Don't Let It End This Way
Oh the corporate battles we as Instructional Designers have. In my first position as an Instructional Designer I thought this was a unique situation with the organization that I was apart of. Of course I didn’t know any better. Now that I have worked in more than one organization, I can tell you that this is a universal challenge.
What it comes down to is the fact that most people have a preconceived notion of what training is. While our industry has developed standards and expectations of training, the rest of the world is oblivious to these. In most cases, training is assumed to simply be a collection of information in some structure resembling a PowerPoint file. The assumption is that the more you put into this PowerPoint file the better and more complete the training will be. If one particular point is really important you should say it many times rephrased in different ways.
I’m sorry to say that this is still the expected norm out there in the corporate world. In fact I have colleagues who still think that this is primarily what we do (add style and appearance to other peoples content). There is more to it than that. It is up to each Instructional Designer out their in the world to educate our customers as to what value we bring to the table. Please don’t cave into the death by PowerPoint that so many are expecting. Ironically these are the same people who will blame you when the training that they had you passively design turns out to be ineffective.
What it comes down to is the fact that most people have a preconceived notion of what training is. While our industry has developed standards and expectations of training, the rest of the world is oblivious to these. In most cases, training is assumed to simply be a collection of information in some structure resembling a PowerPoint file. The assumption is that the more you put into this PowerPoint file the better and more complete the training will be. If one particular point is really important you should say it many times rephrased in different ways.
I’m sorry to say that this is still the expected norm out there in the corporate world. In fact I have colleagues who still think that this is primarily what we do (add style and appearance to other peoples content). There is more to it than that. It is up to each Instructional Designer out their in the world to educate our customers as to what value we bring to the table. Please don’t cave into the death by PowerPoint that so many are expecting. Ironically these are the same people who will blame you when the training that they had you passively design turns out to be ineffective.
