Telltale Signs you need Instructional Design

 

After posting “Who Needs Instructional Design?” I received emails asking for specific indicators that knowledge of Instructional Design is recommended. Queries came from both career Training professionals and those rotated into L&D from other functional areas.

Since there are different roles in the Learning function, I will try to go over each one.

If you design training programs, the first thing to review is your objectives. Are they peppered with “to know,” “to understand,” “to appreciate”, and other verbs that cannot be demonstrated?

Do you measure learning only through pre- and post- test regardless of the objectives?

If you are a trainer, do you start planning your program by asking “what do I want to teach?”

Do you find yourself doing majority of the talking in the training while the participants mostly listen?

Do your instructional visuals (such as PowerPoint) resemble Word and Excel Documents on slides?

As a Training Evaluator, do you base your programs’ success on the results of the Smiley Sheets distributed after the training?

As an L&D professional, do you first analyze whether a training request is training or non-training-treatable? Do you know what to look for when evaluating a training vendor’s proposal?  Can you provide your training vendor the objectives you want them to create a learning intervention for?

If you answered Yes to the first 6 questions, and No to the last 3 questions, these are signs that you need Instructional Design knowledge to help you do your job better.