, people fall into it just because they have this, you know, this common set of skills that we all seem to have are this curiosity, this ability to ask questions, the jazz hands, you can stand in front of a class and, you know, wow, people.
Cammy, …
::And so put that on my resume when I say that I have jazz hands, that that's one of my skills, I think that should go on resumes now, like the Jazz hands of e learning, which, you know, is a dangerous thing too because jazz hands can be a little distracting when you're trying to do good instruction As we all know, so all right, back to the question about the book.
Cammy
::So the, the, the first edition of the book was sort of coming out a lot of conversations I've been having online about that with, with, you know, the instructional design community at the time. I was also blogging a lot writing both for my own personal blog and also for kios website. So I had this body of work and I started speaking at conferences in 2009 and putting together presentations and becoming a little bit of a brand ambassador for Kino.
Cammy
::I had a lot of work that I could, I could pull together and create the book, the accidental instructional designer. So the first book was actually pretty easy to write because I had written most of it and I just had to, you know, massage it together, write a few chapters, top and tail it. I mean, it did take me six months. So not to say that it was like, like that.
Cammy
::Anyway, so that was the first edition 2014. And you asked, why did I update it? You know, the short pithy answer is well, because I have 10 more years of deep experience and I know more things, right? I just, I do, my job has shifted as well. So I am not doing that direct instructional design every day. Like I haven't written a storyboard or script in seven years because quite frankly, I had been doing that for 20 years and I needed a change, right?
Cammy
::We all need a shift in our, in our careers at, at certain points. And so, so some of it's that, you know, my, my, my perception shifted, my point of view has shifted over the last 10 years. I just have more, more, more experience. I wanna share that with all of you. Also, the industry has shifted a little bit. Certainly the tools have changed. I needed to update and refresh some of that.
Cammy
::A lot of my resources were out of date, broken links, all that kind of stuff, new books on the marketplace. I've read, you know, 40 more books since then that I probably wanted to tap into. So some of that just, it just needed a little, little refresh that way. And then we're also seeing and this is coming out of the pandemic, I think you guys probably see this as well.
Cammy
::A lot of people, particularly teachers coming out of, of K through 12 and, looking to make a career change and it's been a big, it's been a big, a big sea shift, right? So a lot of people entering the field for the first time who are going, how do I get started? Where do I get going? So it just the, the time was right too. It just seemed like good time.
James
::There are a ton of people looking to get into the field and it is one of the most recommended books for people looking to get into it. And in addition to being a good book, I think on its own, it has lots of practical advice and lots of good sort of higher level thinking, too, you recommend a million books in there. In fact, as I was reading it, I'm like, I really need and you, you collect some of them at the end of the book, I really need to go through and just find the whole list and just chip
James
::away at them because there are lots of great stuff and, you know, like one, like the one book I kept thinking, I wonder if she'll mention this one who was a favorite of mine didn't make the list. But, well, and it's got a very similar name to a book that did. So, the book I have in mind is Make It Stick. which is a book on testing really and on memory.
Cammy, …
::I have that has been recommended to me so many times and I have made to stick on the list to stick.
James
::It's mentioned a couple of times and I, and that's on my list. I've been because I discovered that while I was discovering the other one. But but there's so many books to read, there are and I'll never get around to them. But I was saying, you know, you, you, you've created essentially a syllabus of, of really lovely books to cover a wide variety of places. And even though I have a degree, well, not an ID because they didn't have degrees in ID.
James
::In 2000, they had degrees in educational
technology. So, which includes ID, but isn't exclusively ID. But you know, there's a, there's a lovely variety of places to branch off from just the books you mentioned and summarize briefly in your larger discussions of the craft.
Cammy
::Yeah, there's a lot of great books out there. There's a lot of books that get much deeper in the weeds on things. So, you know, in a, in the assessment chapter I mentioned Patty Shank's book. Like, if you really want to get into assessment, go read Patty Shank's book on writing better. Also poll choice assessment questions. there's a whole book on that.
Cammy, …
::I give it, you know, I give it a, you know, I think that's what's so great about your book really is for someone new to it.
James
::But even for a refresher, if you've been out of it for a while, I used it particularly for that. I'd been out of it for a while and I wanted to refresh, it, it, you give, you give just enough, to pique interest and, and, know what you might expect in those sources and then there's enough of them to keep us all busy for the next decade.
There's a lot of stuff in.
Cammy
::Yeah. Well, for sure, for sure. And I, I do think, so funny, you know, you go off and you have a book and people write reviews on Amazon. So there was one, the only negative review on Amazon so far, somebody didn't like the paper because it was too thin. And he also said it was, it, it read like a novel and it was, there was not enough how to instruction in there and I was like, fair, like, great.
Cammy
::
I'm glad it reads like a novel as the English major who want to be a novelist, right? But to me this is more of a 101 level book, right? This is to give you that grounding in the industry and the space and help you get started, point you in some directions because what happens is a lot of people land in this and they're like, I don't know what I'm doing.
Cammy
::I don't know where to get started. I'm all alone because I have to invent training all by myself at my company. And then they realize, oh, wait, I'm not the only one. And when I speak at conferences, it's amazing. There'll be a room of 400 people and it's like a kumbaya moment where everyone's like, I was accidental too and they're all just having these moments of revelation and recognition about how, you know, our paths here are convoluted and none of us thought we were going to be
Cammy
::this when we grew up and, and yes, it's changed a little bit. You can go get a degree in instructional design now. And I think students have a much they just have more understanding and awareness that e-learning online instructional design. I think all of that stuff you have been exists. I didn't, we didn't even have computers, right.
Amalie, …
::And we still get weird looks at parties when people ask you what you do and you try to tell them and even though it's right there in the name, well, when I switched to this, my mother kept saying I don't, I don't really understand what you do and, and I was like, that's all right.
Amalie
::You don't need to. Yeah, it's really ok. but that was, I was wondering about, so when I, when I first read your book and,
and I thought a lot about my parents were graphic designers. And so in the eighties, we, right at the end of the eighties, the, the shift to computers started happening and then every company's secretary became the graphic designer with clip art with, with their clip art. And, and so it was both this wonderful democratization of, of those aspects of the business,
Amalie
::but also this kind of strange, I don't, I don't wanna say dumbing down, but it was like this strange, shift and, and coming as someone who learned who has yet to have a job that was exclusively related to my degrees, I tend to always be accidentally falling into whatever my career is. So I appreciate that. But I also like, I wondered if you had thoughts on, on the, the sort of tension between those two things.
Cammy
::It's classic, I mean, it's, and it's gotten even more hardcore, right. So, back in the day, an hour of e-learning content that was procured by, you know, a bank or a paint manufacturing company. I mean, we had corporate clients back then. It was probably $40,000 for an hour of e-learning content which might have included video by today's dollar standards.
Cammy
::I did this calculation a few years ago but the number six in my head, it was like
$65,000. By today's dollar standards. Clients do not pay that much money today and I am still in corporate training, selling to that market. So it's really interesting that as the tools have changed, the price has come down because it's so easy for people to create e learning now with tools like articulate storyline and captivate and rise, etcetera, etcetera.
Cammy
::
You know, as I mentioned in the late nineties, when I was working at VIS, we did everything, you know, hard core from scratch and everything. You know, graphic designers had to lay out every single button and build it and the guys had to program it and we dreamed of templated tools, we dreamed of the articulate storylines and you know, oh if you could have just something you could just fill in and like it would, you know, magically publish your, your quiz or whatever that didn't
Cammy
::exist. 2005 was about when articulate came onto the market with their first product suite and it was really a revolution. It was about, you know, anyone can create e learning now anyone can create you know, turn your power point into e learning, just push a button, it's magical. the democratization of, of it, right? It's, it is amazing and yet garbage in garbage out.
Cammy
::So, you know, my company, the guys who found it in the UK, they really made their niche because in the early days, articulate was out and they were showing people, you know what the tool doesn't matter what matters, is great design and you need to have great learning design and you can create great e-learning, but you need to know the principles of great learning design first.
Cammy
::So anyone can create crap and you know, one of these tools, but we wanna, we want to actually move the needle on performance, behavior, knowledge, skills, attitudes, et cetera. So yeah, and I remember having AAA podcast interview probably with Tom Coleman from Articulate and probably 2010 about just this topic, democratization of, of, of it and how it's a good thing.
Cammy
::And yeah, it also means a lot of crummy stuff gets created because anyone can be a trainer. Now, we all went to school, we all know how to teach and there's these awesome tools that make it super easy to, to do that. So in the corporate sector, you see that even more. It's well and unbelievable.
Amalie
::I feel like we see it in the in education as well. And I was an instructional coach for a while. And so I was teaching teachers and you start realizing, we also would say good teaching is good teaching.
Amalie, …
::And so if you know the principles of good teaching and people who are good natural teachers tend to do really well, they don't necessarily need the formal training and they don't necessarily those people, they understand the principles of scaffolding, right?
Amalie
::And they, they will understand it without even knowing the terminology. They just know that that's how good teaching happens. So that was, that really spoke to me reading this book because that was something that when I was hiring teachers, I always wanted, I'll take the natural teacher over the formally educated teacher all day long.
Cammy
::So how did you, how would you find them? Like, how would you discern if you are a natural versus you could be both, I suppose?
Amalie
::Yeah. Yeah. And there definitely are both. I was lucky enough that I was working at
a, at a school that was a charter. So I was able to kind of hire outside the, we had waivers for certification. So we were able to kind of hire outside. But we would have them do, you know, model teaching and do practice pieces and, and watch them interact, watch them interact informally with studentss too.
Cammy
::Yeah. Now where it gets tricky in online learning. and this is where I'll talk about pie is right? There's this whole technology component too. So in the book. You'll see. II I break down kind of the field of learning, instructional design into a I call it a pie. And it's not my initial idea. It was Dr Ellen Wagner who's a professor of instructional design.
Cammy
::And I've just run with it over the years, but she's been a mentor and a friend to me. So she's happy for me to keep pro process this. But we have to be thinking about four core kind of core pieces, core skill sets. One is learning, right?
Understanding how particularly adults learn because that's what most of us are focused on. And that's where the assessment and the instructional scaffolding.
Cammy
::And you know, how am I going to structure the course and, and you know, what are the right activities and sequencing, et cetera? That's where natural teaching often comes into play. But there's also this creative piece of the pie, which is also where natural teaching comes into play. If you think about a live instructor that's jazz hands.
Cammy
::And in digital learning design, that creative piece is so important because we are writing, we are telling stories, we are doing graphic design, we're doing
video production, we're doing game design, we are creating animations. You know, there's just this huge array within a digital lens that we have to, we have to, it's important to apply because otherwise you're just gonna have a boring, you know, really sound instructional experience that does not wow, engage you know,
Cammy
::have any impact because people are bored to tears. So, you know, that's where your formal instructional designer will come out and create something really solid but super boring. You need the jazz hands, you need the confetti you need with without distracting. And this is not about adding all the whiz in the bang that's gonna throw people off, But it's creating, adding a creative element to make it more human, to make it more accessible, to make it more engaging, all the things
Cammy
::that we want to do, it's leveraging all those pieces. Yeah. Yeah. And then there's the technology piece and we can't not exist without technology anymore, even in a higher ed, you know, institution that is face to face classroom. My son is just finished his first year at U Mass Amherst and it's, you know, a lot of it's online, all of his assessments are online, all of his notes are on online, right?
Cammy
::There's the whole L MS that you have to deal with. Technology is there and it's not going away. It, it gets more and more complicated with every day that we go and now we have to, you know, factor in A I and you know, all of this stuff, then there's the business piece of the pie, which is a whole another piece of it. And that's understanding, you know, if you're working in a corporation understanding how, what you're doing ladders up to the organizational, organizational business
Cammy
::goals, running project like a business, you know, you've got to have schedules and timelines and project management skills and you might have to be a performance consultant and act like a consultant. And, you know, a truly well rounded e-learning professional will know maybe a little something about all of that stuff, but not all of it.
Cammy
::Like, there's no way you can learn and be an expert in all of it. It's too much, it's too crazy. So, you know, there's a lot of ways to think through that, but as an individual who enters this field, it can get a little overwhelming when you first get that sense of this big picture like holy smokes. I have to learn all of that. No, you don't.
But understand your sweet spot, understand what your weaknesses are.
Cammy
::Have a view of the big picture if your boss wants you to do it all and they want you to be the one person shop who's managing all of that. You say, either you say no thank you or you say hire me some other people who can round out my skills or I'm gonna be, you know, ok, at all of these things but not great or, you know, whatever, whatever it might be. So it's just having that, that, that big view.
James
::and I think I was drawn originally probably to the, both the teaching bit, but also the technology bit that component of it. And I know I DS at, at different places are in very different situations. Like I've worked in places where you're essentially a one man shop or one person shop. And I've, I've worked in places like here at Global where we have a media department that has videographers and animators and illustrators and and we have technical support but then having some
James
::technical skills in the L MS and in and in the other Softwares that you can use to create things is always going to be helpful. But like you said, you can't be, you can't be a master at all of it. You've got to, you've got to figure out what yours is and, and round out and delegate when possible.
Amalie
::It feels a little like we are sort of a middle ground because we do have the full media team and then we have, you know, it teams and we have teams that work specifically on the L MS and we, you know, but at the same time when I first came on, I noticed that every instructional designer kind of had a focus. So James, I know you focus on user experience, you actually a lot. We have another instructional designer that focuses on accessibility a lot. I mean, knows how to do all the other things
Amalie
::but has a particular attention to accessibility and me coming from instruction, mine is more specifically on the, the pedagogical side. And another designer has been doing it a long time and his focus is very much on the L MS and knowing all the things the L MS will do. And it's, it's interesting, I'm, I'm still figuring out all the ways to leverage everybody's specific thing because then we also the work on our projects in our little spaces.
James
::Yeah. 11 of the things I was really surprised about coming into it because you think, I mean, since I was drawn to the technology part of it is how much project management and and how much, you know, gift of gab goes into the whole thing, how much it is, you know, winning the trust, you mentioned, you talk about
trust a lot in your book, Cammy winning the trust of people that this is going to, this is going to matter. But even before you build those pieces, winning the trust of the, the
James
::people you're working with the SME S and, and managing the project through to its completion is a, a way bigger part of it than people might think coming from the outside, from the outside. They're like, I got to skill up on this tool and I'm like, well, yeah, do that. Sure. But like, you know, there's, you, you might, and every, every place is a little different, but you might be surprised how much of it is, is project management and, and talking to people.
Cammy
::Yeah. And to your, to your point James about degrees just to come back to that. things are different today. In, in 2023 you can do a 10 week instructional design certificate program that didn't exist, you know, 10, 15 years ago. it was so hard to come by. So if you are moving into this field and you want to jumpstart by all means, please go ahead, get a certificate, get a degree.
Cammy
::It's easy. It's way easier than it was when I was doing it. And that might give you a bit of that credibility to, to find that first job. It's not a requirement. We hire a K, we hire people who don't have degrees in instructional design because we, we do feel like we have our methodology. If you've got the right skill set mindset, we can teach it to you.
Cammy
::And you will learn and we have, you know, a process that we follow. So come along with us and we will teach you amazing instructional design. No degree required. But if you're, if you're breaking
into it, I would be cautious for people who, if you are looking at certificate programs again, figure out what it is that you wanna do if you don't want to be stuck behind storyline and that's all you're doing is building courses and storyline.
Cammy
::If you'd rather be mapping out curriculum and doing needs analysis, then find a program that focuses on that versus a tool that is an instructional design program. But it's really teaching you how to use a specific tool or something. so that's just my little, little bit on, on degrees.
James
::No, that's fair. I mean, there's, there's a lot of training out there. Everybody can set up their own, you know, shop and say, hey, I've got a certificate, here's my program, I'll give you a certificate. You know, I'm not saying that can't be a good thing. I'm just saying be, you know, buyer beware on those things.
James
::You know, there are plenty of accredited programs, there are plenty of, you know, accredited certificates where you can, you know, those are going to carry more weight with employers, I would think.
Yeah.
Cammy
::Yeah, I mean, if you want to build a portfolio quickly of examples, then maybe go to a more tool driven certificate program where you're making stuff and then you have this portfolio, you can show off of things that you made if that's what you want to do. I have never made anything. I have always worked with the teams who make, I mean, we make it together.
Cammy
::
It's that collaboration. We did this and it, you know, it, it was, it's always been part of the fun. I do like to make things in fact, in the real world. So having this product that you create, like creating a class is super cool, creating you know, a self- paced e learning program. It's cool. We did that. We designed that there's a cool story, there's some great graphics.
Cammy
::I didn't do all the pieces, but I was a part of that story. It's, it's awesome. It's a really good feeling, making stuff. Yeah. Well, that's amazing. I mean, describing the team that you have. that's it, right?
Like you can't all have deep expertise in all those areas, but to have a well rounded team that has individuals who have focus in, in deeper areas.
Cammy
::And you know, one of the things about instructional instructional design as a career, There's a couple of points I want to make, but one is, it's really a T shaped t shaped skill set. So if you've seen that model where you're, you, you know, you can have general knowledge as the bar across the top of your tea, but then create some deep expertise.
Cammy
::So this is knowing all the pieces of the pie is that that crossbar and having your deep expertise in UX or accessibility or whatever, like that's great and you might have multiple posts, maybe it's a, I don't know, a AAA Greek doorway, you know, more of a, more of an m maybe kind of Yeah.
James
::Yeah.
Cammy
::And that's totally fine. But, you know, you all are lucky. It sounds like they share
with a lot of that expertise. So that's, that's amazing. You know, other companies you might be asked to do it all and you have to pull in vendors or hire other people. I'd like to think that, you know, the best instructional designers, the best of those of us in this role are really amazing.
Cammy
::General contractors. And, you know, I know to pull in the, you know, the plumber and the electrician when I need to. And I know who to go to for that. I don't have to be the expert in plumbing or the expert in electric electricity because I'm not, but I can talk to the right people.
Amalie
::That has been one of the, the biggest learning curves I think for me coming into this is because I've always worked places where I have had to be the, the, yeah, when I worked in the language department, I did their graphic design stuff and I did their t a training things and I did student workshops and I, like, I had to do all of these things and I would just be like, ok, I, I can do this and I'll learn it and I'll figure it out and I'll do it.
Amalie, …
::And now I'm like, oh, I can, I can just call the media department and they can do it because they're better at this part of, part of his learning to let go I think is learning to say, you know, yeah, I can do this.
James
::But my friend, Ben, one of the learning technologists can do this so much faster and, you know, and, and, and I can get more done because I can say, hey, can you handle this bit and he knocks that out while I'm working on some other part? So that collaborative thing is a lovely thing to have and probably will keep me here a long time.
Cammy
::Well, it sounds like you all have, you have a you're a at a corporate that has a big L and D team with a lot of people on a team which is not every corporation or a vendor. So, you know, company like we have, you know, 10, 15 project
managers, we have 10 15 instructional lead instructional designers, we have content writers, we have graphics people, we have developers, we have a Q A team, we have I said project managers, account managers, like we have that full suite, we bring it all to the
Cammy
::table. We have people who have expertise in accessibility. That's one of the reasons I've always loved being on this side of the fence, you know, being working for a vendor because I do get to have all of, you know, I have people who can do that. That's sort of what I joke. My people do that I don't have to be the graphic designer. I'm not very good at it.
Cammy
::Yeah, I'm not very good. At a project management. It turns out I used to have to do it for years, but no way could I do it to the extent that my team here does today. We're also managing a lot more projects at any given time. So you really do need a lot of project management expertise. But yeah, having that wide skill set across your team. Super awesome and amazing.
Cammy
::It's also interesting just to go back to something that you said James about instructional design at different organizations. And I talk, I talk about this in the book. There are many shades of instructional design. So you might call it instructional design over here and your job skill set or the company that posts, the job has, you know, these 10 criteria and another company over there, same
job title and they might ask for something completely different.
Cammy
::Usually job listings for instructional designers often have this final thing at the bottom that says and other other tasks as required, you know, it's just like umbrella job, right? For that general contractor.
And that's not gonna change. But it also means if you're out there interviewing and you're looking for a new position as a, as an instructional designer is to make sure you really understand what you're getting into what's expected of you and be willing to say no, if
Cammy
::that's not a good fit for you because there are many shades of it out in the field and many organizations, almost every organization in the world has some kind of training going on. So you can go find a job kind of anywhere, and bring your skill set and find something that suits you and suits your sweet spot. It's out there, I'm telling you, there's just so many places to go with, with the work that we do. And if you've started down this as a career path and you, you feel like this is what
Cammy
::you're gonna be doing for the rest of my life, your life, like I did at one point, The the possibilities are kind of endless and super rich. And then you get new technologies popping up and if you're like, oh, I'm really into A I and you want to figure out how that's going to inform your work flow, right? That can be super exciting and you can still, you can develop new skills because it does not get stale. what we do.
James
::That's true. That's, that's maybe the best thing about it. You said something similar to that in your book about what you love about your job is that you get to dip into
all these different companies and help
them do their work better. And similarly, we know we get to tip in all these different classes and all these different
James
::instructors and see what they're trying to teach and how they're going about it and try to make all that better. For the, for the greater, good. I mean, for the greater good.
Cammy
::Right. You're impacting the lives of actual students and people and helping them get ready for their next step in life. Like, it's, it's awesome what we do. We, we are the helpers, we are helpers of the world. It's a good thing.
James
::It's a good thing. It's a, you know, you sleep better at night. You know, I used to, you know, I used to work in a corporate job that sold chicken. They sold a lot of chicken. It was ok. I like chicken.
Cammy
::I, well, you know what? You're, you're an eater of chicken and the people who are producing that chicken, you want to make sure that they're doing it safely so that the people who are eating the chicken aren't getting sick, right? Like you're, you're part of this great food chain.
Cammy
::Ha ha. But you know, you can look at any, you know, we get to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. It's great. Well, it was great meeting you both. Thanks for inviting me and happy to happy to shoot the ID Breeze anytime.
Amalie
::I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Yeah, take care here.
Check out the second edition of Cammy's book, The Accidental Instructional designer, which you can find in our show notes and don't forget to subscribe to the pedagogy tool kit
