Skills to work on in 2021
I’ve been asked, “what are the best skills for a learning designer to spend time developing in 2021?” Before I give you my 2 cents, I’ll disclaim that it’s always good to get the opinions from your managers, clients, peers or even a professional coach.
What is the purpose of upskilling yourself? For many they want to be paid more, take on new responsibility or be more indispensable to their employer (job security!). In that case picking skills that could apply across multiple roles is your best bet. Various types of project management are necessary if you’re in business, design, operations etc… If you haven’t already got one, getting certified with a PMP or CSM credential is always a good idea. Leadership and business skills like budgeting, vendor management and comms are always in demand but lacking in learning design departments. Designing education for certain topics pays more than others. If you gain expertise with more in demand skill sets in addition to learning design it can pay off. Right now software engineering, cloud, artificial intelligence, data science, DEI and medical are all in demand areas. Gaining familiarity with one or more of those makes you a better candidate for certain kinds of education jobs.
On the other hand the answer for many educational designers isn’t necessarily pay. People who want to get their first job in educational design and people who want to become better learning designers should focus on core job skills. I’ve met long time instructional designers who were stuck in their career because instead of mastering the basics they had chased buzz words. If you’re new to the field, spend time on the learning sciences and learn a few frameworks like ADDIE and SAM. For veterans in design, it can help to approach your job with a beginners mindset in the same way we approach other peoples jobs with a beginners mindset. Instead of ‘microlearning’, what do the learning sciences say about interleaving content for better retention? Instead of ‘VR’ what do the learning sciences say about embodied cognition? Spending regular time with the research will give you a stronger ability to assess new trends instead of trying to chase each one as they come up.
A third way to look at it is to actively study what makes you fulfilled. For fun I study history and philosophy. As a dad I feel like love of history comes with the territory. I run into new heuristics, approaches and ideas that cut against the group think of education and design. In the distant past scholars could master multiple subjects in their lifetimes and be able to contribute meaningfully to multiple fields at once. It’s nearly impossible to master one subject with the mountain of words that have been written in hundreds of years. There’s still benefits to dwelling in other fields. You can come up with novel solutions that someone else with your same training wouldn’t have come up with because they didn’t have the same hobbies as you. Agile project management from software development is a great example of successful cross-pollination in learning design.
Whatever way you go, share what you’ve learned with others. We know as educational designers that it will make it more memorable for you but it will also add to the collective knowledge of your network.