How To Gain Useful ID Experience Before You Get the Job with Heidi Kirby

Luis Malbas  
Okay, welcome back, everybody. Thanks again for joining us, in the training, learning and development community, in our event, transitioning to learning and development are happening all this week. I'm just going to double check here and make sure we've got folks rolling in. Oh, yeah, I'm seeing that number just pop up. Excellent. All right. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, this week has been absolutely fantastic. So far. I would say that this is definitely one of the best events that that the to DC has produced just with the amount of energy and the feedback and just overall, the messaging surrounding all of it. It's been so positive and so wonderful. So I want to thank everybody for that. The speakers, everybody the virtual tables. Really, it's it's been great. And that said, we have another great speaker that is going to be starting in just a moment Heidi Kirby, Heidi actually spearheaded our first event that was related to human teachers transitioning into l&d It was like the road to l&d happen, I think it was in February of this year. That one was great, too, if you can go back to those recordings. In fact, I should, let me just grab that link real quick. And I will paste that into chat. So you all can, can take advantage of that one. It was really really fantastic with some stellar speakers, as well. Um, it was a single day event. So it was a little different, but it was wonderful. So check that out. And and today, Heidi's gonna be talking about how to gain useful ID experience before you get the job, which is of course something I think this entire audience is really needs to hear. Let me tell you a little bit about Heidi Heidi is based in Cleveland, Ohio. She's a customer of a customer education manager and PhD candidate in Instructional Design and Technology. How's that PhD candidacy going? It I'm defending

Heidi Kirby  
this semester.

Luis Malbas  
She also hosts the block podcast, it's building learning and organizational culture, podcast and co authors, the useful stuff newsletter for l&d professionals. She got her start as a college professor professor, but has since worked as an instructional designer and l&d Manager for NASA, a large health insurance company and in tech companies. And with that, Heidi, I'm gonna go ahead and hide myself from the stage and let you take it away.

Heidi Kirby  
Thank you. Yes, so today we're talking about how to get useful ID experience. And as Luis already mentioned, all of these things about me, I was a college professor. That's how I got started in l&d, and I'm now a college professor again, teaching podcasting courses for the University of Florida. And also like Luis mentioned, I'm the co founder of useful stuff, and the useful stuff newsletter for l&d professionals with my l&d bestie, Matt Smith, and host of the black building, learning and organizational culture, podcast, and special hello to Bella. And although my IDs that I currently work with at Pantheon, I see them here in the chat. So and I'm super passionate about helping new and aspiring ideas. And I will say, please bear with me, I've had COVID since Monday, so my brain is still a little bit slow. And I may have to mute to cough or to take a drink. So please just bear with me. And we're gonna go through this as quickly and painlessly as possible. The other thing is, I would love for you all to go ahead and contribute your ideas, as we kind of go through the topics here and talk about the different kinds of experience. Go ahead and share in the chat some of your ideas or things that you've done ways that you've gotten experienced, because I want us to just walk away with a really robust list of ways that we can all get more experienced, because I'm sure you've seen it the we want you to have experience and instructional design, but it's an entry level job and I've never worked in instructional design. So how do I do these things? Right. So before we get started, I want to talk about a couple things to consider before we think about getting that experience right. The most important thing is to start building relationships. And the first thing I have on here is don't cold sell. And what do I mean by that? I get a lot of messages in my LinkedIn inbox from I'm all sorts of different things, right? People trying to sell me things, people asking questions, people who are, you know, peers or people who are new or aspiring instructional designers? And I want to answer all the things I want to talk to all the people. But the worst is when I get a message from someone I've never talked to before, and they're like, hey, I want to be an ID, and do you have any work for me. And I don't have a relationship with a person. And I've never talked to them before. And so for me, as somebody who works with a lot of different aspiring ideas and volunteers, my time, I would always give an opportunity that I find to somebody that I've actually talked to and built a relationship with before somebody who's just randomly reached out and said, Hey, can I work with you? So you want to make sure that you're building those relationships, that you're asking those questions first, that you're, you know, networking with people, and there's kind of this, you may have heard it before, there's kind of this rule of threes with networking, that you should network with the people who are on the same journey as you write. So other aspiring IDs, who are where you want to be, so whatever the role is that you're looking for, you want to find people who are already in that role. And then who are where you want to be in a few years. So if you want to be a senior ID, or a freelancer or own your own consultancy, or be a manager, connect with all these different kinds of people, and take the time to get to know these people in your network. So start posting on LinkedIn start, you know, commenting on other people's posts, and really take the time to build those relationships. Before you start asking people for time and investment and things like that. I think that's really key.

The other thing you want to think about is that the different things I'm going to share today don't always fit the design and development skill set that ideas need, right. But it's about so much more than that, right? Needs Analysis. How do we collaborate with subject matter experts and stakeholders? How do we gain support and buy in for the different solutions that we're coming up with an idea that we have? How do we manage a project from beginning to end? So I think a lot of times instructional design gets over simplified to like, development and storyline and that very kind of narrow focus, but we really want to think about all the different skills that go into being an instructional designer and all of the different places where we can get get experience. Okay, so we're already talking about this a little bit in the chat. That's why I said you probably already know this one volunteering, right? It isn't always an option. It isn't always for everyone. But volunteering is probably the easiest way. But I've also seen some people put themselves out there in a way that may not be the best way. So I've seen people just post on LinkedIn, like, hey, I want to be an instructional designer, and I'm volunteering my time. So reach out to me, I have 10 hours a week free. And I'll help you do whatever it is that you need to do. If you have a small a small network, this may not get the reach that you want it to get because of the LinkedIn algorithm, right? You may not be visible to the kinds of people who you want to you no volunteer with. And you may also run into a problem where you do find someone who says, Oh, hey, I this is perfect. I need a training, can you make this training and they'll they'll order a training from you, right? And you won't really get to do the full process or have any autonomy over the project. Right? So volunteering at your school. A lot of people are saying this in the chat already identifying a problem at your school or volunteering to do if you're a K through 12 or higher ed, volunteering to do PD. That's what I did when I was first trying to make the career switch. Um, you know, I've I've yet to see people volunteer to do PD who haven't been welcomed with like a Yes, please do. So you can then take that opportunity to create that professional development and especially if you're a K through 12 Teacher, you can get that experience creating learning experiences for other adults right it. So that's within your workplace, you can figure out if there's a way a stretch, Project PD, things like that. But also outside of your work, a lot of people just say, hey, volunteer with a nonprofit, but some people don't really know where to start with that. So if you're part of a religious institution, or you've joined a small political group, or you're a part of a cause, right, if there's a cause that you really care about, those are the kinds of groups and areas where they need help. They're looking for volunteers, they're, they're asking new members or new volunteers, like what is your skill set? How can you help me and you can really find different ways to use that gain that experience and use your knowledge to not only get the experience, but to like, work on a cause that you actually care about and are actually passionate about. And it'll be really great to have that kind of win win situation for everybody. Right. And then there are also ID volunteer groups specifically to help instructional designers get experience. I think Sherif mentioned in the chat that Edie app is one of them, they kind of ebb and flow. So I used to know about more, I think a couple of them have kind of faded away. But one of the ones that a former team member always highly suggest is Rumi Are you mi e, where you volunteer with them, and they have you create content for their platform, and work through the instructional design process. So there's a few different ways to, to to Oh, I'm sorry, PD is professional development. So if you have professional development days as a K through 12, teacher or as a higher ed, college professor, those are some ways that you can go ahead and help.

And then you can also help an expert. So what do I mean by this, we all know people who have expertise in something right, maybe you have a friend who is a Financial Services Advisor, or you have a cousin who's a child psychologist, or, you know, you know, people in your circle, who have different areas of expertise. And maybe they're interested in creating content and putting content out there and teaching other people their expertise. Maybe they're interested in monetizing the expertise, but they don't necessarily know how to create content or where to start, right. Not everyone is a content creator. So you could always reach out to the people you know, that have a particular expertise, and are interested in sharing that with others. And you can help them create blogs and videos and courses and programs and live events and all of the things to help teach others their expertise. And again, it's mutually beneficial, right? You're helping them build their brand, and monetize their expertise. And then you're also getting that Id experience. And if they publish a course, or they have live events, you can link out to those things on your portfolio and say, Hey, I help this person create this thing. You can also find a partner so someone who is on the same path as you another aspiring ID, I actually know a lot of IDs, who did this when they were first starting out, they would pair up. And this whole event is a great way to meet people for this. But they would pair up with another aspiring ID. So maybe if you're having trouble getting through to nonprofits, or people in nonprofits, I saw that come through the chat. If you're having trouble figuring out where to start, or there's not a lot of volunteer opportunities in your area, pair up with someone, right, someone else may know of a ton of different opportunities, but they may not have a ton of time to work on a project. If you put your heads together, you can not only work on something with someone else, and practice giving each other feedback. But you also get that that kind of teamwork experience that project management experience, because now you have more than one on a project, you have to go through that. You have to you know, figure out the roles who's going to do what how you're going to split things up. And it's just a really great way to get that kind of experience and to build a relationship and to build your network. And make sure though, that if you do this, that you take notes and you record everything about what it's like to work together so that you can put that story in your portfolio, or you can talk about it in interviews or things like that. And it's a really great way to just leverage your skills and the other person's skills and to like, figure out what some of those different skill gaps are, as well. So great way to gain skills, experience, knowledge, all of the above. And then, of course, if you're like, Ooh, I don't really want to, you know, I don't really want to volunteer yet, I don't really know, you can always just create your own product, right, you have your own expertise and skill set as well, right. So you can create courses or events or programs on what you already know. So how to create a lesson plan how to have a tough conversation with a parent, or you know how to deal with a disruptive student, things like that, that you already know that you can go ahead and create your own courses on your own content on your own products. And you can use those as your portfolio or if you want, you can monetize those right, you can make your own website or however, and I see a quick question that I want to answer. How do we work the analysis elements into this type of project? So because it is your expertise, and you're working as a subject matter expert, and also the IDX, it might be good to figure out what are the kinds of content that you know about that people are looking for? So you might talk to other educators, you might talk to other people? Who would be your potential audience, right? Figure out what they're looking for, what they need help with,

what they're what they're nervous about, what's the hardest part of what they do. And once you start asking those different things, and asking those questions, then you can kind of figure out, okay, this is maybe the area that I see the most opportunity in. And then you can use that analysis as part of your, you know, your portfolio as well and say, here are the, you know, I talked to 10 teachers in my district, here are the problems that they were facing. And here's why I decided to create this content based on that. And again, you can, if you want, you can monetize it. And you can have, you know, once you get your new ID job, you can also have, you know, you can have your your side hustle be all of this extra content that you've created as well. Solve a problem. Someone already mentioned this in chat, too, that they they saw a problem within their school district, and they pitched a learning solution for that. So if you see a gap at your job, if you hear, you know, we hear things, right, we hear people keep complaining about this one thing over here, people know that this is a well known problem over here, you can pitch a learning solution, you can say, Hey, I'd like to create something, or I'd like to address this problem and maybe help with training or whatever. But you can also offer problem solving to family or friends, right? We talk about these things, right? This actually happened to me, I was chatting with a friend. And they were telling me about how some poor person at their job, fell victim to a phishing scam, and ended up buying like a bunch of gift cards at a local store and spending a bunch of their own personal money. And they totally fell into like a work phishing scam. And I said, Didn't you have any? Didn't you have any, like cybersecurity training or, you know, training that would help prevent this? And they said, Oh, no, we're really small company. We don't have to do any training like that. I said, Well, you probably should. And so I ended up putting together just a quick like, one page training proposal of, hey, you know, if you're looking for cybersecurity training, you know, here's what that might look like. And here's, you know, so you can also do that just having different conversations with people and seeing what the needs are or you know, if you say what fields you're in, or what fields you're going into, a lot of people like to tell us about. Not fun elearning stuff they've taken so or not fun training problems that they've encountered, right? So there's opportunities there to where you see a problem. You know, look for the problems and look for ways to solve them. And Bella is giving some amazing advice right now on portfolio websites. But yeah, there's a building an eel any portfolio session tomorrow, so we're not going to talk too much about portfolios today. Okay, so this one maybe isn't going to give you that very specific design and development experience. But finding a mentor is a great way to find out what the role of an idea is really like, right? It'll allow you to ask questions about what kind of skills are needed, it'll allow you to get some feedback on your work on your skill set, where you can kind of create a professional development plan. But again, I will say, Please don't reach out to random people and ask them to be your mentor, there's a chance they might say yes, but I think again, that it's really important to build those relationships. And to start, start by having conversations first before you ask someone to dedicate their time to you as a mentor. So maybe if there's somebody who has interacted with you a lot on LinkedIn, who's been particularly helpful, who spent a lot of time answering your questions, who's, you know, taking the time to have some zoom chats with you, maybe you feel comfortable enough to ask that person to be your mentor, the other way is to start posting, right, um, start connecting with people start talking about what you're doing to upskill some, you know what you're doing to learn more, and the more you're commenting on other people's things like Joelle saying in the chat, the more you're you're active, the more people will offer some mentoring, or you can just, you know, put out the bat signal, right? If you have enough people in your network, you can say, hey, I'm looking for.

And another thing I would suggest is, let people know what kind of commitment you're looking for. Because sometimes people are hesitant to offer when they don't know how much time is being expected. So, you know, say something like, Hey, I was wondering if you'd be willing to give me an hour of your time every other week, to go over things that I'm working on, and to just talk to me more about what you do day to day, right? And by setting that expectation, it's more likely that someone will feel comfortable saying, oh, yeah, sure, I'll mentor you. And, you know, there are so many wonderful people in the l&d field that are willing to help. And I'm sure you've all seen that. You've seen that in this event right here, right. But finding a mentor is a really great way to get that feedback and to to hone those skills. And again, maybe not so much with the design and development piece, but helping out at events like this or presenting at events. I don't want to assume that everyone's ready to present at a conference, because I know that takes time, right? Especially for an introvert like me, it takes time to like, feel confident enough in your skills to. But if you start joining l&d organizations like this one, there's GRDC, which is the global learning and development community, there's a TD the Association for Talent Development. Those are just a few those were just acronyms that were rattling around in my head, but depending on what country you're in, there are different l&d organizations for your specific country. And there are smaller ones. There are bigger ones, I'm sure Yep, the links are gonna be coming in the chat here for different orgs. And a lot of those bigger organizations have conferences like this one, big ones, smaller ones. And then a lot of the smaller l&d agencies are now putting on events or conferences as well. So I know, people like Tom McDowell, and Vanessa from anchored, anchored tree anchored learning. I'm sorry, Vanessa, put on conferences as well. So they're, they're a little bit smaller scale. But that's even better for new and aspiring ideas, because they're not looking for the speakers who've written three books and have 20 years of experience, right? So as you build your network, as you start meeting new people, you're gonna see all these different conferences. And if you're not ready to present, you can join the board of your local organization, you can help go through the conference proposals for people who are speaking and then there are so many logistics that go into putting on an event like this, that you can just volunteer to help with that stuff, right? Just the logistics, just putting things on. And the best part is you're going to meet other l&d professionals. You're going to learn about what their skill sets are. You're going to Uh, you know, learn about the skills needed for the field, you'll get, you know, free access to certain events if you're volunteering and helping with events and things like that. So another great, great way to gain experience that's a little bit outside of like the traditional storyline experience, right. All right, so that's what I have for you all today. You can find the blog podcast on pretty much any any major podcasting platform, it's BL O C, but you can also find it at the Buzzsprout website, blog, pod dot buzz brought up, but oh my gosh, can't talk.com. And then if you are interested in useful stuff for l&d professionals, Issue two of useful stuff is forthcoming. And it's going to be all about how to find out what people need. So if you go to useful stuff dot email, you can sign up for that newsletter. And of course, please, please, please connect with me on LinkedIn, I'm throwing my link in the chat here. Thank you. Anchor training with Vanessa. Thank you. Um, and yeah, I'd love to hear any questions that you have.

Luis Malbas  
I'm taking a look to see let's give it a second. You know, I do want to mention too, when you're talking about the conferences, even some of the bigger events like a TD ice and tech knowledge. And then of course, with the learning Guild, and DevLearn and learning solutions, there expos are usually free, or really, really low cost. And I know what the guild in particular, we used to offer sessions within the expo area, like a full day's worth of sessions. So you could potentially you know, if you're like, say, in Vegas, or in Orlando, where these bigger events are, are held, you could go to these events for free and basically take full day's worth of session, mostly, of course, they're going to be tool focused. But it's still a great way to network and to learn more about what is available out there in the in the in l&d world as far as tools and, and vendors and stuff. All right here we got one is from Kate is part of a project good to include in a portfolio, even if you didn't complete the project.

Heidi Kirby  
I'm gonna give you the very vague answer of it depends. I think it depends on the story that you tell with the prod with that part of the project, right? I think that it's if it's not to completion, maybe you explain why. Or I guess I would just want to know more about like, why, why it wasn't completed? Was it a prototype or whatever. But as long as you explain that, and you explain your process that to create that piece of the project, I think it would be okay.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, one thing that I'm worth thinking about is like, say for instance, if maybe part of the project wasn't, you weren't allowed to release it to the public or something like that. Maybe? Yeah. All right, let's see and got another one from Reema. Can you find a job directly as an instructional designer? Or is there any other stepping stone like being a content writer?

Heidi Kirby  
You can do it however you want. So yes, you either way you can do be a content writer or a curriculum designer or you know any other an LMS. Administrator, right? There's a million paths into ID but you absolutely can find a job directly as 92

Luis Malbas  
Yes, definitely. Um, surprisingly, I've interviewed I don't know. I feel like hundreds of people since I've been doing CLDC it's surprising how many people have gone from working in the theater, to all of a sudden, like, accidentally stepping into instructional design. Surprisingly enough, like stage managers and stuff, so that's, that's an interesting one. All right. Got one from Cecilia. Here. I'm seeing many people land ID roles who had corporate experience prior to their K through 12 classroom experience. I've done some volunteer projects, but I'm struggling to get to even get interviews. I've also had my resume redone and continue to update updated

Heidi Kirby  
tips. Hmm. Reach out to me, Cecilia, let's chat. Let's chat offline. Yeah, because I think sometimes It's just a matter of you haven't found the right opportunity yet. Or they're like, there's usually a gap somewhere, right? Like, maybe your resume is too teacher sounding right? Like maybe there's not enough highlighting of like your transferable skills. Or, you know, there's something missing in your portfolio or, you know, maybe you're going for sometimes people are going for roles that are a little too. That are, they're a little overqualified for almost. So it could be any number of things. But yeah, definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. And let's chat about it.

Luis Malbas  
To see us. Thank you. That's very generous of you to it. Thank you.

Heidi Kirby  
Yeah, of course.

Luis Malbas  
It's see here, I'm going back to chat to look, I'm not seeing anything in but give it a second to see. All right. And actually, it I know since you since you have the COVID We should probably let you go and get some rest. I'm so appreciate you staying with it.

Heidi Kirby  
Of course, I couldn't miss this. Ya know, pretty

Luis Malbas  
much whenever I think about transitioning to l&d, like just helping people there. You know, it's you and Sarah stebic that I think about more, you know, like as the highlight so, yeah, thank you so much for doing this. And everyone we've got what have we got, we've got some cool tables that are going to be starting soon. Let me mention that real quick. At 10 o'clock. There's a networking volunteering table with Ricki Fisher who has been every time I go in there, he's got like a really, really popular table. So pop in there. 10. Also, Stephanie Diggins is going to be back talking about instructional design freelancing at another table. And and then of course at 11 o'clock another session. This one is with Joelle transitioning or transition navigating the in between super excited for that one. So hopefully we'll see all of you there. And Heidi, once again. Thank you so much, and we'll see everyone next time. All right, bye bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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