Instructional Developer

If organization and focus are a few of your main personality traits, you may want to consider becoming an Instructional Developer. Classrooms are full of worker bees doing focused tasks, which is why a classroom in many ways is just like an office. Although one goal as an Instructional Developer is building knowledge, and the other goal is producing profits, the mechanics are basically the same: Like a Manager with his or her employees, a Teacher ’s primary objective is finding ways to make his or her students more productive.

As an Instructional Developer, your job is exactly that: developing instructional materials that help Teachers teach their students more productively.

Instructional Designers study in college the discipline known as “instructional design” — which is the practice of designing effective learning experiences — you’re typically employed alongside Instructional Designers by schools, colleges, and universities, as well as education companies and consultants, including software makers, educational publishers, etc.

Usually, instructional design is based on the ADDIE — Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate — process. While Instructional Designers usually are in charge of “AD,” and Teachers the “IE,” you’re typically in charge of the second “D.” Often, that amounts to the technical side of creating instructional materials, including written text, electronic media, hands-on activities, and visual aids.

In other words, Instructional Designers decide what’s going to be taught, as well as how and why; then, you create what they decide. Depending on where you work and what you’re developing, that might require tasks as varied as writing, graphic design, web design, video editing, computer programming, etc.

Using a combination of educational knowledge and technical skill sets, you basically create educational materials that help students more effectively learn whatever it is they’re being taught.