Success Stories: Teacher to Trainer with guest Stephanie Diggins

Luis Malbas  
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the training, learning and development community. Thanks for joining us today. Happy Tuesday to you all. Yeah, today we've got another success story, teacher to transition journey to talk about. And our guest is Stephanie Diggins. And let's see, we have Stephanie has actually been a guest with TL dc in the past. It just interestingly enough, it was I think it was late last year when you had emailed me, and you were looking for was it was it was the freelance event, right? You wanted to learn more about freelancing? And you're like, what if you did an event about that? I'm like, Okay, let's give it a try. It took me a few months to kind of get it together. Right. It was, I know, it was in the winter break. And we had a couple other things planned, but then we eventually pulled it together. So I you know, that was pretty savvy of you to make that request. And we actually got a freelancing event out of it. I should actually paste that link in the in the chat at some point just so that people can have access to it. Yeah, we're gonna be talking about you as you were a teacher for a number of years, and transitioned to instructional designer. And so yeah, let's, let's let's discuss that. How did you? How did you get started in education to begin with?

Stephanie Diggins  
So I actually have a background in theater and theater production. And so after college, I graduated in 2004, which is dating myself a little bit, but graduated college in 2004. And afterwards, I tried to work in the theatre industry, and still love theater, still do stuff with theater, but I eventually decided like, Okay, I want to, I want to teach like I want to, I want to teach theater because I love theater. And so I went back to school, got my master's degree in education, secondary education, and Ohio, and start in like, immediately even, like I started my master's degree, and I started working in schools like this at the same time. So I was working as a paraprofessional, and then I went into it was a long term sub teaching drama class. And then finally graduated, like I kind of did a little bit backwards. I ended up teaching before I did my student teaching. So it was a little it was a little bit of a hot mess, because my classroom management was non existent. So so it was a steep learning curve. And then but when I got into student teaching, I knew not what to do. So it made the student teaching experience a little bit easier. And then 2011 I graduated and started looking for a full time teaching job and ended up in New York City and taught there for a couple of years and then made my way down to Delaware, which is where I'm originally from and taught there for a nice five and a half years. So I've got nine years of teaching experience under my belt.

Luis Malbas  
Wow, were you Were you good? Were you trying to? Were you thinking about getting into theater when you went to New York?

Unknown Speaker  
I did. No.

Stephanie Diggins  
i That's part of the reason I wanted to move to New York. Cuz in college, I went to New York City see a Broadway show actually sell rent on Broadway. It was amazing. It's like one of my favorite musicals. And always wanted to live in the city and eventually gotten there and loved it. But it was teaching was draining. Yeah, even in New York, and then eventually in Delaware. I because I did, like leave for about six months. Like I left my teaching job in New York traveled for a little bit, because I'm like, I just, I need a break. And then ended up back in education when I got to Dell when I got back to Delaware. Right? Okay.

Luis Malbas  
You know, it's amazing to me how many theater people are actually in instructional design. I, we talk about it pretty regularly here. Just the interviews that I've done. It's like, background in theater. Now instructional designer. So when did you decide to to shift instructional design? Um,

Stephanie Diggins  
I started kind of doing it as like a side gig just to earn a little extra money. Last year, yeah. Last summer, I ended up getting two freelance, freelance jobs. And so that start like that really started the instructional design. Interest, I'd say.

Luis Malbas  
So go, can you go into that a little bit? I'm just curious. Like, how did you find an instructional design? Job? I mean, or, or freelance work to begin with? Is it something you just answered an ad on the internet? Or how did that go?

Stephanie Diggins  
One of them was, yeah, so the first kind of freelance job that I got, and this was a long term client, like I ended up having him for, like, working with him for almost a year. But I found him on Upwork. Okay. And I've used Upwork. before. You know, in the past, I've done some like freelance writing. And so I just got back on Upwork. And it was like, kind of looking into stuff. And so my, the client hired me as a, like a PowerPoint person, like a PowerPoint guru or something like that. He pretty much just wanted me to sleep off his PowerPoints. And because he was, the PowerPoints were a training that he was selling to a company. And so I was subcontracted. But the PowerPoints weren't doing what they want, what you wanted them to be able to do. Because PowerPoint is a presentation software. It's not a authoring tool. Right. So I at that time, I was like, I was, you know, doing the free trial with storyline starting to like, figure that out. Because that's one of the big upskilling. When you're transitioning is the software, a lot of the software we do not use in the classroom.

Unknown Speaker  
So I

Stephanie Diggins  
showed him a course that I created on storyline and was like, Look, this is what this is everything that this software can do. And that's everything that you want it to be able to do. So I was able to convince him and he wants to the company. And they were like, oh, yeah, we can we have an LMS. And so we can totally, like upload this to our LMS system. And so that's what I ended up convincing him to, to let me develop the course in Storyline. Instead of just PowerPoint. I was content developing. I was taking his PowerPoints and uploading them into storyline because you can upload PowerPoints directly in a storyline. But then I was adding like, you know, we were adding videos, we were adding scenarios, we are adding knowledge checks. So

Unknown Speaker  
that was like my first

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, no, and that's great that you actually had a project that you needed to figure out like that is that's a that's a big deal.

Stephanie Diggins  
Well to I was able to learn storyline as I was working right now if I was like, oh, I want I want to be able to do this. I have no idea how to do that. Then I just you know you Google it. You go to elearning heroes and they have like All of the directions on how to do certain things. And so it was it was nice to be able to learn. kind of learn on the job. Yeah. How do you store it?

Luis Malbas  
Were you using just the trial version the whole time? Or? Yeah, he

Stephanie Diggins  
ended up buying it. Like it was. This is probably like a little bad. But so I had the trial version, then he got the trial version, and then he ended up buying it. So we had a couple of months that we got to use storyline for free because we both did the trials. Right. Right. And then yeah, and then he he purchased it.

Luis Malbas  
Nice. Okay, so started your instructional design career just doing? Oh, you know, we should actually mention with Upwork. expand a little bit about what Upwork is. I've used Upwork in the past for drying, like web devs and stuff. But why don't you go ahead and tell folks what Upwork is?

Stephanie Diggins  
Absolutely. Upwork is just a it's a, it's a freelancing job site. So you can create a profile on it, you can show some of you like some of the work that you've done, so you can add like a little bit of a portfolio into your own profile. And they do take they do take a cut of what you earn. But

Luis Malbas  
yeah, and it's a great way to kind of get experience, right?

Stephanie Diggins  
Yes, yeah, absolutely. And there are tons of jobs available for instructional designers on Upwork. Upwork is not the only place to get a search for you know, freelance freelance jobs. I'm also a part of learn Nexus on Linux is I haven't really gotten any jobs through them yet, because I haven't actively like really pursued. But that's another like, great website for looking for freelance jobs.

Luis Malbas  
Right, right. I know that Id Lance that sponsors a lot of our lately, TL DC stuff. I haven't I don't have any direct experience with them. But I've heard really, really good things about them. And

Stephanie Diggins  
then Parker grants straight. Yeah, they've seen Yeah, I actually brought him I pretty much brought him to you. Yeah. Did the freelance Yeah. And when we were talking, when we were talking about speakers for the freelance event, I was like Parker grant, because I had gotten his name from Sarah stebic. Another huge help with me transitioning from teaching to instructional design, as she heads up CPLD teaching a path to learning and development. And, and she's just, she's one she's just amazing. Love her. And she's a friend now and, but she has like so many great resources for teachers that want to transition. And the TP TP LD community is super, super supportive.

Luis Malbas  
Great. No, I show she's on the program next week speaking, I can't remember what day it is. But for our audience out there, let me type this in. If anybody wants to look at the event next week, which is free. You can check it out there. All right, let me ask you this next question, what do you feel was the thing that helped you the most transfer from being a teacher to an instructional designer, um, any skills in particular,

Stephanie Diggins  
definitely tech skills, like making sure that you have those down, um, when I was really like, learning about instructional design, attending conferences, networking, all of that like really helped. Um, there are some amazing instructional design books out there. And you know, and also learning a little bit about graphic design is you you need to be able to make your course look pretty and that takes some graphic design skills. And then also like really getting into like the AV portion of it, you know, audio of audio video. So if you're doing like, you know, a talking head video or an animated video, and then also being able to add voiceover and make it actually make sure it sounds good and that you don't have static or background noise or anything like that. So

Luis Malbas  
right, right. So let me get some specifics. What did you What events did you go to to sort of get into it or were there just a whole bunch that you just start in signing up for and just diving into it,

Stephanie Diggins  
there was kind of a whole bunch that I started signing up for, and just you know, all the TL DC events. No worries, because you had, you know, you had you, you have amazing events like you and you pick, and you you curate, like incredible speakers in the fields. And, you know, in a lot of speakers that you have our speakers that I follow on LinkedIn, yeah. LinkedIn, because they're so like, you're kind of, like, well known in the industry, and they're doing amazing things. And, and I'm not like, I'm not saying like, they're doing amazing things like job wise, because of, you know, of course they are, but they're doing amazing things for the community, for the community, and really just like, helping people out, like giving them the information that they need to be able to be successful in this field.

Luis Malbas  
Right. Right. Yeah, I think it seems like that's, that's pretty much the thing that I'm trying to do is, because I've been in this space for so long, and there are like, definitely people that I know, that have been out there forever, that are, that helped kind of define elearning and instructional design over the last, like 20 years, I rarely bring those folks into TL DC. It's more like, kind of like the the folks that are really active and sharing and wanting to, that are actively part of the community that I'm kind of more focused on, but I'm certainly no, yeah, I want to bring some of the other like big time experts at some point, I'll, I'll get a few of those and entity. LDC, how about what the graphic design thing? Like? Where did you go for, for stuff like that?

Stephanie Diggins  
For graphic design? Well, there's

Unknown Speaker  
a great book, the non designers

Stephanie Diggins  
design book or handbook or something like that, I think that's the name of it. Um, so I, you know, I have that, and that's helped a lot. But then also, I have a friend of, like, a friend of mine from high school is, yes, pretty much kind of what he does is graphic design. So I'd always have him like, my website and everything. Like, I've had him look at it and give me feedback and, and kind of like, remind me, like, like, really kind of point out, like design principles that I need to keep constantly like, kind of in my head. So yeah, it is, like been able to with one client that I have, I've been able to really kind of practice my graphic design, because initially, and they're a long term client, which is great. But initially, they hired me to design job aids. So that was, that was some graphic design there.

Luis Malbas  
Ya know, and it sounds like one of the things that I'm consistently hearing in these in these particular episodes, the success stories, ones, or the instructional designers that I feel like are really having seen some success are the ones that are curious. Right. And that's the thing like that really struck me at first when you and I talked was that you had an uncle? I think it was that was helping you with the business side of freelancing. And you're like, I need to get answers. I need to find answers. You were really like, just like, wanting to, you know, to explore and yeah, this stuff sorted out. And I think that's an important piece of the whole thing is that if you're shifting from one career to the other, you have to be interested in really like just chasing some of this stuff down.

Stephanie Diggins  
Yeah, absolutely. And like, especially with freelance you do have to be pretty business savvy, because you have like, you know, the uncle that you mentioned, he's a CPA. So all of like the tax stuff that I need to do, that I don't have to ever do, because, you know, my school the schools I worked with automatically took taxes out. I have to like, now I have to figure out okay, you pay your taxes four times a year quarterly. What's my tax? What how much taxes do I need to pay this time? How many taxes How much do I need to pay that like each each quarter and like calculating that and you have before you even actually get have to pay income tax you have you hit a certain threshold with your profit and so it's still a lot to learn. And then just you know, when you're creating your freelance business, whether you want to do an LLC, or if you want to do just be a sole proprietor making you have business insurance. Oh, she is let me say Making sure you have a separate bank account for your business like, yeah, personal account, you got to you have to have one for your business. And what if you get on this was like something that I just recently kind of found out. So one of my clients is actually paying me by cheque. And so they send me a check once a month for, you know, the work I did the month before, and the check is made out to my business. So made out to me, it's made out to my business, because I have to send them an invoice and stuff. And so, you know, I can't just deposit that that check without having a certificate from my state and county saying, like doing business as a form that I had to fill out and go down to the courthouse, they notarize and all that stuff. I think I had to pay like 50 bucks for it or so it was not expensive at all. Um, but you know, it's just, it's an extra step that you have to do to be able to just cash this check that is in the name of my business. Right, right. Right. So that was that was an interesting learning experience.

Luis Malbas  
Oh, definitely. Definitely. So So what has surprised you so far about going from being a teacher to becoming an instructional designer? Like, is there anything in particular that you can mention, that was like a big adjustment?

Stephanie Diggins  
I think the biggest adjustment is, was not being in a constant state of stress. And that's mental health thing. Um, between not being in a constant state of stress, and not having to work every second of the day. Wow, those were the two biggest things that hook the most. Kind of, it's just, it was I don't even know how to describe it. It was like, I had to like, take a step back and be like, Oh, wait, if I don't start work, if I don't work, like eight hours straight, that's okay. You know, I can go for a walk in the morning. Like, I don't have to wake up it's exam anymore. I can sleep in a little bit. I you know, yeah, I have deadlines, but I can manage them. It's not like

Luis Malbas  
yeah, no, that's pretty intense. Like she here is saying I'm in charge is powerful. Yeah, um, but what do you miss about the teaching profession?

Stephanie Diggins  
Is the kids yeah, am I am I am my teacher friends. Yeah. I like one of one of my strengths as a teacher was being able to connect with my kids being able to build relationships with my students. And, you know, I miss I do miss being able to walk down the hall and talk to my teacher friend, because now I work from home. And so it's just me and my dog. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, those are those are like, really the only things that I miss. I don't like you know, I love I love lesson planning. lesson planning was fun. I still get to do that as an instructional designer, essentially. I don't miss the politics. I don't miss the paperwork. I don't miss having to grade hundreds of papers because I was an English teacher. Yeah, you're an English. And I also created a program called the Teacher Academy. And they were for high school. It was for high school students that wanted to go into teaching. So don't miss like all the grading and stuff. But

Unknown Speaker  
But yeah, that's

Stephanie Diggins  
the biggest thing is I miss the kids and my teacher in being able to see my teacher friends. All right,

Luis Malbas  
right. No, that's, that's Oh, thanks for sharing that. That's really, really interesting. So why don't we go into what your daily schedule is like now? Maybe just describe that?

Stephanie Diggins  
Yeah. My daily schedule is fun. So, in the morning, after I get up, my dog and I go on a hot girl walk. That's our myth. It's a tick tock thing where you walk like two to four miles, and listen to motivational podcasts. And so or like inspirational songs or something like that. So it's a little, it's a little bit of mood, movement and mindfulness. So I do that in the morning. And then

Luis Malbas  
what kind of like what podcasts just for folks out there?

Stephanie Diggins  
Um, so I'm going to look it up real quick, because I have, like a whole list of podcasts. Um, there's the mood podcast. We can do hard things real pod, take the cake. Those are the ones that I've listened to so far. Those have so far. Oh, and not your typical podcast? Mm hmm. So those are some of the motivational

Luis Malbas  
ones. Nice.

Stephanie Diggins  
I've been listening to. And then, yeah, after after my morning walk, get, like, get ready for the day. So shower breakfast, and then do some work?

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, yeah. What's it? What's the what's the work usually? Like? Is it we just dive in sit at a computer and go? Or can you describe that little bit?

Stephanie Diggins  
Yeah, it depends on like, what the client needs at the time. So um, you know, I might have a meeting, I might have some stuff to do in storyline, some content development that I need to do, I might be reviewing some stuff, and maybe doing some graphic design, it just depends on what I've two clients currently. And they're both long term clients. So it just depends on what they need. But then, like I, you know, I work for a couple of hours, and then I stop and take my dog to the park across the street, and we play and I throw the ball for her. And then I still have some work to do. And I do a little bit more on. But only right now I'm only doing I was doing maybe for four to six hours a day of work. Because over the over the summer, the work slow down, I you know, towards more towards the winter, spring, I had four clients, then two of the contracts ended, which is typical. And the two, the two clients that I have, they're both long term clients. So that slowed down a little bit, but it's picking up again, yeah, I'm going to be busy this fall. Right. Like when, when it's when the work slowed down. I wasn't scrambling, like I was making enough to like pay my bills and stuff. So I'm willing to find additional contracts. Because I'm also still recovering from burnout from teaching. So I was like, Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna still get I'm going to continue to work on myself work on I was, you know, when I was part of the reason I left teaching was because of anxiety and depression. So I'm going to continue to work on that, make sure that I'm in a good space. And then, you know, as the work picks up, then it picks up.

Luis Malbas  
Nice, nice. So, um, you know, if you had, if you were talking to a teacher that is, you know, thinking about transitioning into instructional design, are there any particular lessons that you would share, you know, that you think would be helpful? Is there anything that you can reflect on that? Just to hand over some advice?

Stephanie Diggins  
Yeah, so, um, I think one of the hardest things, when transitioning into instructional design is kind of figuring out your starting point.

Unknown Speaker  
What do you do first. And so what I've,

Stephanie Diggins  
what I've told other teachers that of transition, like I told them, start with, like, these four things might be three, um, you want to build your LinkedIn profile. You want to update your resume, and you want your resume to not like it, you need to basically translate it to like corporate speak. So that it's understandable for someone who works in the corporate world. And there are a lot of like, great webinars on how to do that. And then your portfolio. Those are like the three, the three things that you need that you need to focus on is portfolio, LinkedIn, and your resume.

Luis Malbas  
Right, right. Okay, cool. We have One of those things going on next week because I know actually cheers on it's gonna be talking about portfolios. There's actually a few. I think there's three sessions that are talking about moving from like academic to corporate, you know, sort of going from being a teacher and then going into business. And then Laney Istvan, in particular is going to be talking about terminology and things like that. So that that yeah, next week, so that's great. That's great. I never thought about having somebody on to talk about getting your LinkedIn profile going. But maybe that's something I

Stephanie Diggins  
can Yeah. Double impact does have like a really good, I think he has a really good YouTube episode

Luis Malbas  
on updating.

Stephanie Diggins  
How to optimize your LinkedIn profile? Yeah. Because I mean, with my LinkedIn profile, I've gotten, you know, I've gotten messages from recruiters. I've gotten one of my current clients, they actually found me on LinkedIn and reached out to me and then was like, hey, we want to meet, we think you'd be a great fit for, for this contract. Yeah. So I was like, Okay, this is

Luis Malbas  
great. Yeah, and I think that's more important for the Freelancers, too. I know that, like, if you're just somebody that is that's looking for work. And, you know, you just want to, you know, looking for a job. Updating your LinkedIn once is fine. Because I myself, I'm not like, LinkedIn stresses me out. I just get stressed when I when I go to LinkedIn. I don't know. I think it's just there's, like 90% of it is, yeah, it's a lot of like, noise to me. And so and I, I just can't keep up with it. So I start to get anxiety. But But I know that if you're a freelancer, I know the better freelancers out there. Just maintain a good story. Right. So that, you know, speaking of which, have you connected with Karen north at all?

Stephanie Diggins  
I follow her on LinkedIn.

Luis Malbas  
Okay. To connect with you, because she's from Kentucky. You know, she went to she went to the Ohio State University. So this similarity she's going to be speaking next week, too. So yeah,

Stephanie Diggins  
so she does a great thing. I don't, I can't remember if she does it just once a week or daily because I'm, uh, I'm not as active on LinkedIn as it probably should be. But you know, everything's like updated and it looks good. My profile looks good. But she does a great thing where she She researches and then posts jobs that she thinks are good.

Luis Malbas  
Oh, yeah. The instructional design jobs saying yeah, yeah.

Unknown Speaker  
That's awesome. That's cool.

Luis Malbas  
I just want to mention, Bridget is saying that Jennifer brick offers great LinkedIn advice as well on YouTube. Something to take a look at. Yeah. So what are your future plans? What's it look like for you? Coming up anything, you know, like, any goals that you've set or anything?

Stephanie Diggins  
Um, so. So something that I want to do that I haven't even started on yet. But I want to I do want to have a YouTube channel that gives freelance advice or instructional designers kind of like really? Each episode, like kind of just goes over what I've learned as a freelancer when it comes to the business side. Yeah, yeah, there are tons of resources out there about the l&d side not and it's not just necessarily like freelance related. So there are like, tons of videos out there about like adding and, you know, the, the different theories and stuff like that. And story storyline and how to use the different tools and but I didn't see a lot and that's why I reached out to you about the about the freelance conference. And it's so much about the business side of of l&d. Right and time that you anytime I someone goes over the business side of l&d, it's kind of glossed over, they don't really get into like the nitty gritty of running a freelance business and everything that you need to do to be legally set up. Right. As a business owner.

Luis Malbas  
Yeah, there are a lot of resources for that. Definitely.

Stephanie Diggins  
And I think LD Lance does does some do some stuff.

Unknown Speaker  
But that's, that's

Stephanie Diggins  
coming down the pipeline,

Luis Malbas  
right right now awesome. forward to being a YouTube star. So we'll see you at some point then. All right, well, I'm 70. I'm gonna go ahead and wrap it up. I just want to remind everybody next week transitioning to learning development. It's a whole week full of sessions. If you go to www dot t to ld.com You'll see the schedule on that page. It's free. I don't know, last I checked, I think we had like close to 400 people registered. So it should be a pretty That's amazing. Yeah, pretty busy one and, and the schedule is almost complete. I'm just missing a couple things from different people. I think I have a panel yet to book. But it's for the whole week, like two or three sessions each day. Plus we're gonna have virtual tables should be fun. So please join us if you can. And with that, I'm gonna go ahead and just close this one out. Stephanie, thank you so much again for joining me on on a broadcast. And see you next week at the event.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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