Understanding Business/Industry Content
I recently had to design a learning experience on the topic of… bear with me… how to handle tax withholding for retirement distributions when there is an outstanding loan on the account. Complex, much?! I ended up developing an asynchronous digital lesson with a few practice scenarios associates can work through.
It took me about 1,000 emails/meetings back and forth with the SMEs and 1,000,000 visits to our internal wiki and the IRS website to understand this material. Do I remember it now, a few months later? NOPE!
That’s not to say I haven’t learned about about the financial industry working at an investment management company. But I am not one of the SMEs and I don’t work in the business, I work in the training department.
Instructional designers are experts in crafting learning experiences for the workplace. The content is borderline irrelevant. I felt the same way as a teacher; every year when I had to teach WWI, there was some kid who played the Verdun video game and knew way more than me. I’m not a military history expert. But I could plan an awesome simulation where we flipped desks over to build trenches and launched paper ball artillery at each other to try and claim No-Man’s-Land in the middle of the classroom.
It’s up to us to glean exactly what learners need to know to succeed at their job, and chisel away all of the excess. What we are left with is the NEED TO KNOW. And from there we can plan educational experiences of value.
Content in a new industry can be intimidating for those of us used to specializing in one subject area. Whether you are working in healthcare, tech, finance, hospitality, manufacturing, or transportation doesn’t matter nearly as much as honing your practice as an instructional designer. I won’t be attending finance conferences in the future, I will be pursuing Learning & Development opportunities.
So no, as an instructional designer, you don’t need to be a content expert in the industry in which you are working.
