How to Show Your Skills: Resume and Portfolio Tips with Alison Sollars

Luis Malbas  
Okay, let's see. Welcome back, everybody. Thank you so much for attending today. It's see we have people coming in. I see Cindy is there is and there's McKenzie. Excellent Charmin thank you so much for attending. Alison Sollers thank you so much for doing this session. We kind of added you towards the end of everything. But I think this is perfect for roads lnd 2023. How to show your skills resume and portfolio tips. Super important for everybody that is looking to, to transition into a career as a l&d professional, a little bit about Allison. Allison is a corporate learning experience learning experience designer, a freelance or elearning developer and a former educator, just like many of you, works with TPL D teaching a path to lnd or Sarah has been here, McKenzie was here. And wait, I can't remember. What do you do for TPL? D again,

Alison Sollars  
I'm the vice president. So I work really closely with Sarah and all of our major projects. And I'm also the main community manager who manages the LinkedIn group.

Luis Malbas  
Wow. Wow. So and I do want to remind everybody after this event is over, if you haven't already, gone to the CPLD website, which is a teach, learn dev.org

Alison Sollars  
Yeah, teach, learn dev.org I'll drop that in as well.

Luis Malbas  
Make sure that you join TPL D. Although T LDC, we I love to build and create content for transitioning teachers, we have at least a couple of these events a year TPL D focuses exclusively on that. So they are definitely the community you should be hitting up after you leave here. And with that, I'm gonna go ahead and hide myself from the screen and let you take it away. Alison, thank you so much.

Alison Sollars  
Thanks, Louis. I dropped already in the chat for all y'all who are here live with me and I have slides. Because I have some interactions in here and some kind of ways to take information from you. So if you'll join me there, that will be good, because then you can give me your input and that it's easier for me to monitor than the chat in some ways. So and I also put in the chat, the teacher and Dev our website, which is, I would say under construction at the moment, but has a lot of great resources. So if you do want to go to the T PLD. website. So my session is a little bit of odds and ends to kind of pull together maybe some of the advice you've heard throughout the conference so far. And try to put it into actionable steps that you can take based on you and your particular skill set. I really loved on the first day, the talk about like stacks in Connie speech and this idea of like, you have a skill stack that you're building or and everybody has their own. Everybody has their particular stack that they are, this is what I'm representing what I'm selling. And one of the things I want to say about resumes and portfolios up front. A lot of what I talk about here is not going to be like here's what to write on your resume, it's going to be here's how to think about your resume. And here's the mindset to get in. And one thing I want to think I want to say right up front is your LinkedIn, your resume, your portfolio, your cover letter, all of your materials, are you selling yourself and selling the particular stack that you have. So it's going to be different for everybody. The the worst thing that can happen with like the same resumes is you just you get kind of lost in the pile. So my goal is like you don't get lost in the pile because you are representing your unique self, essentially. So welcome, everybody. Real quick before I get into my story, if you will, and I'll probably use the slides for everything else. But if you will use the chat here and just kind of tell me like where are you joining me from just to kind of like get us started and warm up a little bit. And that way I can see I see some highs already. Mackenzie Mackenzie, who is also CPLD Community Manager doing a lot with us lately, is in here and out now it's going fast. So we've got Atlanta and Nebraska and Michigan and Maryland, all over Richmond, New Hampshire. And my story is about leaving the classroom happened last year. One of the things I'm not going to get into too much is like timelines, and like what I did in my particular way, because I think everybody's journey is going to be different. And this is a mindset thing. I think, too, that we need to get into. It's great to hear people's stories, but don't expect your story to line up with theirs. Especially I transitioned in a really hot market and the market is cooled down. So I think it's important to not like get caught up and things like that. But the tips I'm going to focus on are tips that will be like kind of like you could work towards. And they will make you ready for the opportunities that arise when they arise. So my story was, last year in a in a whirlwind essentially, in January, I decided that I wanted to look for some freelance side work content, writing, I have an English degree, or maybe making some curriculum. And I also maybe wanted to get back into doing some web design, but I needed to brush up my skills. And that's how I stumbled on instructional design as a field, I did not know it existed. And I found instructional design, which is a kind of combination of technology and, and learning experience design and curriculum design and things that I've done tangentially and upskill towards it didn't know about it. And I was like, Oh, well, now I have to do this. And it was a whirlwind of like, 4050 hours on top of my teaching weeks, like working towards building a portfolio and figuring out what my resume should look like, what my portfolio should look like, and how I should market myself, which is ironic, because my very first job out of college and what I originally went into, I have an English degree and a business minor. And I originally went into marketing, and that was kind of what I thought I was going to do before I got laid off in the Great Recession. So it kind of like brought me full circle to this idea of how we market ourselves. So I left behind the idea of my classroom at a time, kind of right before things really changed. In Florida, I had a really sweet gig teaching AP and IB, English, mostly literature in a quirky little program. And I got a learning experience designer job in health care, specifically. I think that one of the reasons I wanted to tell you my story that way and talk about some other things I've done and things that I was looking at doing is the first thing I want you to think about is what skills do you have? What are your particular skills like as a teacher, I knew I was good at designing curriculum, because that's what people always wanted me to do. I got to do like the summer curriculum, stipend contracts, I got to be on the committees for building like LMS training for teachers like for the district, like people kept asking me to do these things. And I knew I was good at training other teachers, running like preceptor programs for our student teachers, like I was always asked to do these things. Because that was where my strength was. And I knew kind of deep down, I didn't have a strength and things like direct instruction, I was flipping my classroom, like long before it was cool and long before COVID, mostly to talk as little as possible on a day to day basis. Because I couldn't do direct instruction for six hours a day, five days a week, some people can and they're tremendous. And they're funny, and they're wonderful. And that wasn't me, I'm a little bit more introverted and a little bit more at kind of like, into building and creating things. And so that was why instructional design still stood out to me as something that was like fitting of me, and but there's different kinds of instructional designers to like, there are so many skills involved in instructional design, there are so many roles where you're like, some people do more project management as an instructional designer, in their role, like in addition to their instructional design, they're managing their own projects. And they're really detailed and heavy. Some people are heavy on analysis. Some people do more direct training, like they, they are an instructional designer, but they also do a lot of training, or they run a lot of train the trainers based on how their organizations are set up. And so it's really, really different. Just in different settings, different positions, and the different stacks, the different kinds of skills that you have are important. So basically, that's what we're going to start and I'm gonna have you if my screen will, what skills do you already have that you believe best translate to instructional design or learning design? Or if you want to tag it with a different job, if you're like, I'm actually looking at customer success roles. And I just thought this might have some adjacent stuff for me in this conference, you can tag it with the role product management tag with the role and put in what the skill is there. So what skills do you have because we're going to look at some job ads in a minute. This is the is the first step I recommend to everybody. When rewriting the resume, we're gonna look at some job ads for what I would consider like entry level roles. And we're going to backwards design from there essentially. So this is going to create a word cloud for us and we're going to see like what are some common skills

also, the tags got out separately sorry, I should have said like put a parenthesis next to it for my tagging it. I have not used I'll have slides but one other time and a presentation yet so I'm uh I'm learning this one as well and how it will adapt to my particular things. So planning analytical skills, curriculum development storyline, assess learning gaps assess needs. is visual design. Itt via VLT? VLT is always awkward for me to say. I think that that like training delivery IOTV Ville, it's like the idea that you have delivered so much instruction absolutely will help with even building the materials there, I found that as well, even though that is not, it's never really been my focus. Even when I was designing stuff for my district, visual design is a big one. So it's getting bigger. And I'm happy that like people have that. For me, that was actually something where I had a little bit, but I definitely felt a need to upskill there personally, as a teacher coming over, so if you have that already, that's I think, streets ahead a step ahead, right, like, in terms of where you are a creative thinker, I like that one, because it's like a couple of different things. But I would kind of break that down. When you're thinking about yourself, like what makes you a creative thinker. I think I'm a creative thinker too, because I have skills in analysis. Because I have skills in like research, I actually think research is really good for creative thinking. So I think sometimes breaking your skills down even more is kind of helpful. All right, so let's apply some of this knowledge to our job ads. So I pulled four job ads, they're a little bit ugly on here, because I pulled them really recently, I wanted them to be like pretty current job ads. So I pulled them this week and just kind of plugged them in here. And I just got a simple screenshot. They are I pulled roles that I thought were pretty standard looking like they looked like job ads I'd seen before. They were pretty introductory level, like, I do think it's important to kind of balance that. I see sometimes people saying like, Oh, I'm having a lot of trouble. And even in a hot market, there were people saying like, I'm having a lot of trouble. And then I found that they were applying to all like training manager roles, and even things like director of learning roles. And they're like bullet, I'm a department lead, you know, they they have all this experience. I was, you know, an administrator, my school district, they have all this experience in another field. But those are roles that are kind of higher level. So these are all roles that I would consider entry level and that are marked as entry level on LinkedIn where I pulled them. And based on the job ads, like don't require specific experience that teachers wouldn't have. So they're not ones that would be like kind of immediately weeding you out. I pulled two on site and two remote jobs. This is for spectrum, the internet people as the onsite job in Charlotte. And as we look at these think about what is the focus of this role, because they're very different, I tried to pull some different ones, how might a teacher skills transfer yours in your case, probably because you want to think about yourself and build your own self knowledge. And then how does this role compared to other roles you've seen or viewed and start to build kind of a feeling about the roles you're looking at, so that you can build a resume, because it is hard to write a resume to every single job individually, I don't recommend that it's not efficient. But you do want to write a job to the role not just like throwing spaghetti at the wall resume. So you have to kind of start to internalize the expectations of the role as apply throughout the industry. Even though every job is different, there's some we can start to build some similarities in the jobs that would most draw you in. And they might not be the same jobs that would most draw me in or most draw another person here in because everybody's going to have different, you know, wants and needs beyond just like I want a nice place to work in a nice salary. Like we also want to do different things in our day to day. So the two areas that I look at the most are these major duties and responsibilities and required qualifications. And if they're written well, the ones I pulled the instructions written pretty well. But the ones I pulled for the most part, did not have some of the things that I think really make job ads stand out is really well written. There's like kind of standard job ads, I wanted to pull that because I think that's the majority. But some are really well written. And they'll even tell you like in your first 30 days, you'll do this and your first 60 days will do this and your first 90 days you do this. And like some even have like you can actually feel somebody went in and like thought about it and like put in like their personality and stuff, if you see that pay extra special attention to them, I would say, but a lot of times they're gonna feel kind of general. And that's not uncommon. And it's, it's harder to parse those I think so that's what we're going to start to look at here. Major duties and responsibilities. This particular company wants you to collaborate with the leadership team and subject matter experts. That's a pretty common one collaborating with other people, particularly subject matter experts. And quite often groups like leadership are organizational groups within the business partner with the business to create clear learning objectives in the support of business goals. So you've got your learning goals and your business goals. And those are the To things to keep top of mind how they might connect, and and other people have talked about more deeply into needs analysis and so forth. And in some of these videos, I'm getting less than two particular skills and more into what they're asking for. So you can kind of figure out oh, could I do that? And, and which things? Can I do best? And where do I need to upskill design and develop high quality learning content, conduct reviews of training materials, a review of training materials is like I'm looking at old stuff, seeing what needs to be updated, seeing where I might see gaps or flaws, seeing where we're missing training. But it also could be a review of like, this is going up soon, like we're internally reviewing each other's work. That's a really general term. So it might be different things there. And you'll find that a lot where it's like, there's some vagueness to the job ads, or they don't really match up, in some cases perfectly, because they were just kind of written generally, as a catch all. Provide enhancements and revisions to existing training, materials, updates, and so forth. maintain current knowledge of latest industry tools and processes. That could be the industry of their business or the industry of like learning design, I'm guessing they're skewing more towards learning design there. But it's written vaguely enough that it would include both collaborate, again, to create quality training deliverables, actively participate and or facilitate in person or virtual meetings. So they need somebody who can run meetings on their projects, which most new ideas would still I think, although some might not depending on how big a team it is, and if they're coming into a more junior role, but that I remember is one that wasn't in all of the ads, maintain accurate status of projects. So some project management there, project tracking, facilitate in person or virtual Train the Trainer sessions. So this one has the person probably building some IoT or via vi Lt. And this one's probably IoT, because it's in person, and it's an onsite job. And they're facilitating, it has both, but like, they probably have some in person as well. And they're facilitating train the trainer session. So they're looking for facilitation skills, in addition to learning design skills, and not every job will be it will, that's another thing that I've noticed, will vary, diagnose and escalate risks to design projects, that's like, basically, when is something going to be a problem? And can you diagnose and escalate those risks to somebody who can address it, and then perform other duties as requested, which people will sneak into every kind of job. Teachers know that very well. In terms of, there might be some extras on there. And then required skills, abilities and knowledge. So one of the things I looked at for the ones that I pulled here was like, why would a teacher qualify for this on basic paper, because especially if like in my industry, a lot of healthcare organizations take some federal funds. If you take any federal funds, there are some laws that are like if you say something's required, if you say bachelor's degree is required, then you got to stick to your job ad or write a new job ad and put it out there. So I usually go by like required as like, it is mandated, but I also watch for those wiggly words. So you can see here, like they require a bachelor's degree in education, adult learning, or equivalent experience. And that or equivalent experience is a is a wide net, that could be a lot of things. And you'll see that in a lot of things like or equivalent tools, because they sometimes there's tools that are very similar. This one has really basic required qualifications, like, you know, it's pretty broad and general. And so they're, they're clearly looking for somebody and they'll probably look for more things than just these but they're looking for they're not trying to pin themselves in. So they're giving you like, basic skills, right, like prioritize and organize. I saw those skills on that list. A lot of teachers were like, I'm really organized. And I bet you are because I know teachers, teachers can be some of the most organized people in the world. communicate orally and in writing in a clear and straightforward manner. Deal with the public in a professional manner. Leverage foundational digital learning tools, delivery methods and platforms with minimal direction. So

I'm trying to highlight here and it's trying to go back on me. So there's a lot of things hear that you can see teachers applying those skills from the last one like Oh, my facilitation skills could come into play in these train the trainer's my curriculum development certainly can come into play in pretty much any ID job. But like other skills that you may or may not think of how are you going to like leverage those and fill those gaps where you do have gaps. So if you see in jobs, for example, something comes up all the time and you're reading these jobs, and you're like, I'm not sure about that duty. That's the one that I really can't picture myself doing. That's your upskill point. That's your I start writing it down, I start figuring out what I need to upskill on to fill in that bullet. So if I feel like yeah, I could design and develop high quality learning content. But I don't know if I could actually create learning objectives in support of business goals. How do you tie learning objectives to business goals? That's the thing. That's it doesn't make sense to my, my mindset, then you know, that's your upskill point. And when you have those specific points, you can do much better research, then how does a teacher become an instructional designer? You can figure out how do I fill in this particular gap that I have, and then show that I filled it in and show all the other things I can do that that I can prove like I can create these learning materials in my resume. First, I have to do the research and understand it and understand what people are looking for. And how can I market to that, I caught some of the math talk on sales. And the idea of like, this is a sales thing. I did ad sales for a little bit before I got my marketing job out of college, the idea of like they have a need, and every job represents a need, every job represents a problem, they have a need, how do I prove I'm the solution to that need? If I am, if I know I can't do that job, don't apply for that job. But if I think I can do that job, and I can solve the problem that I feel like that advertisement represents, this advertisement feels pretty general to me. I don't know exactly what problem this company has, because they haven't written a really specific job ad. But I do feel like the problems they have are are fairly common. They need to update materials, they need to ensure learning objectives are matched to business objectives, they need to train people on performance issues. I don't know what they are spectrum, because I don't work in that industry. But the problem that they have is, is pretty much going to be similar to the problem a lot of places have, but things that stand out to me like that, train the trainer sessions, which are in a lot of instructional design jobs, but not all I'd say about like half and half of what I see emphasizes that whether they have them or not, what they've chosen emphasize is going to tell you what they think their problem is to a little bit. And you can speak to those things. Alright, so let's look at another one, I'm gonna try to get a little faster because I do have four I want to get through before I get into the meat of the point just so we can see. I think multiple examples helps. So this is optim. This is not my part of optim, or landmark or anything really, this role doesn't sound anything like the roles like on my team, because optim is a huge company. UnitedHealthcare is a huge company. But I noticed there was an optin one that was put out that I thought was really interesting, because it focuses almost entirely on learning project management, paired with ID. So the skills that they want, they very clearly have a lot of balls in the air, they have a lot of stuff going on. They want somebody who can help with some of this project management. And this job ad, I've seen so many job ads from optim, because it's where I work. And this job ads written very differently from other ones I've seen too. And they're all written a little bit differently. But they're looking for like there's the collaborating, consult with subject matter experts, which we've seen before product discovery and Customer Experience Management, which is very vaguely written so could mean a lot of different things. Communicate practically to provide project status updates to supervisors means project management project plan. So they want somebody who, in addition to doing the learning design can really keep everything organized for them. That's a priority. I see in this ad that I don't see an every learning experience designer or instructional designer at the second I look at this, I think like that is a they want somebody organized, they want somebody who can manage products, or they wrote their job ad wrong. I mean, that happens too. But since they are different, I'm assuming somebody wrote it specific to this. They're not asking him for a bachelor's for required qualifications. Part of that is because they couldn't hire anybody without a bachelor's if they put it in there. And they might find somebody great who has an associate's degree or doesn't have a degree or who knows. So they're not asking for that probably, I would imagine that the person who gets the job will have a college degree because most instructional designers I've met do, but and it's in the preferred qualifications. But you can see the required qualifications there are a little bit different than before. And they're not very complex or detailed. They're pretty general like three plus years of experience in they give you a bunch of different things, instructional design, training, modern learning concepts and application, I would count teaching as modern learning concepts and application and I think they would too if they wanted to hire a teacher, and they could justify that on the required qualifications. So when you see phrases like that, don't exclude yourself if you like, but they didn't include education degree. It's if they're writing it vaguely like that, it's because they're open to the they're open to the pitch, right? Like so you've just got to give them the right pitch. And you can maybe get across the plate, if it's a role that would be entry level. Not I mean, like I said, there are some things that don't, that would not be within reach. And there I'm going to ignore the telecommuting requirements because that's just kind of a thing that's an all of theirs. They do have like, participate in internal continuous improvement efforts by offering ideas and creative solutions to improve policies, processes and tools. That's something I didn't see in a lot of job ads. So I'll pull out there. That to me also speaks to wanting somebody kind of like organize somebody who is like somebody thinks in a detail oriented way and improves things. And I read this and I thought a teacher could be very good for this job. Somebody with that experience, who also has the ability and has been upskilling enough to create the learning materials needed. They don't want a lot of fancy tools. They want Microsoft Office Suite not. Yeah, Microsoft Office Suite they want. They don't even have in the preferred any like, particularly fancy tools they want maybe somebody with SharePoint experience, which my old school district used to use SharePoint, we put things on SharePoint. So some teachers might have that WebEx experience. And probably like that's preferred. If you had a bunch of zoom experience and team's experience, it probably would kind of scratch that same itch, but they're not asking for so if you're they may not even design elearning in this particular section of the business, I don't know because I don't know this team. But if you're looking at ads, and you're like, oh, man, I haven't learned storyline or Captivate yet I can't design elearning. And you're looking at all these portfolios, seeing the elearning. There are roles out there, that that's not what they do. And if you look at the job ads, it's limiting, it's less roles maybe. And it's a good skill to learn. But there are roles that kind of the last one I thought kind of felt like it had a little bit more facilitator in it, but also just kind of a kitchen sink of responsibilities. This one, I feel like they want somebody to help keep them organized in their learning projects, as well as develop that learning. And there may be like some presenting too, because they're mentioning WebEx in addition to the suite and stuff like that. So there, there's some kind of mixed things that I can tell, I can already feel some differences between the job ads when I read them. And the more job ads you read, the better you'll get at doing that to that I can do this because I have read a lot of job ads, and I still read job ads, because people send them to me things like asking like, Oh, you think I should apply for this job. Like, as I'm helping other people. I'm not looking for a job, but I do read job ads quite frequently. So third, one Carvana. Another onsite job, Phoenix Carvana, I think is current, I don't know what Carvana does, actually, I should have looked that up. But I added this one later, because I wanted a fourth one. But I would call them like retail. And this one I pulled in because I did want one that did say like elearning tools, because there are a lot that say that. So what you'll be doing, applying tested instructional design, theories, practice methods, talent development curriculum. So they have, this tells me first of all that that feels a little bit, this feels a little bit more written for this job in a not like Fash down way than the other last two to me.

And this also says they have a particular curriculum that they're maybe looking like so maybe they break down again, sometimes things aren't like the job, I'd say. So I'm assuming. So I always ask questions. If I was, you know, interviewing with a recruiter for a job working with subject matter experts. That was that's been an all three. So you can see that's a big one across the board. And think about like how you can collaborate with people on a topic you don't know. That's, I think the hardest job for teachers, we are the subject matter experts. I know, English, I teach English, etc. Right? I was lucky enough to work in a program where I had to work with other teachers for the IB certificate program, because it was a career based program and the teachers were CTE teachers and I didn't know anything about some of the fields, like things like ROTC, aerospace and bio biomedical things that I didn't know about. So I did have that experience. A lot of teachers have that experience with ESC teachers maybe. Or if you work on an interdisciplinary team you work with, you know, as a group with different people, you make the English aligned to the science curriculum, and you each learn a little bit each other's things. But or you work on a committee and you develop something. I've had opportunities to do that before. What have you worked with somebody who helped you kind of become a subject matter expert on something outside your subject and then design towards it. And if you can think of those kind of situations, elementary teachers should have lots of that. Because elementary teachers often specialize and break up and write all the different pieces of the curriculum Elementary, I taught kindergarten for a little while. I think actually teaching elementary is much harder than teaching secondary personally, from my experience, because it's so hard to be an expert in every part of it. Like I was a literacy expert. I was great at designing and teaching the reading curriculum. I can certainly do elementary school math, but I am not a math or numeracy expert. So my design of math curriculum would rely heavily on somebody who was better at that, who was more of a Smee at that than I was when I worked in that role. So subject matter expertise and how you leverage it, think about how that might look. I wouldn't call it that necessarily in what you've done, because you don't want to misrepresent it. But if you can start to think about it as that you can start to sell your ability to do that. And also start to volunteer and do projects where you get like, I pick a subject matter expert or I paired with a local nonprofit Um, you know, dog shelter, and I don't know anything about dogs or the thing that I'm making a training on. So I have to ask a lot of questions and get the information from somebody else there, you know, there's opportunities where you can use that skill and then showcase it in your portfolio. This one's a little bit more techie than the other ones is actually what I really wanted to show here, like creating supporting material media, audio, video simulations, roleplays games. Um, they actually mentioned, they do create other things, too, like instructor guides, but they mentioned elearning. They mentioned Captivate and Articulate Storyline, Adobe Creative Cloud learning management systems. So this one is one where if you hadn't upskilled on the tech, I probably wouldn't apply for this job. Because if you had no upskilling on the tech, it probably doesn't fit in the pile. But that doesn't mean that if you didn't use storyline in your job, as a teacher, you haven't upskilled on storyline, because that's not it. That doesn't mean that you can't do that in a new setting. So this one is a little bit more kind of towards that content creation tech side, as well as the learning design, it doesn't not have the other parts of it. But that makes it a little different than the other ones. And then Instructure Canvas, this is Canvas, LMS, they post jobs, they have a really rigorous process that I did have to cut off the part of their process, where they have you like film A can't work place where you've designed in Canvas, and like submitted, and they have you do all these write ups. So this is one like if you wanted to apply to Instructure, you really would have had to design something in Canvas and kind of had that ready to go because they also close fairly quickly. I've noticed. But I imagine the person who gets this job will have been a teacher at some point, whether they're coming directly from teaching or from somewhere else. Just because I know a lot of people who have worked at Instructure. And a lot of the people who work there have some background in teaching. And I do know people who've gotten a job straight from teaching to an instructional designer instructor. So that's a possible jump, if you have the tech skills. So this is another kind of techie one, but also going into the EdTech direction, which I'll point out, there are some instructional design jobs in edtech. Not every ad tech job is an instructional design job. In fact, there's not as much instructional design, I feel like in edtech as other places. There's some curriculum and content development and design roles. But that separation is one to kind of think through when you're thinking about what you want to do. This one, unlike the other technical one also has things like UDL and accessibility, because we care about that for school, we should care about that everywhere. But we definitely care about that for schools. And then because it's for a specific tool, you know, they want you to know how to design in Canvas, right. And that's also why it has things like HTML office offerings, because that's how you can use the rich content editor to make your canvas look much, much better. In fact, a lot of the way that I kept my HTML up over the years was I used to break the district's Canvas locks, they used to like try to lock our styles. And then I would go and just change the HTML because they wouldn't let me change other without the HTML, but they never locked down the HTML. This was years ago. But we had Canvas for a long time. But this is one that's like a little bit techie, probably you want some educational experience, it still has things like collaborate with subject matter experts. But it has that focus on Dei, that focus on accessibility. And it has little bit of personality in the job ad to like this is of the job as I pulled in my opinion, this is the best written and they have a really rigorous well planned kind of process for it. So you can tell that goes together, and you'll see a difference like some job ads, I pulled one higher ed one. And I pulled this to show there's much better written higher ed one. So this is not meant to represent the higher ed writes, like week job ads, I meant it, I pulled it to do two things. One is the higher ed job. Because those also exist, I just don't know as much about them personally. And also, it's like some of the ads you'll see are really brief like this, too. And I've seen actually these in corporate and higher ed, but I have seen these kinds of there was one thing that made me think I read the train educators and students use the online learning system. So when I see a lot in the higher ed job ads when I'm looking at those, and then the minimum qualifications to say I want to say about higher ed, I didn't see a master's degree as a minimum qualification anywhere else, right one didn't even need a bachelor's degree. But a lot of times the higher ed jobs will want that master's degree or related. So education degrees often count. I was really worried that my master's degree in leadership, I have master's degree in Educational Leadership, that's my education degree would not count and many people from higher ed said no, that that would count like, that's fine. You don't need to go get one in instructional design. Some, some places will feel differently, but don't exclude yourself like let other people exclude you. If if you're on the fence is what I would say. It does, of course authoring tools here, but that could mean any thing at a university, it doesn't necessarily mean storyline. In fact, I would, I would think that it would mean something like h5 P or the LMS. Before storyline if you're not listing storyline or Captivate, also could be like Torah. But just like there's a lot of variation. So I took a lot of time showing you job ads, but I did it because I want to show you a little bit how to think about job ads. And the difference between job ads because the very first step to rewriting your resume correctly, in my opinion, it isn't looking at other people's resumes. I mean, that's great. And I think it's good to do, it isn't like, it's starting to collect the things you've done. That's important too. But before you know which things you've done to collect, it's looking at job ads, figuring out a lot. And that means you can't necessarily apply to the first job as you look at maybe if you're unless you're really burning the candle at both ends and doing this all very quickly. But it's looking at job ads, and really starting to take in and feel like what are these places looking for? And what are some of the trends and what they're looking for everybody's going to be looking for something different. But there are going to be some common themes and trends. And that's kind of like some basic research that you can do to understand. So based on those job ads, that little sample set that I gave you today, and that's not the whole range of job ads out there, certainly. What skills do you already have, that you should be focusing on? I already have this, I can prove it based on my experience doing something in my current role or my previous roles. What do you already have? And I think I sent this question of wrong. So put that in the chat for me. Because I changed my slides last minute and I mess myself up. So I'll move over to the chat here. So what are some skills you already have? Let's see problem solving.

Collaboration, oh, yeah, collaboration was in every one of those job ads. And a lot of times people think teachers don't collaborate, that we just close our doors and work all by ourselves. And anybody in modern education knows that teaching is an extremely collaborative practice these days, but people who haven't worked in education don't know that they imagine the TV show teacher right, like who's just, they're only in their own classroom. Or if they do, they're just like, they just talk in the teachers labs, they don't actually like work together and plan together. Like that's not something a lot of people know, video production is a great skill to have if you already have it. Research, research is a huge skill, in my opinion that you can leverage in a lot of ways. But you have to kind of sell it like how is I think like lowercase our research above academic research is more sellable in some of those job ads that I saw. But then obviously, academic research is extremely valuable to a lot of IT jobs as well. Assessing learner needs L I think that's a really good one. Assessing learner needs, and our ability, I think this is one that teachers often like think about in a way that I think could be stronger, because they think about it as the individual learner, and not the patterns that they see. So we I think everybody who's a teacher is planned, you're not literally planning for Sally and planning for Johnny and planning for Tim, you might plan accommodations for them, you might plan interventions for them, you might do something different because they need it. But you're planning for the trends that you have seen, you are anticipatory planning for the things you know, your learners are going to need. And then you're reading your data and you're iterating on that and planning gap, using your gap analysis to kind of plan things to, and so people will write it as though they're planning for individual learners like tutoring, and not like the wide scale planning that I know many teachers can do. And that is more appealing in a learning design role, I would say. I'm gonna keep going just because I have a few more things I want to cover. And I'm looking at my time and I'm running a little bit long. I want to make sure I know there's a full day of sessions today and one after mine as well. How to prove your skills. So here are some skills that I predict many teachers have, if they don't have the full amount they have like they're on the way there they have the enough skills that if they upscale a little better, they could be there for a corporate role or a higher ed role as well. Don't ask me about a government role, because I know very little about that. But my husband does work in university and I work in corporate. So I know a little bit about higher ed and more about corporate than in higher ed just from talking to people and seeing the differences. Gap and data analysis. Gap and data analysis to me was a huge part of my job as a teacher. This is different for every teacher. But data was huge in my district. Data was the defense of everything and to get people to leave me alone and let me do what I wanted to do in my program. So I ran some nice programs. And sometimes people would be like, Why are you doing this and that the thing that everybody else does, I would have to do GAAP and data analysis specific to my program and justify it. So I had that particular experience. But I also know having worked on like a state tested subject, that every teacher has to do gap and data analysis and make their data charts and like, show it to people and justify it. And if your data is not good, you have to show why. So I really think teachers get in the trenches with data, like quite a bit in many districts, I'm sure there's variation. But that's something where I think teachers have a lot of skills that people don't know about. Or if they know about them, they can't really quite vision, how it transfers, and you have to be able to explain the transferable pneus of that, and why it was a matter like I spoke in many interviews, and this was the thing that I think resonated the most with people. I spoke in many interviews about like making visual data analysis, visual data stories, to prove and justify programs of learning. And that was something that they might not even do in their organization. But they were like, oh, that's, that shows a skill that I didn't expect you to have project management, which I think a lot of teachers do have those skills, you can go and get certifications and so forth. Like some of the certifications do require experience, but other ones do not. But I don't think you necessarily need one to say like I have some of these project management and organizational skills. And I think that's easy to show, in a resume that you are able to kind of you manage a yearbook project and you manage the budget and you manage the deadlines and you manage like you manage it from beginning to end. But it means you have to think more accomplishment based all of your resume stuff you have to think more accomplishment based, not what do you do on a day to day it all runs together? You know, 185 days of a contract year? What did you do? And what was the result of something you did on them smaller scale that represents your skills that made a difference? So maybe it was one project Overhill the reading curriculum, you know, for you and your third grade colleagues, and you did that gap analysis and you found a need and you developed something to meet that need. And then you figured out if it worked, and it did work, because probably the things you're putting in your resume are things that did work, at least in part. And what was the result? What did it do? What was the problem solution? So how do you prove your skills, you prove them with those problems, solutions that show the skills, technology skills, many, many teachers have great technology skills after COVID A lot of teachers who are looking to transition to ID I've noticed are people who were helping other people with technology during the pandemic liked pandemic teaching that virtual teaching and found a new challenge in it. I LTV IoT design elearning design elearning immediate development, you might have one or the other of those or both depending on what you've designed in. And how do you show it those are ones that you can show literally on your portfolio. So those those first two gap and data analysis, product management, I do think you can show those in a portfolio by talking about the problem and solution of your projects, especially if you did volunteer real world projects, or by like making a data story and things like that. But the technology skills, the design, the design the development, that you can show in your portfolio, you can show it as a hard skill. If you can do it, you can put it up there and prove it. And this is one of the reasons I love portfolio based like positions is because you can prove nobody can tell you you can't do something if you can show them that you did it. Right. Whether you had the job title or not LMS administration, many people did more with the LMS. They went in and looked at LMS analytics, they loaded classes in more people had to do stuff like that during COVID. So if you got an experience with the LMS, beyond just creating lessons in it, there may be an opportunity there, you may have those skills. I see a lot of teachers who downplay those skills, who loaded in rosters who pulled reports, who found kids who weren't doing well across classes, because they pulled those reports. And they did like they did calls out during COVID to make sure those kids didn't fall behind based on their LMS analytics and that they were on the LMS only like three minutes a day when they were supposed to log in for all their classes. That learning management system which is your canvas or your Blackboard or your Google doesn't have as many of the analytics. But Google Classroom school ology people who did that. That should be something you put on there. If you didn't do that, that's fine. This isn't you're probably not applying to LMS administration jobs, or if you are, you're probably upscaling to that. But if you did it, a lot of times I see people leave things off that they did, because they don't know how what they did was valuable, essentially. So that's another thing. I guess another thing is to really take stock of your skills before you write your resume. Don't just look at what's on somebody else's resume and feel like okay, well I need all of those things. Take stock of yourself first. You're what you're selling. You're not selling entry level ID from teaching, you know, you're selling yourself you're selling like Aaron Grice, Rohan Braza, you're like whoever you're selling who you are LNO key, right? Like you're selling you as a solution to their problem. And then of course, this one is one that I think I found it harder for people to wrap their heads around teachers being able to do the stakeholder management and working with subject matter experts, because were thought to be so cloistered. Um, so that is a thing that I would have something on your resume that shows a time you collaborated and produce something. And you may have even had to manage up like work with administrators or with district folks, if there is anybody, like, had to sell a program in some way, even if it was a small way, like, you managed up because you had to get, you know, like, approval, it doesn't have to be somebody even above you, like you had to get approval from guidance, or the ESC department or another department. In order for something to work. If you can weave that in, then they understand and you can talk about it more in the interview. But you want to give a sense that you have that ability to collaborate with people outside your lane. And not just write like I worked on cross functional teams, but like give them something they can latch on to where they can visualize it a little bit. Everything on your resume every bullet should have if you're pivoting especially this is less true. If you hold it held the job title it's there's less of an onus on you, it's it's still a good thing to do. But if you're pivoting, especially everything on there, or most things on there should have something that helps them visualize what you're talking about in a specific way that doesn't make you a statistic or a number.

And this is just to get a kind of glimpse at the audience before I go into the very last part.

So a couple instructional designers, elearning Media Developer, more instructional designers, a corporate trainer. The next thing I'm going to talk about because I do think it's important to touch on is in some roles are mixed in this way, is the differences that in our skills, and what what skills we want to present specifically between a corporate trainer and an ID and I'm just going to barely touch on it. That could be a whole talk, really. But I'm going to touch on it briefly just to get you thinking the way I think about l&d, and there's many, many roles. So this is just the way I think about it organizing in my brain. The way I think about l&d Is there are three main lanes, there's instructional design style lanes, which includes like elearning developer and stuff that might not do the full range of things or things that are adjacent. And certainly includes learning experience designer, which is very similar to instructional designer, or sometimes the same thing, depending on who's using the title. But then there's so there's instructional design, then there's corporate trainer, which also can be under a lot of different names, but some of them are like, mixed up like Training Specialist could be a corporate trainer, it could also be an instructional designer, it could also be the third lane, which is kind of training operations. Those are like your training coordinators, your training operations managers, they make the they make the bus come on time, they make the a lot of product management involved in those roles, a lot of organization involved in those roles. They may not be called product managers, and they may do things. There may be blurry lines, like a training coordinator may also present and facilitate sometimes. So but there's three main kind of like branches of skill sets that I think about when I think about like Where would most people want to go and within those those other branches, like within instructional design. There's some people who really, I just want to design elearning some people who want to design everything, there's some people who want to design built IoT s. There's some people who you know, want to design for different industries, specifically, like there's a lot of different specialization. But that I think, is the three main kind of like lanes that we could get into.

So what skills might a corporate trainer or implementation specialist focus on? Implementation Specialist is a different role from corporate trainer, but I think the skills overlap kind of similarly in terms of differentiating. So an instructional designer is designing and developing the learning in most cases, they're, they're doing that needs analysis. They're figuring out the learning goals and how they're tied to the business goals. They're designing, storyboarding, doing all kinds of things that might lead up to the development of that learning and then there hopefully, not as often as we want to evaluating the learning and applying what we learned from the valuation to iterate and improve our learning. Through that process after the implementation process, the implementation process is not usually done primarily it can be. It's there's, there's mixed roles, right. But it is not usually primarily done by the ID. It's usually primarily done by trainers, or the LMS admin and the implementation through like, the LMS learning management system. So what skills might a corporate trainer and implementation specialist focus on that and it may not implementation specialist I put in there because that's what a lot of the trainers seem to be for Ed Tech. And I know some people are interested in a tech sometimes, like going out and training teachers how to use no reading and things like that. So what might they be face to face training public speaking? Yeah, organization I think is great for both strategic thinker I think is good for both but maybe even better Friday to be honest. Storyboarding is maybe more for I don't think a corporate trainer would really do storyboarding. facilitation, public speaking. So if you are an amazing, you're amazing at direct instruction. You are you are, you know, captivating. Not necessarily that you stand in lecture people for 40 minutes, because facilitators are they have, they're not just always just talking right out, you're right there, they're doing other things, too. There'll be more interesting than I am right now, there's some great facilitators to do all kinds of things in their sessions to who do activities, they lead activities, just like you do in the classroom, it varies. Some of them are just talking about you over a PowerPoint, because that's what that's what's got to get done. But facilitation is, like a skill teachers have right that is essentially not the focus of an instructional design resume. But it is the focus, if you're going for those roles, where you're going to be direct instructing groups of people, it can be on instructional design resume, because you're leading train the trainer's you're still they're still useful skills. And even if you're designing for facilitators, it's really useful to have been a facilitator and to know their challenges, and to know how to work with facilitators of different kinds. If you've designed materials and other people on your team have used them, this was another thing I sold a lot other people on your team have used them, you've designed them in a way where other teachers could plug and play them and could facilitate that content. Because it was it, it made their lives easier, then you have had that experience of designing for other people, not just yourself. And that can help the instructional design side, but I would put my facilitation skills higher. If I was my first corporate Junior corporate trainer job, I would put those bullets up higher and focus on the more than if I was going for an ID job. And sometimes I'll see the opposite. I'll see like Id job resumes where they have their facilitation, they'll have really great things at the bottom that I think are like, Why is this below this like? And thinking about that order is I think important dynamic presenter Yes, a corporate trainers, if you are really, really extroverted, and you love talking to people all the time, and you hate staring at your computer all day, you may not want to be an instructional designer, because that's a lot of it. Not that No, extroverts ever want to be instructional designers. But you may really want to be a corporate trainer, and just didn't kind of realize the difference. So that is something I wanted to kind of point out and corporate trainer is just one word for, I've seen 8 million words for that even more than Friday. So it does get kind of tricky. I feel like I don't see corporate trainers much anymore for some reason. And I'm not really sure if it's gone out of fashion, um, resumes. So I have my kind of actionable tips, as you're sitting down, and you're looking over your resume, and you're thinking about yourself as the products that you're selling. Because that's, that's a mindset that's hard to get into. But it is a mindset that I think with everybody I was I was helping over the summer, the people who made that mindset shift, it made their lives easier. So that's I think the best advice I can give anybody is you are what you're selling to solve the problem. And that's a little bit uncomfortable sometimes, especially when you feel like like you're cold calling and you're filling in these applications, you haven't gotten a referral for that place. You're just kind of, you know, throwing applications into the void. And you're getting a lot of rejections too. And you don't know why or what you can improve. But and you do get those calls occasionally. I mean, it's kind of like you're getting this feedback cycle. And it feels a little bit like cold call sales. Sometimes I imagined I actually didn't do cold calling sales, but it it feels like like that sometimes where you're selling something and you're not quite sure how to meet the needs because you're not getting that communication back. How do you do that in your resume, to get them to call you so you can you can have that conversation and have that side of things. Do communicate clearly what you've done and sometimes why. I see a lot of resumes where they list a lot of buzzwords, and they don't actually come up Kate and Problem Solution weighs what they did, why they did it, if you can, and if they fit and if they make sense, include relevant KPIs. Heidi went into that much more in her session. So watch her session, if you haven't already, what some KPIs could be from the classroom. But these are basically like your, your numbers, your key, your key indicators of your success in your role. And you have numbers, you have numbers. And sometimes your numbers, the numbers that you want to use the most aren't necessarily the numbers that show the skills that you want to use either. So think about the story that the number is telling. And think about what makes it valuable as that problem solution. But do try to work in numbers. At the same time, if you really can't fit a number into something, but you still think it's a good bullet to have on your resume. It's okay, if everything doesn't have a number, like it's not a it's not an all or nothing. But you want to show that you can prove you had results. And you know, when you had results, that's one thing I think people want to see. They want accomplishments, not just what you did, did day to day, but what did it do, especially if you're pivoting and changing fields, focus on skills that fit the role, not kitchen sink, you might have done the best job at organizing a field trip. And it might have been the most impressive thing in the world. And there might be all these moving pieces to it. And it might be written up in a really impressive way. But does that best job does that best fit the type of jobs you're applying to? For a project management role? It might if it was a really complex field trip. For an instructional design role. I might be wondering why is that on your resume and especially why is that at the top depending on how you've written it and the problem solution involved and all of that. There are exceptions don't immediately go cross off anything that has to do with a field trip because I said that, but think about how it fits the role that you're applying for. And do not use the same resume for different roles. If I'm applying to a project management job, instructional design, job, Training Specialist corporate trainer style job and you know, an ed tech sales job. These are very different resumes. And if I'm applying to that many jobs, I'm probably still in the exploratory phase. And maybe should pull back a little bit. But if you're applying to different kinds of jobs, and it's okay to have maybe two ways you're looking, make sure they have different resumes, different base resumes, and you can change them a little bit to each job ad. But once you have a good base resume, you'll find you don't need to so much. Don't overuse keywords or buzzwords if it's just a line of buzzwords, and I can't figure out what you personally did at all. And you're not currently in that job that you want to get to. I'm not sure I just it doesn't feel like anything yet, it has to have that I have to have some context. So you do need to translate your resume. I think Heidi gave some great advice for that, again, I would watch her talk for the specifics of examples on that. Which is why I pulled pulled back a little bit on that because I think it's already it's that content exists. And she did an amazing job with it. And never obscure your title don't lie. There's no need to lie. Don't call yourself an instructional designer. If your title was not instructional designer, it's okay to put instructional design in in your like summary or your headline at the top like that's what you're looking to do. But don't, don't write anything that seems like it would be a lie. Like to me calling students customers would feel like a lie. And so I wouldn't do that, to me calling parents stakeholders, especially in a sentence along with a lot of other people, if there were multiple groups of stakeholders, like parents, people in the community, etc. does not feel like a lie, because it is how my district talks about things. So I'm okay with that. But if it feels like a lie to you, it feels wrong. Think about that for a minute and make sure that you're not obscuring anything. Always, always, always you want to clarify, never obscure.

And then for portfolios, I could do a deep dive on portfolio some other time, and maybe I will in terms of like really specific things. But these are just the most common things I see. I wanted to make this little bit more introductory because we're starting with that first base. But some things I see that like kind of make them. I think really like a checklist to go through, make sure the UX is polished, your portfolio does not have to be a website, you can host it a lot of different ways. However you host it, make sure that it's very easy to find your samples, and that your samples are well presented. It doesn't matter how fancy or how upskill like how technically advanced it is. But it does matter that it's easy to use. If it's not easy, then they think that the learning you're going to create isn't going to be easy to use, right? So make sure that the UX the user experience that the person using it can figure out where they need to click for everything, and where the things are, just by looking at it. And that's that's a skill in and of itself. And it's different on different mediums, which is why portfolios are so hard because some people will tell you like make a portfolio website and some people tell you you don't have to both of those are true. But you need something that is easy to use, explain and show more than just tools. Like it's great to show what you can do in storyline and what you can create. But if all you're showing is just in Your actions and storyline, then you're probably not going to get as far as if you make a problem solution. And you explain that you can analyze data, you can do all these other parts, essentially, site and show research. One of the best tips I got for my portfolio that helped a lot in my field. I did a lot of healthcare interviews. I didn't interview only in healthcare, but I did a lot of healthcare interviews and I wound up and healthcare was, they were complaining that a lot of people's portfolios did not have academic citations. Teachers know how to do academic citations. So if you use resources and you do research to learn how to you know, you learned about bear safety to make a training on bear safety, cite your sources, cite your academic research, or what sources you use, and show that you did your research and you know how to cite it. And that also keeps you free of plagiarism. Never plagiarize for a lot of reasons. But also, like, make sure you know how to do your citations. In my field, APA is the most common, but they were happy if I cited in anything. Feel free to continually add and improve and get lots of feedback. Have people look at it, have people critique it, how people will get it who are going to tell you the harsh truth. Because praise is not going to get you as far as real meaningful, nitty gritty feedback. And then don't share lots share it like professionally if it has lots of easy ears, if the links are broken if you've got spelling errors, okay, portfolio is a living document. But some things we want to have ready before we share it with people who are not giving us feedback that are actually we're applying to jobs, share it for feedback, then for people to proofread it for you Sure. But don't share it on your resume. If you know you haven't, you know, you wrote it in the middle of the night. And you've got to go back and fix your spelling errors, right? And never never plagiarize and don't have all you can have some templates if you note that you use the template, but don't have all templates without like acknowledging that you're using a template, because it gives people I think, the wrong idea. And also, where did you get that template from? Were you okay to use it like never do anything that could be construed as stealing, for sure. Because nobody wants to work with people like that. So remember, your portfolio and your resume or living documents, change them, change them as you get feedback, and you need to change them, change them when they're not working. Change them when you decide you want to like move towards one industry instead of the other or one kind of job ad instead of the other. And then I know I, I took a long time. So I went a little over my time. But I'm happy to stay and take questions. Still, if we don't need to clear out for the new one, even Canva templates, I would say to use the template if used to Canva template like in the description of the project, I would mention that personally, I don't use like a lot of templates. I like to I'm very particular. So I like to build things. But when I do use a template, I say that I did. Because to me that is the most honest kind of way to be. And that's, I think you'd ever get wrong with honesty. Like, you don't want somebody to hire you because they think you did something you didn't.

Luis Malbas  
Great advice. Allison, that was great. There's so much information. You know, the thing that really surprised me, every time that I talk to you, you just sound like a veteran of like a decade in this space. And I know that I don't know, you're relatively new in the instructional design field. But you've just got it. I mean, you you you just you just know and this stuff is really important for for now, you know, for the modern, l&d professional, you've really, you've really nailed it, I do want to see I know that if any of you need to take a break because we're gonna be starting again with with John at at the top of the hour at one o'clock Pacific time. But feel free to leave, you need to take a break. But I do have a bunch of stuff in the QA area. You have sort of like a speed round type of thing. Absolutely. I don't know if you went over some of this stuff. I kind of had to jump into some other things while we were talking. So hopefully I didn't miss miss anything. But Aaron was asking Do you have any preferred sources of job ads? Not sure if you answered this already, if you did,

Alison Sollars  
um, I used almost exclusively because I was too lazy to make an indeed profile. LinkedIn, I think LinkedIn and indeed would be the two places that I would go I didn't actually start using a deed until I was looking for side work. And they have a lot more part time type stuff. But I didn't use like I didn't go all over the place. I just really use LinkedIn now. Now with the market cooler, would it be more beneficial to go a little bit more out of your range? If you're not finding stuff maybe but wouldn't hurt. It wouldn't hurt. No, but I did. Like I was finding I was was finding like 20 to 30 jobs a week to apply for a remote or a couple in my area hybrid. And that was plenty for me. So,

Luis Malbas  
yeah, yeah. And we get jobs posted in the TLD. See, it's still the chat.us on our Slack channel regularly. I think there were just three posted this week. So take a look there. How about this thing? Kerry's asking if I create things in software? Your company has like Canvas or another LMS? How do you use that in a portfolio with screenshots?

Alison Sollars  
Okay, so assuming you have the right to use it, because like you're not under an NDA, it's not somebody else's intellectual property. Most school districts, it's fine to like, take a screencast of what you did, but I don't know what your contract says. So assuming you have the right to use it and take a screencast of it, the way that I've shown my stuff from like a Canvas course. And this is actually the way they have you do it in their application process, which I haven't done. But I read the application process for that job ad, is that I have done a screen recording of it going through the major features, talking about why I designed things the way I did. And then yeah, pulled some screenshots if I wanted to show it on a website for like the page. So and then you also can link to like, if it's canvas, you can link to it in Canvas Commons, but probably nobody's gonna go there is my maybe I'm a little cynical, but most people don't have the time to go to like LMS courses and stuff. If you've presented a video to them, they love it, because they're like, oh, okay, I see it. Thank you for communicating that to me. So clearly, basically.

Luis Malbas  
Nice. Okay, um, let's see, this one got voted up. So I'm going to show this one. From Karen, what are some best practices and good examples for a portfolio? That's well put together?

Alison Sollars  
I went over a couple of best practices for portfolios. And I think that's my kind of core list. I would say. Beyond that it gets into like, what do you want to be known for? One of the things that Tim Slade says all the time that I really appreciate is, you should be kind of T shaped right? So what do you want to do? What do you want to be known for? My portfolio has almost exclusively elearning. Not because I can't design a filter, and IoT or whatever. But because I wanted a job that was a remote job that included some ELearning Development. And it has like Project write ups with problem and solution. So they can see I can do more than just develop elearning. But I wanted to do that. So that was what I focused on most. But I think a well rounded portfolio, you're considering things like, you want maybe a sample of elearning, maybe a sample of a facilitator guide, Participant Guide slides for IoT, maybe a sample of a job aid or two, maybe a sample of a video, one thing that I did that was really helpful to me, that was suggested to me by somebody else, just like somebody I had a coffee chat with, and I'm trying to think which person, but was like to pair things together, like have a project where you have a storyline, but you also have a video, but you also have a job aid. And the benefit of that is people are busy, and they don't look at very many projects. But if they see all these skills in one project, they're like, oh, okay, you use multiple tools to make this. You can use all this stuff. And I don't have to look at any more thing because people are very busy.

Luis Malbas  
Right, right. Yeah, we're looking to see if we, we could get a hiring manager and for this series, but didn't manage to find one. Maybe next time we do this. We'll, we'll get a few of those folks in. All right, this. Here's another one from Carrie, I do a ton of LMS and admin data, I'm having trouble visualizing how to show these things. Can you post an example of a portfolio?

Alison Sollars  
I think this is one of those things, it's better shown in a resume bullet than a portfolio like what do you do? What does doing that LMS at admin data accomplish for your school or organization? What's the problem solution there and that goes in a resume bullet, if you wanted to show like the result of it at a portfolio, you could do a data story like I have another problem solution. But like you could do a data story with like how your work impacted a metric. And like you could do it almost like a project management presentation. Like I see those in like some of the PMI stuff. And then like the Google project management course, they have an example of that where you show like the data before the data after you know, in a kind of like slideshow presentation, you could absolutely do that. And like even if you didn't do that and present it to your admin, you could do it in the framing of like, this is what we presented to our administration about our project, right, like, you can say that that's hypothetical to in there, you don't have to lie about it, but that's what you could have presented if they had wanted to see it.

Luis Malbas  
Now that's great answer telling that story is super important. Nice. Okay, so let me go ahead and mark that one. Okay, have one from Hannah here. When working on building a portfolio, is it acceptable to use pre made templates in your courses such as an articulator should you be designing them from scratch?

Alison Sollars  
I think this is just my opinion. I think that it is much more valuable to design from scratch even If you're going to be at an organization that will use templates, lots of organizations will have templates for you to use. But somebody has to make those templates, somebody has to edit and maintain those templates. And if all you've done is work on templates, then I think that's not showing. If you're focused on that skill, if you want to show that you can do elearning design and development, I think you need to build stuff from scratch. That doesn't mean that everything like if you have a bunch of projects, but you also have one that happens to have a template, especially for part of it, I think that's okay. I don't think there's anything wrong with using templates for like things ever. But I think if you're trying to show that skill, you're not showing it by using a template.

Luis Malbas  
Nice. Okay. All right. Last question. Let's see this one's from LAN, would you recommend upskilling by learning about UI, UX and HTML?

Alison Sollars  
For most teachers, that's not where I would recommend as a starting point. At UX a little bit you UX and user experience, I think low level like basic, just like the general principles of it, just like general Visual Design Principles, I think every learning experience designer should know, which are basically things like, not like How to Make a Website necessarily, but how does the user experience like, the button should always be in the same place. Like, I should always know where the button is to click Next. And like web design is like this, like, I know how to close the window of any browser, any pop up, I open on a web browser, because it's the X at the top right? Like, it's always in the same spot. And like good tools have this to where you know, intuitively how to use their interface. And I think learning a little bit about user experience, and a little bit about UX really helps with design. So maybe a tiny, tiny bit like LinkedIn learning on the basics. If you feel like that's a weakness of yours. HTML, CSS is something I happen to, to know and have done before. Like, I'm of the MySpace generation, where we learned it to like, you know, make our MySpace pages different. And I like in high school, I ran a soap opera fanfiction website that I designed in front pages, right? Like, I just know that because I know it. But I don't think instructional designers need to know that it is helpful. If you want to design in the LMS and almost any LMS, you can use HTML, CSS, and it would be helpful for jobs like that Canvas job where they call it out. There's there's jobs I've seen, call it out. But is that the starting point for most teachers looking to transition to instructional design? Probably not. It's more of a web design thing. If you're really interested in super technical stuff, Code Academy has a good free HTML starter course that I took as a refresher, and I think is it'll teach you everything you need to know about the basics of HTML and gave me like the refresher on Oh, yeah, that's how I do that part of the closing the, you know, interaction and stuff. But I would not recommend that as a starting point, I would recommend as a starting point, making sure you know, the language between education and instructional design, which Heidi's talk was on, it was very good. But there's also other resources, I would recommend making sure you have a strong foundation and learning theory, which I personally believe most teachers do. I believe andragogy is not that different from what most teachers are doing nowadays. But it depends on what you do in your day to day, and it depends on your background and your training. So I would make sure that you have that background and you feel confident in it. I would recommend a strong kind of upskilling in business acumen. And I would start with Kirkpatrick that's where I started and an understanding of Kirkpatrick and how that applies. You won't get to use all the fun stuff in Kirkpatrick probably in your regular job. But that kind of bridges that business gap, before I got into really technical stuff. And then like the technical tools that I would start with are things like really great PowerPoint, storyline rise, articulate Captivate Adobe Creative Suite before I branched out to HTML and programming unless you have an interest in programming, specifically, HTML, CSS, not really programming, but that is kind of like the gateway to programming I would say.

Luis Malbas  
Got it. Okay. Great, great answers. Let's see. And that's it. Well, you did an hour and 14 minutes. That's a lot. No, that's okay. It was a lot of stuff. And now I think that a great way. A great follow up to this one is going to be John's John Weber's session next, which is interview tips and tricks, which I hope will see all of you there. Alison, thank you so much. Alison, and I were talking earlier, we are trying to schedule maybe a member showcase next week. So Alison may be on one of our TLD casts, which you can watch live as well. So that'll be happening next week. And with that, I'm going to go ahead and close the session out and let everybody take a quick break and then we'll see you back here shortly in less than 15 minutes. Okay. Thanks, everyone. then,

Alison Sollars  
oh, a couple of people asked for the slides. I will post I will post them. I don't know email me if you want to message me on LinkedIn if you wanted the slides um, I don't know quite how to post them in the resources here. Sorry.

Luis Malbas  
You can also send them to me and I can I want to get together thanks, everybody. Bye

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