Building Your eLearning Portfolio with Ashley Chiasson

Luis Malbas  
Okay, welcome back, everybody. Thanks again for joining us at the transitioning to learning and development conference. I hope you're enjoying the week so far today's the last day. And now we probably have one of the most anticipated sessions of the week here with, with Ashley show saw, and who is going to be talking about building your elearning portfolio. Ashley is an award winning instructional designer and elearning developer with over 15 years of experience. I have been seeing her name coming across my desk for years and years and years. So she's definitely a vet of this industry. She's a senior elearning developer at trialing it, where she creates high quality binge worthy compliance training. And she holds a master's degree in education, and a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics and psychology. That is very cool. And with that, Ashley, thank you so much for doing this. It's an honor to have you in this event. And I'm just gonna hide myself from the stage you take it away.

Ashley Chiasson  
Awesome. Thank you very much for having me. I feel very flattered to be invited to give this session. It's been a little while since I've, I've given this one. But I think it's an important topic and one that I hold near and dear to my heart. So I'm just going to go ahead and share my screen here. Welcome, everyone. I hope everyone's been having a very exciting event. We've all been enjoying things. All right, we get the screen up. Okay, so I just wanted to welcome everyone to building your portfolio why you need to do this. In my opinion, my very humble opinion. I truly believe that a portfolio is the cornerstone of any l&d career. So my hope is really that by the end of the session, you have the motivation needed to get your sorted out. So as Louise had said, I'm Ashley Shazaam. I'm the senior elearning developer at Alliant, where I create binge worthy compliance training. Not a lot of people probably hear that. So if you're curious afterwards, don't don't hesitate to reach out. I will sing the praises of of the courses and what we've been doing over there. I'm based out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, and like many learning in learning and development, I'm an accidental instructional designer. Growing up, I wanted to become a speech language pathologist. So that's why I kind of went to school for linguistics, threw in a psych degree while I was at it. And then while I was applying for grad schools, which were very competitive, I needed to get a job. So I had a friend, she was a former teacher, she was working as an instructional designer. I'd never heard of that before. She was working as an instructional designer in her company. She really just needed some warm bodies. She said, Hey, you're kind of smart. I think you could do this. So I hadn't heard of instructional design as a career option before but I interviewed I got the job. I think because of the linguistics degree. I think they thought I spoke a bunch of languages. But they didn't ask. I didn't say anything until the first translation project came through. And I really just fell in love after I got that job. So while I was in that role, I obtained my master's of education in post secondary studies, I began working as a freelance instructional designer and elearning developer. And since then, my career trajectory has kind of been all over the map. I've done military contracting full time freelance. I've worked in higher education as an instructional designer. And as a faculty member, I've worked in government I freelanced part time while working various contracts. And now I work for a rapidly growing compliance training company. So all of these experiences have contributed to a lot of really cool professional development opportunities that I've had, such as speaking at conferences like this one or other events, and I've published a couple of books on Articulate Storyline. It's it's really been a wild ride. But I truly think that getting a portfolio out there was part of my launching pad to having all of these opportunities and finding the types of careers and roles that I've I've stumbled into. So enough about me first I had a couple questions. And I'm not going to I actually can't see the screen. So maybe Luis, you can pipe up if just a general sense of who's showing up the showing their hands. But before I kind of go into portfolio building, I wanted to know a couple of things. How many of you currently have any learning portfolio?

Luis Malbas  
All right, I can monitor chat for you if you'd like. Let's see. Can you see that at all? Like,

Ashley Chiasson  
I can't see it at all? No, I didn't see my presentation. So I'm really going in blind here.

Luis Malbas  
Sure. Sure. Let me let me tell you, I think I saw Ashley was saying working on hers. Cory? Not yet. Amber. Amber has one Sarah, just working on, on hers. Let's see here. All right, sorry. It's going

Ashley Chiasson  
by pretty fast. Some folks are all over the map of having yet started might have one in the works might have one established. And then the other question I had was, how many people you could just say, me, me, me, or whatever it is, you're gonna pipe up in the chat. But who here is interested in a band, eventually changing jobs roles or moving into a freelance or contracting role, which I think will probably be a resounding? Almost everyone since the topic of this conference is transitioning? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  
that's it actually getting lots of mes. amis.

Ashley Chiasson  
Awesome. And then my last question, and you can respond with me as well. Have you ever been asked to provide a sample or share your portfolio with a prospective employer or client?

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, I didn't see a not yet. Seeing Yes, is mostly

Ashley Chiasson  
Okay. Cool. Yeah. I'm always kind of intrigued by that one, because I, as I will discuss in a little bit, I do think that the portfolios are really becoming a bit more prevalent in the ask for positions. So whether or not you could relate to any of these questions, I'm going to share why I believe portfolios are the cornerstone for every learning and development professional. All right. So in my opinion, there are four main reasons why having a portfolio is important. First, your portfolio highlights your capabilities, especially when it comes to visual technologies. So if you're looking to get into elearning, that's going to be king. It can act as a visual resume. If prospective employers or clients can kind of see what you're capable of doing, then they can make a better assessment as to whether you would be a good fit for a given role. It can lead to an increase in job offers. So once you have your portfolio established, it's out there you have a contact some way of them contacting you, you can more easily generate passive employment inquiries, and that leads to a whole lot less hustling. If you're interested in going into freelance or independent contracting, you're never going to stop being a salesperson for yourself. The Hustle is real, you will always hustle in some respect. But if you have a portfolio, it really generates more of the passive increase, which can can kind of give you some opportunities. So if you're not looking for a new job, or clients, your portfolio can also be a great way, almost like a time capsule for your own professional development. So you can have your portfolio maintain your portfolio and then as the years go by, you can look through your pieces and reflect on how far you've advanced your skill set. Since you you began with your portfolio building journey journey and within the industry. Since the pandemic, there have been what seems like a huge surge of people wanting to get into instructional designer elearning, which is great. There, this also means that there's a lot of competition out there. So I think that a portfolio is really essential at this point, it can set you apart from other applicants and make the job hunt a lot less stressful. I mean, we all know that. applying for jobs and interviewing is not the most enjoyable experience. Some folks might might really enjoy it, but it is often stressful. So having a portfolio can make it a bit less stressful. And if you're interested in freelancing, like I said, a portfolio is really critical because you're are generating a consistent amount of passive inquiries. And it really gives you the luxury of being able to choose which projects you want to take on and who you want to work with. Because for anyone who has freelanced in the past, you may have relate to the experience of, oh my gosh, I'm exhausted, I'm so burned out, because all I've been doing is taking every single project that comes across my desk. And I made that mistake as well, when I first got into freelance, and I was so burnt out by the end of the first year, and it just wasn't great. So I kind of pivoted, I was a bit more strategic the next year and increase my rates and was able to still get all those passive inquiries. Understand that if I said no, kind of like when you're shopping for a house, and they the real estate agents are saying, you know, don't be too upset if that one sells because there's always another house. And it really is true there, there will always be another client. So you do have that luxury of being able to choose which projects you want to work on and who you want to work with. You don't have to feel the pressure of taking everything all the time. Or you can take everything on if you want that, I'll leave that up to you. So know your audience, I think this is kind of a hot take. And I don't know how accurate it is, it just seems to be the vibe that I'm getting from what's going on lately. And as someone who sees a lot of resumes,

I feel like my hot take is that it seems like cover letters are slowly disappearing as an expectation. I see fewer companies requesting them, and I see fewer people submitting them, which makes sense if somebody's not going to ask for a cover letter, why put the effort in. Although I do think it's still a good exercise. So within learning and development, I think that your portfolio should read as a visual cover letter. And so what I mean by this is that your portfolio should contain samples of projects that highlight your capabilities. For example, with Articulate Storyline samples, you may have very basic samples in your portfolio. However, hiring managers who are looking for something very specific can usually see a simple looking sample, but recognize when complex elements have been employed, such as variables and conditions. When I'm looking at prospective applicants for ELearning Development, I'm thinking okay, well, this is what are like the type of programming that I need an applicant to know. And based on their portfolio, even if it's something simple, like a tabbed interaction, or click and reveal, is there something creative in there that's showing that they've used more advanced elements within the authoring tool? So I I'm not afraid when I see somebody's portfolio come through, and it is a bunch of basic interactions, because the keen eyes can really dig deep and dispel what they're kind of looking for in those samples. I would say another recommendation is avoid including samples of projects that you wouldn't want to work on again. And I say this, because if people see something so if somebody's looking at your portfolio, and they're thinking, Oh, great, like that person's got this awesome Captivate project, or Lectora project or this Camtasia video, they're likely going to inquire to see if you would like to work on a similar project because they see it there. They think, Okay, well, that's great. And they want to work on that. Again, they're proud of it. So this is why I very specifically include only Articulate Storyline samples in my portfolio. Do I work in rise? Yes. Do I work in Captivate? Yes. Do I still get asked even though I don't have those samples in my portfolio to work within these tools? Yes, but much less frequently than if I had a variety of tools featured in my portfolio. I know that I prefer to do storyline development, if someone is hiring me for an elearning development position. So that's what I show. And then oh, sorry, I scrolled. There we go. Okay, we're back. So finally, if you're applying for a position and the company has a very specific style, you should build a sample or two that cater to that style just as you would cater a cover letter to the job description. So an example of that could be when I first started a true lion. They had a very clear news castI style theme to their courses. In this scenario if I We're looking to get hired, having a news cast style sample in my portfolio would have come in handy. So that's really what I mean by knowing your audience and you've done your research, like you would research for a cover letter, and you're really catering your portfolio to the job that you're applying for. So there are common challenges, I know that maybe you're not legally allowed to share your sample your work samples, maybe you don't have time, maybe you don't know where to begin. Or maybe you are an instructional designer and you think you don't have anything to share in a portfolio. So my hope is that I'm going to give you some ideas here to combat those challenges. And make it so that you're not making excuses for yourself.

The most popular thing that comes up when I deliver this session, almost every time I have a lot of people asking about sharing work that isn't legally allowed to be shared. What I recommend to individuals experiencing this problem is to sanitize your samples, this goes out to everyone who feels trapped and restricted by their nondisclosure agreements. So sanitizing a work sample doesn't have to be a huge undertaking. Sure, branding and content are proprietary in most cases, but to my knowledge, and someone can pipe up in the chat if they know otherwise. Who like no one has a patent on overarching design concepts, who owns all of the world's tab interactions we're clicking reveals drag and drops, I feel pretty confident saying that no one has a patent on those. So that means that you can take those concepts and repurpose them. So an example of this is, I once built a really cool process interaction for the military, the content was definitely controlled goods and the branding was proprietary. So what I did was I stripped out all of the branding by removing logos, adjusting the color palette, and then replaced all of the content with my own content. So I just Googled or like thought of how to make eggs, scrambled eggs and chose some topic and then use that as the basis for my process interaction. So I then replace all the content with that. And you can even use placeholder text in lieu of actual content. So there's a ton I'm not sure if if everybody's aware of them. But if you Google Lorem, Ipsum generator, you can find all kinds of crazy things like cat Ipsum, or cupcake Ipsum or bacon, some use. There's lots of cool placeholder text generators that are out there that you can have fun with. So once you take a few of those steps, you can sanitize a work sample pretty quickly and put that in your portfolio. Now this next slide is going to make everybody cringe and your butt cheeks clench and it's doing the same for me, I promise. So challenge yourself. Now before taking the leap into okay, like let's first talk about the elephant in the room. Like what was going on with these patterns. I had something going on for pattern backgrounds. I was super stoked on it, rounded rectangles. It's, it's not great. But before taking the leap into full time independent contractor ship, I knew that I needed some sort of portfolio. I had been freelancing part time for several years I was getting a lot of can we see your portfolio questions? At the time, I had a full time job with clients predominantly in the defense sector. And all of my coolest work samples were classified as controlled goods, I wasn't able to share any of my professional work and it felt really defeating. I mean, it would be cool to be able to show Oh, this like x Xbox Kinect gesture based training that we build or this like augmented reality of like aircraft piloting like it'd be cool to show some of that but I wasn't allowed. So I had worked for this company for years and couldn't take away any of my best work to use in a portfolio.

So after I wallowed on this for a bit and got finally found some some downtime, I got serious I created my first two samples. The first was a tabbed interaction with hotspot popups it was designed to teach you how to be the cat. So I'm a crazy cat lady. When in doubt go with what you know. I didn't really know how to be the cat but wiki How can To the rescue with some hilarious illustrations and that simple tabbed interaction is still a hit with clients or folks who visit my my portfolio. Second was inspired by many of the small business books I had read, I want to share brief reviews. So I created a hotspot based interaction that had book reviews within scrolling panels. They like none of it was revolutionary, but they were really the launching pad for my portfolio. So my, my moral of the story here is that when you're feeling defeated, challenge yourself to be creative. And going back to what I had previously said about a portfolio as a time capsule for your professional development. Like I look at these and think what was going on 1015 years ago, but I'm so glad that things like you've advanced, you've grown, you've learned so much. But who is she? Who was she back? Then I want to know, where did you find these patterns? Okay, so challenge yourself. That's number one. And I will go back to that, when I get to where you can find some inspiration, I will come back to that point. So, before you do what you can and cannot include in your portfolio, you need to ask your clients or company what you can and cannot share. Many times I encounter individuals who are too afraid to ask for permission to include content in their personal portfolio. Some people are nervous that their organization might think that they're looking for another job, even if they're not. Some people may assume that because they've signed a nondisclosure agreement they're unable to ask. And some people might not know whether they even want to ask. So regardless of how you feel, asking is a very easy step in the portfolio building process, it may save you some time, in that you won't have to think too much about what you what you want to include or building something from scratch. In my portfolio, there's not a ton of work samples because of non disclosure agreements. But the ones that are there are there because I asked, you can also modify your request. So it doesn't have to be an all or nothing situation, you can explain the different options for sharing a portfolio piece. So some organizations or clients will be fine with you sharing a full interaction or course, but in my experience, most aren't. And what I recommend for those who seem to Stonewall, you at that point in the request is to ask whether you can simply share a screenshot and a description, which in my case, is what I typically do. And that description would explain the process behind what you did with the project. Or you can ask if you could do a screencast walkthrough, so do a video demo of you walking through the project. And then you can demo demo the full course without giving the goods away for free. So in the examples above, I had worked on a project for the Nova Scotia government. And I thought for sure this is a government agency, they're going to shoot down any ask of putting their content in my portfolio. I asked they agreed to me, including some screenshots and a description. So even when I thought it was going to be hard, no, I just really had to ask because you can't make decisions for other people, right?

But I'm an instructional designer. I can't have a portfolio. And to this I say a lot is. So what you're an instructional designer. That's fantastic. I get that question a lot. I'm not an elearning developer, what can I put in my portfolio? And I think that there's a big misconception about not having anything to share in a portfolio when your role is less visual than that of ELearning Development. There are lots of things that you can share portfolios aren't limited to elearning samples. As an instructional designer, you likely create needs assessments, course development plans, storyboards, here, I've got a an image of a very simple word storyboard and a course development plan. You could have a visual storyboard that you did in PowerPoint or something to that effect. So these are all things that you can include within your portfolio. Not only are these elements interesting to prospective employers, but it's interesting to other instructional designers or learning development professionals who are working within similar roles. One of my most popular screencast is a time lapse of me populating a storyboard in Microsoft Word word. I thought it was boring. There was definitely copyrighted music on it. Mmm, but other people really enjoyed it. So there are individuals who have built entire brands on their process documentation for things like scenario and branching design design, what doesn't really seem exciting to one person is fascinating to another. And if you're applying for some of these roles that are more heavily geared towards the analysis and evaluation phases, and and the design phases of instructional design, these are important pieces to have within your portfolio. So inspiration comes in many forms, and you never really know where you're going to find it. When it came to elearning. Development, there were a few places that I saw creativity. For me, the articulate elearning heroes challenges were huge when it came to kickstarting my motivation. Because half the battle is your own imagination. The challenges were great. Each week, there would be a new challenge, a prompt for submission. And each week, I would be blown away by the entries. The eLearning heroes community is a supportive environment, comments tend to be positive and constructive in nature. And they were a great way of seeing what my peers were capable of doing, and get ideas for how I could apply similar approaches in future projects. The weekly challenges really did just that. For me, they challenged me to kind of get out of my head and think outside of the box to create interactions, I may not have previously considered creating, like parallax design, or just all kinds of wacky stuff. I think the one from last week was pictograms in elearning. And so if you haven't already done so you should head on over to articulates community and at least check it with the challenges, it's a good way of getting started in the portfolio building journey. Even if you're not using articulate products, you can take inspiration from the prompts, and it can really help you out with, oh, I don't know, I have to create my own samples. I don't know what to do. David Anderson has 385 challenges right now. I think they started in 2017 or earlier. So definitely a great place to start when you're looking for ideas. Websites are also a great place to find inspiration. Not only can you marvel over design of certain websites, but you can examine the user interface and kind of think about how can I replicate certain elements within your own portfolio pieces, whether that's a storyboard or like some crazy tabbed interaction or a custom menu or something like that. Media also has a wide range of inspiration. So instead of Mindlessly scrolling, the next time that you're browsing the internet, TV, a streaming platform or an app, take note of some of the elements, the design elements that make each platform unique, and consider how you might apply those to a learning context and a portfolio sample.

Fear will only hold you back, you really just need to let it go. Have nothing to lose. If I would have been told years ago that I would be standing in front of large groups of individuals, many of whom I respect and idolize myself and delivering a presentation, I would have told you, you are nuts, you're out of your damn mind. I was always the kid in school who would take zeros when an oral presentation was required. I'm slowly conquering that fear. When I first started building my portfolio, and participating in the eLearning heroes community challenges, I was terrified to share my work because in an industry with so many talented people, what authority was I to make people look at my work? Once I started to let go of that fear and the fear of what will people think? Or will they judge me, I was able to share my work and grow my portfolio and grow as an E learning professional because as I said before, the feedback is generally positive or constructive in nature. So it really helps you grow. So your harshest critic is always going to be yourself. And we all just need to get over ourselves a little bit so that we can be successful industry professionals. So in the same vein of letting go of fear, you should put yourself out there most of us feel impostor syndrome. And when you've worked on a project for so long, sometimes you can no longer see the forest through the trees. But there are a world of people who might feel differently about your projects than you do. If you've worked on a cool project, submitting it to some sort of showcase like the elearning guilds demo fests can bring your projects to a massive audience and doing so may help build your confidence in the hard work that you can put fourth, even if you aren't submitting your projects for awards, you can always share your work out loud to like minded communities, like via your website or on LinkedIn or on Twitter. So here's an example. And we'll see where are we took the inspiration from so extra lion, we have a, a theme that we have adapted year after year, but it took inspiration from key places. And we continue to run with that because it really is engaging and it works. Our courses take inspiration from the news in that they have hosts reporters, we have lower thirds. In our early days, we used to have a little ticker down at the bottom, we take inspiration from streaming platforms like Netflix, and that we're creating bite sized episodes to make our training binge worthy. And so if you're in California, or Connecticut, or now Chicago, and you are required to take two hours of sexual harassment prevention training a year, having this type of format works really well because it makes taking two hours of compliance training a lot less painful than if you just had this buckle in and, and kind of strap yourself down and we're going we're going for it, we're taking two hours of training, my computer's probably going to crash my memory is going to deplete. So we like to do bite sized episodes kind of like Netflix. We also take inspiration from television and that our videos are very highly produced with real actors. Our video producer is actually an actress, we break our topics into episodes. And every year we release new seasons of our courses to keep things fresh and keep clients coming back. So we kind of really go for that news theme, Netflix television broadcast type of vibe.

Alright, so for some building your portfolio may seem like a daunting task, it really doesn't need to be difficult. A few places that you can post samples are places like dribble.com, Pinterest, or even the articulate elearning heroes community. Now in your profile, you can add samples. I love sharing knowledge with others. So I incorporated my portfolio into my blog. Occasionally I do show my work posts, I do have a portfolio section. And that is kind of this is the behind the scenes of that or I'm pointing here at the wrong monitor. This is the behind the scenes of that. So I use WordPress and I use a simple WordPress plugin called Media grid. And if you're wondering more about how I use that plug in, I have a video about it on my YouTube channel. So you can check that out or send me an email and I can I can direct you to those. My Portfolio isn't fancy, but it does exactly what I need it to do. Clients don't need to see 10 full courses before deciding that they like your work. But what they do need to see is some representation of your capabilities within the world. Once you have your portfolio built, the next important thing is to promote yourself. So I do this via my website, the elearning heroes community, LinkedIn, Twitter, and don't be selfish. If you see cool things that your colleagues are doing promote them as well because they're more likely to promote you and they see you doing cool things. And this is how referrals happen when someone has overflow work, they might reach out and say, Hey, do you have time I've got this excellent client, I think you'd be a good fit. And then you can pay it forward when the same thing happens to you. So, to summarize, portfolios are important. So don't let not having one hold you back. Stop making excuses for why you don't have a portfolio and just start building it. But build with purpose and treat it like a cover letter. And then once you build it, promote it and promote your peers because if you build it, they will come. Alright, so if you would like to connect, you can reach out via email, LinkedIn, Twitter or my website. I also have a YouTube channel where I post storyline tutorials There are currently over 100 So if you're looking for storyline training, check it out. It's free. And if you've ever been curious about what binge worthy compliance training looks like, check out july.com Thank you so much. I hope this session has helped you with getting your creative juices flowing or at a very minimum inspired you to get out there and build your portfolio. And with that, I will pause for questions and I'll leave this up for a couple seconds all Luis will get you to maybe read out the first couple of questions and then I'll if there are any. And then also Got my sharing?

Luis Malbas  
Sure. Um, let's see, I'm not seeing anything in the Oh wait, there is one in the QA area. Let's see this one was from about 90 minutes ago. Megan is asking for folks just transitioning into ID is it at all worth it to apply for jobs before having a live portfolio?

Ashley Chiasson  
I mean, I think that there's there is a benefit to applying for, for jobs without having a portfolio. The only thing that, like you can go for a do do whatever you do you do whatever you want, Megan, but I think the only caution I would give is that, because it's so competitive right now, you may get overlooked for like, because of somebody else that has a portfolio and I've noticed a lot of job descriptions are requesting a portfolio. So it might, it might be fine. You might you might get an interview just with your cover letter and resume and because you're awesome. But I think in the current landscape of things, a portfolio is really going to kind of tip things over the edge and set you apart from people that might not be applying with one.

Luis Malbas  
Okay, sounds good. Got a couple more here. Laura is asking is blogging a good way of showcasing your work?

Ashley Chiasson  
Blogging is a great way of showcasing your work. So what I do, and I admittedly, I haven't been blogging as much this year. But I, I've had my website for about 10 years, I'd say. And I it was great when I very first started blogging because I was really posting a lot about different different terminology that comes up in our industry and explaining that to my audience, and then sharing it over on Twitter. And now it's kind of morphed into head and the screencast, where I'm showing this very specific thing, or I'm doing a roundup of conference sessions that I've attended. And then I'm posting that on my blog, and I'm blasting that post out to my LinkedIn and Twitter communities. So it's getting a lot more kind of traction that way. So if you're doing a lot of share out loud, and work showcase, post, I do think that that has a benefit. And a lot of people want to know the behind the scenes part of it, like what did it take to do the project. And which is why when I share my portfolio pieces, they kind of come up in this little light box. So you click on the thumbnail comes up in a light box. And then there's a description underneath. And I usually explain a little bit about the process because other elearning developers or instructional designers or learning and development professionals really appreciate going behind the gears and seeing that information. And I prefer to work in WordPress. I've not really worked in Weebly that much, but I've been in WordPress since before I was in learning and development. So it was just an easy transition for me.

Luis Malbas  
Cool, got it. A few more of them have rolled in here. Let me just refresh the votes. Okay, um, your thoughts about screenshots of work on a portfolio?

Ashley Chiasson  
I think it's fine. I think almost I think every piece that's in my portfolio is currently now a screenshot because I have to even the ones that had links needed to be updated. So I have to go back and update that myself. But yeah, I usually share screenshots or several screenshots. And then I still include that description below. That explains, this is what we did. And this is why we did it this way. And we recommended this, but they chose that and this is how we brought it all together.

Luis Malbas  
Nice. Alright, I like this one from Cory, do you suggest having a theme or focus to your portfolio or you're showing a variety of things, for example, one that shows a process training one that might be awareness raising the issues?

Ashley Chiasson  
Yeah, so I think that this goes back to knowing your audience. And so it's if you're not really looking like actively looking for a job or submitting your your portfolio as part of your your job application, I think yeah, a little bit of everything could be cool. However, if you are looking at applying to a very specific company, so for example, truliant We do a lot of compliance training. So hot topics right now are preventing sexual harassment and discrimination unconscious bias dei topics. If I were looking for a job in that type of industry, I would probably cater My Portfolio pieces to that because it would increase the likelihood that, oh, the hiring manager at the compliance company is, oh, we have we have a workplace diversity course that let's see what their diversity example is. And they might, it might give me a kind of shove over some other applicants that have maybe firesafety samples or something that's very much not that within the, the realm of their offerings.

Luis Malbas  
Nice. Okay, let's see here. Chrissy is asking suggestions on showing the design process, specifically analysis on projects, we've developed ourselves.

Ashley Chiasson  
I mean, you could I think that's up to you, you could do a some sort of process, like a chart, you could have a, you could do a video of yourself explaining the process and doing kind of a screencast, where you're sharing your screen and recording that while you talk through things. You could do a if you have articulate 360, you could do a rise interaction that just very linearly linearly shows how you went through that process. I think you could kind of take it in a few different ways. But yeah, I think whatever medium would be easiest for you, I think is is the way to go.

Luis Malbas  
Nice. Okay, I got a couple more. And then we'll wrap up from Sean asking how important is it to include how long it took you to finish the project in the portfolio? Started, he started his project, but did not record time.

Ashley Chiasson  
I don't think it's very, I haven't seen it a ton. I don't include how long it took me to do certain projects. And the reason being, I was thinking about this not long ago, because someone included a sample and it said two weeks to build. And in my head, I thought, well, I've got these government's samples, and nothing moves quickly with government. So if I put the time people might think, Oh, you spent that much time and that's all you did. And I was like, but we did so much. But we just had to have all these meetings and get approvals and all the red tape of it right. So I don't think it's critical to have any time that it took for a project, whether it took you two weeks, or whether it took you two years.

Luis Malbas  
Nice. Oh, and another one came in. Okay, so there's two more, and then we're gonna we're gonna wrap it up. So how distinct have your experience has been between higher ed and private businesses? Have you found that Id roles in each space have similar or very different needs? I was from a sway Rodriguez,

Ashley Chiasson  
I do have I do, I have experienced very distinct differences between higher ed and corporate. And I think that that's they do have different needs. My perspective from higher ed might be different than some others in the US or in Canada. But when I was working in higher ed, I was the instructional designer, I was not, I was not allowed to actually do anything. I just had to guide the faculty members through the process because of faculty collective agreements. And so the faculty were actually required to be the doers. I just had to make sure that the standards were being applied. And we were we were building the courses to be instructionally sound courses and following our organizational standards. So I found that higher ed, it was I leaned a lot heavier on the analysis, design, implementation and evaluation development was really not there. Then I went into community college, and that was all development and curriculum development as well. So it was a bit of everything. And corporate I, in my experience, I feel like yeah, there have been roles that I've been in that has had, I've had to flex my other instructional design skills for different phases. But most often I'm working in the design, development implementation phases of things. So I think it really just depends on on the company.

Luis Malbas  
It's interesting question Milea is asking how much time do hiring managers spend on average, viewing a portfolio?

Ashley Chiasson  
I cannot speak for all hiring managers, nor am I a hiring manager. I'm just someone who on our team that has reviewed portfolios and advise, I usually go through everybody's interactions. It does help if you're like if you have 10 and things in your portfolio, I'll go look at all of them. But it is helpful if you unlock the navigation. So if it's an E learning, interaction, making sure that the navigation isn't restricted so that you're being mindful of the reviewers time as well. I think it depends on what's in the portfolio and what I'm also looking for. So if I'm looking for something very specific, I might be doing a deeper dive on. If you have full courses in your portfolio, I might be doing a deeper dive to make sure I hit all of the pages so that I know whether you're using certain skills.

Luis Malbas  
Excellent. Okay. I think that's that's it, Ashley? And sorry, my camera, kind of, I think it's overheated or something. But I can't have my image up there. But um, yeah, that was, that's been great. Thank you so much for this session. Um, those were all wonderful questions as well. So I really enjoyed your presentation. And thank you for sharing this with the community. Yeah,

Ashley Chiasson  
no, thank you again, for having me. Like I said, it's an important topic. It's one that I don't know how often it's being discussed anymore. But I do think that it, we should all have portfolios and should be treating them like our cover letters.

Luis Malbas  
Excellent. Yes, I totally agree. Well, if there's anything at all that T LDC can do for you just reach out, happy to help with with whatever I can. And, again, thank you for for, for spending your time with us this Friday. And with that, everybody I'm going to close it out. Don't forget we've got a couple of virtual tables going on. Starting up in just a little bit and then our final session of this event at 2pm. Pacific 5pm. Eastern is with Laney Istvan, the language of ID commonly used industry in business terms in the field of instructional design. Laney specializes in this stuff, so it'll be a great way to end the event. Thanks again, Ashley, and we'll see everybody see everybody later.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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