Five Reasons to Hire an Instructional Designer

One of the things I hear most often after I finish an instructional design project for a first time client using their first instructional designer is, "Ahh, now I see the value of using an instructional designer." This is music to my ears because much to my frustration, when an organization wants to develop a curriculum or training, they often advertise for a subject matter expert rather than an instructional designer. So here are five reasons you will want to hire an instructional designer for your curriculum design project.


An instructional designer is trained and practiced in:

1.Acting as a project manager: They know who needs to be involved, on what timeline, and how long it will take. They know when and how to start lining up and involving the key stakeholders, and in what order they should enter the process. They know and can orchestrate an orderly unfolding of the process from buy in, needs assessment, development and approval of outcomes, to design, piloting, feedback, edits, and train-the-trainer.

2. The art of relationship building: Instructional designers have skills and processes for strategically and methodically eliciting participation, drawing out critical expertise, and overcoming resistance in valued SMEs. They know whose buy in they will need and they have the skills for nurturing it from resistance, through cooperation, to excited adoption.

3. They see and remind stakeholders of the big picture: In times of discouragement and floundering in the weeds of too much content they can help talented, in-depth SMEs contain the project to the agreed upon outcomes or reinvigorate them by holding and recasting the big picture vision of the desired destination.

4. The art and science of synthesis: Being in ruthless service to on-the-job or rest-of-life outcomes, instructional designers are experts in taking all of the content that SMEs provide and identifying the key concepts learners need to understand, the skills they need to master, and the issues they must be able to resolve to meet those outcomes. They are adept at blending these critical pieces, while letting go of the rest, to create a unified whole that strategically takes learners from where they are to where they need to be without fluff or extraneous material.

5. The art and science of making learning relevant and authentic: Out go the "spray and pray" 70 slide presentations and in their place the instructional designer creates engaging, active and interactive activities that align with how adult learners learn! Because their focus is learner-centered rather than subject or content-centered, they can work with just about any expert to translate critical need-to-know content into a format that is engaging, effective, and relevant to on-the-job or rest-of-life outcomes. Instructional designers are adept at designing activities for understanding, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, evaluating and creating new learning, not just knowing a lot about a subject. SMEs are absolutely needed for curriculum design projects, but an instructional designer has the skills to organize and orchestrate the project, strategically and systematically elicit the critical  content, synthesize it, and translate it into engaging training that aligns with how adults learn all in service to organizational outcomes.

This is not an exhaustive list so if you are reading this and you are an instructional designer, I hope you'll add to the conversation with more reasons to hire an instructional designer in the comment section below.