What is it to be a Master Instructional Designer?

This is section will be no thesis or debate on learning theories. Instead, here, I will share my journey to becoming a “Master Instructional Designer.”

In 2018, I attended the ATD Expo to obtain my certification as a Master ID as well and enjoy variety of seminars and vendor booths sharing the current trends and ideas trending in my field yet this is not where I acheived my label as one who lives and breathes to ‘master’ instructional design.  

As I see it, my experience began teaching in Sunday school. I taught classes for 5 year olds and then, I was asked to teach my teenage peers and became a popular guest learning facilitator at formal events at my church. This was just the beginning of understanding my ability to adapt to from teacher to facilitator- from pedagogy to androgogy.  Even then, I pursued my interest in human behavior studies as a pyschology major and then, moved overseas only to be encouraged to teach at companies since I was very good at coming up with live interactive exercise relevant to the needs of professionals. 

Designing for adults is not the same as Sunday school. Adults bring expertise, former experiences, and if you are good facilitator, the learning I design allows them to teach themselves. Adult learning is unlocking, unleashing, and a constant remastering of something my ‘student’ know more about than me. Yet my discipline is constantly focus on the activity and design of learning.

After 5 years in Japan, I returned home believing I would apply my learning background to marketing or other international business field. My family endured a crisis and I needed to return to the workforce instead of advanced schooling. I continued to obtain experience in HR administration application testing, some recruiting, and training administration for an Wellpoint insurance in Chicago but all the while, how people learn and the manners to facilitate either live or designing learning artifacts through various means of technology allowed me to return to pursue my forte in learning design. 

Be it banking, healthcare, hair salons, law firms, or engineering every category, I began to woo opportunities to innovate the learning experience my students were not expecting in order to deliver the expected objectives for their employers. I was hired by a startup in 2006 and managed team of trainers and assistant, ran the facility operations, instructed business skill and software classes and began designing, developing and creating evaluation tools for custom requests for just under an estimated 400 companies in Chicago and Los Angeles for 8 years. I decided to become an independent contractor and continued to design requests for small businesses and universities for 3 years before accepting an opportunity to work for LA Care Health Plan.

Any wise person will say that it is not wise to assume one has ever achieved mastery. I believe one’s level of mastery is not in the number of days you attend a class, but the number of challenges one has faced with all experience levels, types, supply or limit of resources, years of study and applications built and deconstructed. Mastery is one’s ability to proactively manage what can go wrong successfully. I have earned this and I enjoy the journey of learning, creating, and making something that improves and enriches others. I continue to certify myself, read books on learning strategies, user interface design, inclusivity best practices, and I am currently enrolled in The School of Motion to continue to harness my skills for editing images, graphics, sound, and video to help learners make sense of complex concepts through multimedia experiences that explain information with a story just as animated as the I do with the all the funny expressions on my face, adventures I have taken, and curiosities of my life. 

So many projects, audiences, skills, and constraint management, have created the Master Instructional Designer for which I brought to bear on the ATD Instructional Designer designation program I attended in 2018. The journey is still happening with more tools for creating broadcasted experiences, social learning campaigns, and coaching others in my field looking and even those with and without experience, I welcome to evaluate me. When we stop learning, we stop growing! I am excited for what the future holds for the field of learning and I enjoy producing new and innovative approaches to learning experiences. Thanks for reading about my journey still underway.