So
C-Dub tell us a little about your job as an instructional design, how did you end up in that?
sounded cool.
and everyone else with cool jobs, tell us about them and how you found them.
Where to begin. I kind of fell into it.
It started off when I did my Masters in Creative Writing. There was a teaching element where we had to deliver seminars to an undergraduate writing class.
Apparently I was quite good at it, so the university hired me as a graduate to design a Creative Writing Club for a local high school. That involved making lesson plans and eLearning for kids.
After that I stayed away from education for a bit. Wound up getting a ‘day job’ to pay the bills. I was a personal taxes adviser, then a complaints caseworker related to taxes in my organisation.
An internal 6 month vacancy opened for an instructional design role and I applied for it on a whim, thinking I’d never get it.
Two weeks later they got back to me offering me a 6 month placement on temporary promotion, based on my previous work (taxes knowledge, stakeholder and time management in complaints, and my previous education experience).
2 months into the job I interviewed for a permanent position and got it.
I have since developed civil compliance eLearning and digital classrooms and built my instructional design skills more formally. It’s a fun job and no day is the same. You learn all sorts of things about the business and get to think up creative ways to teach employees a dry subject using programming, video and audio.
So I was very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time in several instances to get where I am. It’s very rare in life that you get to do what you studied at school or university, but the skills you make while doing that (and after) all feed into interesting avenues that you’d never think to find yourself going down.
