The Making of Designers

As a technical writer and a college instructor in English, I was delighted when I found my home here at Allen. I found myself surrounded by the kind of creative, engaging people I'd come to love during my graduate school years. There was Shannon Hale, the instructional designer who sat across from me who had a contract for three young adult novels (she later switched to writing full time and won a Newberry Honor award last year) and Rosi Hayes, an incredibly creative designer next to me who had one master's degree and was in the process of earning another (the first in education, the second one in art). And those were just the designers I met on my first day.

So much for feeling nostalgic over the academic environment I'd come to love—this was the same thing, but with a real-world spin. I couldn't help but want to share this new, fun, and yes, corporate work environment with my fellow post-graduate buddies, to have them perhaps benefit from the luck that had befallen me to have found myself among such a group of coworkers.

It seemed to me that there was a reason all these terrific people had found a home at Allen—which was the work itself. At the university, I'd taken part in some studies done by its center for instructional design to improve the instructional integrity of its courses, writing student outcomes and creating rubrics to strive toward grading consensus, but at that time I didn't fully understand all that went into an instructional designer's job. When I came to this role at Allen, I think what excited me about being a designer was the complexity of it all. I viewed my job as part teacher, part writer, and part programmer. Since that time, I'd have to add that being an instructional designer for e-learning is part graphic designer, part usability tester, part theoretician, and part innovator. Now, as a project manager, I value in my own team the same range of talents. Bob Leavitt is an Allen Design Lead I've had the privilege of working with for the last year, and whom I've come to rely on in a multitude of ways, as he carefully scrutinizes all the design work that goes into a project we're completing for a major financial institution, checking for consistency, instructional integrity, and creativity, strengthening each course during development before it arrives on the learner's computer screen.

A month or two ago, I heard Michael Noble, our Chief Learning Officer, describe our ideal designer as a "Renaissance person"—a person who has the ability to multitask, to successfully display a variety of aptitudes, and who has that certain Je ne se quois that instills confidence not only from our internal team, but from our clients as well. Is it easy to do this? No. But for some of us, "easy" is not what makes for a rewarding project. While observing my fellow designers, I've been amazed at how effortlessly they were able to write for different client organization types and learner audiences using varying difficulty levels of source content and keep not only their sanity, but their creativity intact and refreshed. I think this stems from staying pure to the needs of the audience. Let the managers and project stakeholders concoct their reasons and justifications for a certain curriculum, but for designers, it's all about the learners or nothing else matters. And hitting that learner just right—with regard to time, method, and message—is the true balancing act.

What do you think makes an excellent instructional designer? Let us know! Then we'll post some of your comments and continue the discussion.