Instructional Design / September 1, 2023

Leverage Your Teacher Skills for a Thriving Career in Instructional Design

In the dynamic world of instructional design, your teacher skills can give you a significant advantage. Your experience in the classroom, honed through countless hours of shaping young minds, holds immense value in this field. By leveraging your teacher skills, you can stand out and make a positive impact on instructional design projects.

As a teacher, you possess a unique set of skills that align with the goals of instructional design. Your ability to engage learners, create effective learning experiences, and manage diverse classroom environments can be a game-changer. By tapping into these skills, you can take your career in instructional design to new heights of success and fulfillment.

That’s why in this article, I’m going to tell you exactly what skills you have as a teacher that you can bring directly into your instructional design job. So, stick with me till the end and I will share those with you.

My Teacher to Instructional Designer Career Change

This is a personal topic for me because I’m a former 5th grade science and social studies teacher. I transitioned out of the classroom and into instructional design because my teaching job didn’t make ends meet.

I was burnt out, broke, and wanted to find a career where I could leverage my teacher skills and support my family. There were skills I had that could be immediately applied to another position, I just didn’t know it yet. 

So, I went out and I started looking at every job posting in my local area. I read through all the different skill requirements. Until one day, I finally landed upon a job that I was like, “Oh, I can do that!” It was instructional design!

If my experience making this change can help or encourage anyone else, I’m happy to share what I’ve found.

What is Instructional Design?

If you’re not familiar with the field of instructional design, don’t worry. It’s been a well-kept secret until recently. I have an entire blog post dedicated to breaking it down if you want the long version. 

Basically, instructional designers work with business owners, key stakeholders, and subject matter experts to create learning experiences. We do this for employees in an organization, for university level audiences, or for people who will be purchasing a learning product.

6 Teacher Skills to put to Work in an Instructional Design Job

There are a lot of skills you can build on as a teacher entering an instructional design job. So, I’ve grouped these skills into 6 categories. In each category you’ll recognize how you already have experience as well as what you might need to do to upskill and prepare yourself for an instructional design job. 

Project Management

I love to start with project management because teachers often don’t realize they have this in their tool belt. 

Here are just a few things teachers do that fall under project management:

• Planning for the school year based on standards
• Weekly lesson planning based on student growth
• Daily planning to make sure you have student resources ready

As an instructional designer, we do a lot of planning and progress-tracking as well. We just call it project management.

What is Project Management?

The Association of Project Management defines project management as “the application of processes, methods, skills, knowledge and experience to achieve specific project objectives according to the project acceptance criteria within agreed parameters.”

If you’re interested in learning more about project management in simpler terms, I have an episode of AcceleratedID dedicated to the topic that you can check out here. 

Here’s a quick list of project management skills you’ll need as an instructional designer:

• Project planning (time/budget/scope) 
• Task identification (what needs to be done in a project)
• Task ownership (who needs to complete each task?)
• Sprint planning (what can be accomplished in a 1 or 2 week chunk of time)
• Project management methodologies (Waterfall, Agile, for example)
• Project management tools (Trello, ClickUp, for example)

Communication

This is one of those teacher skills that’s a super power! Teachers are skilled in adjusting their message based on their audience. For example, you communicate with students, their parents, colleagues, and administration. 

In instructional design, you’ll tap into that same skill just with a different audience. Instead of students you’ll need to be in touch with the end-users of the learning solution, or whoever the learner is. You’ll also need to communicate with your colleagues (other instructional designers or an L&D team). Instead of administration, you’ll be keeping stakeholders and business owners in the loop on project progress.

One new area of communication you’ll need to get used to as a teacher moving into instructional design is working with subject matter experts (SMEs). Teachers are used to being the SMEs. In instructional design, you’ll often work with others who hold the content knowledge. You’ll need to learn how to effectively interview SMEs so you can get the information you need to design a learning solution.

Communication Tools

Just like in teaching, instructional designers communicate via email and messaging tools like Slack. We also use learning management systems and a company intranet. Although the tool might be different (Microsoft Teams instead of Zoom, or Cornerstone instead of Canvas), you’re ability to navigate these tools will crossover and serve you in an instructional design job. 

Collaboration

In a similar sense, both teachers and instructional designers must work in partnership with all of the above audiences. 

There aren’t a lot of differences here. Just as you might change your approach to effectively work with parents to help a student succeed, you’ll be code switching as an instructional designer to ensure a learning solution is effective and successful.

Technology

As a teacher, you use some form of technology on a daily basis, especially since COVID! You’ll have to use similar technologies as an instructional designer. Here are a few examples:

• Learning management systems
• Interactivity tools
• Virtual session tools
• Project management tools
• Multimedia software
• Authoring tools
• AI

The further down the list we get, the more we see some new tools that you might have to learn about. Multimedia software includes things like PowerPoint that you’re likely familiar with. It also includes video development software that might be new to you like Adobe Premiere Pro.

Instructional designers have familiarity with authoring tools like Articulate Storyline to develop eLearning courses. 

Another big area of focus in instructional design is AI. It’s important to understand how you can leverage AI to speed up your work processes and improve the quality of your work. Some of my favorite AI tools to learn include ChatGPT and Descript. 

Learn more about using AI in instructional design right here!

Teaching

Believe it or not, you can use your teaching skills as an instructional designer. Let’s explore how you can use this talent. As a teacher, you are delivering and facilitating the learning of your students. In that facilitation, you are focused on creating a positive learning environment and managing the different behaviors that may happen in your classroom.  

You are concerned with engaging all your learners that may include a range of abilities when it comes to that subject matter. Teachers assess whether or not your students are getting what you’re saying. They pivot or redirect as needed. They also think about how to reinforce what they’re teaching with lots of opportunities to practice.

All of that can be leveraged as an instructional designer in a variety of ways. Instructional designers write engaging lessons for adult learners and sometimes play a role in creating or planning the facilitation of that content.

Teacher to Instructional Designer: Top 20 Questions Answered!  

Curriculum Development

The number one, top teacher skill you can use to move into instructional design is curriculum development. Here are some tasks that instructional designers have to complete, do any of them look familiar to you?

• Select content and resources
• Design learning that maps to learning objectives/outcomes
• Adapt and customize content
• Create engagement activities
• Write assessment questions
• Interview subject matter experts

So it’s a lot of the same skills, just for a different audience, using different tools, and sometimes delivering in a different format.

Wrapping it Up

So, now that you know how your teacher skills can be leveraged in an instructional design job, what’s your next step? If you want to learn more about moving into an instructional design career, I highly recommend checking out my four-step instructional design transition plan.

You can also grab my ultimate instructional design kit for free and take a look at those resources. If you’re ready to take the next step and start upskilling and building an instructional design portfolio, check out The Instructional Design and Tech Accelerator system and certificate program!