160: L&D Career Options Beyond Instructional Design

Holly Owens (00:08.169)
Hi everyone, welcome to this week's live. I'm so excited that you're here with me again. I'm gonna be doing these more regularly. So today we're gonna talk about transitioning from teaching or any other spot in the L and D industry into a role in learning and development and the L and D career path. It's not just instructional design. So I think one of the common misconceptions and

I obviously talk about this a lot, is the fact that instructional design is like a good stepping stone for coming out of the classroom or coming out maybe of a corporate job or something like that. Instructional design is really one where there are a lot of transferable skills with instructional design. So I really want to get into today what those roles are.

and looking to make sure I went live only game. Yeah, I did. So feel free to put your comments in the chat and I will take a look at those throughout. I'm going to be sharing some links as well. So if you want to give me a thumbs up if you're here and say hi. Hi, everyone. Kind of tell us where you're watching in from. I'd love to see that in the comments area.

So let's get right into it because we got a lot to go over today. All right. So let me start by

I had this all set up very nicely as you know, talking a little bit about the growth in the industry. So by the year, um, 2029, the education and government sector of L and D is expected to grow by about 6%. And then the training and development specialist area part of L and D is expected to grow by a little bit about 9%. So it's going, it's growing. I know everybody feels like the market might be a little bit saturated right now with

Holly Owens (02:11.113)
layoffs and things happening and some teachers coming out of the classroom to get into L &D. But I still see tons of job postings for people looking for L &D type roles. So I wanted to kind of calm those anxieties with letting you know that the stats that are projected in the next three or four years, it's gonna grow roughly about seven to 9 % our industry. We're gonna be necessary and you know.

Everybody's worried about AI. That's the conversation for another day, but we'll get to that later.

So just keep this in the back of your mind as you're thinking about transitioning over. So I talked about this more in the previous episode or the previous live I did last week. One of the things I'll say is that that has now been dropped as an episode on my podcast, Adult Learning and Development, so you can see that. You can go out there, you can review it, you can add comments and tell me what you're thinking about. So my own career journey is not linear.

a lot last week about how I started out as a high school teacher. Then I left a classroom and went into learning and development. I also started teaching in higher education as soon as I stepped out of the K to 12 classroom and I'm doing that since 2012. And then I spent the majority of my career, about a decade in higher education as an instructional technologist and designer. And that was a lot of fun. I learned a lot in higher education and I think that's one of the reasons I have the role that I have now.

Then I transitioned over to Amazon Pharmacy as a corporate instructional designer. I was there for about two years. And then most recently, my current role is I'm a director of growth marketing and I transitioned into ed tech. So now I've completed the loop, I think, of a lot of these different L and D roles. And I am using tons of my skills as a growth marketer from instructional design, from being in corporate, from understanding higher education,

Holly Owens (04:14.187)
developing different email campaigns and stuff. And then, you know, whatever my next adventure will be, I'm just very grateful for this path and that I'm able to share my experiences with you and also give you some of the tips and tricks that I wish I had along the way. So I'm not gonna get too much back into my path. You can listen to that on the episode. All right.

We're not here to talk about teaching and instructional design, but I do want to take a moment to go through what.

You know, like how are they similar? How are they different? So with teaching, really you are engaged with the same learners majority of the time. You know, you're with them for whole school year, the 380 days, mostly interacting in person except when COVID happened. You know, we went virtual sometimes. Some things are hybrid now, I hear, at certain schools, but mostly interacting in person. Whereas instructional design, it's sync async.

think it's hybrid, it's high flexed, it's virtual, it's online. There's a variety of different modalities that happen with those.

You're guiding the learners throughout the school year. You're doing them different lessons and units and the curriculum is typically planned for you. You just have to design your lessons around the required curriculum. Whereas instructional design and the K to 12 learners are the younger learners, so that's pedagogy. And then you have adult learning through your androgogy when you get into instructional design. So there's a lot of adult learners that you're dealing with and they like various modalities, various things, multimodal stuff. As do the younger students as well, but it's a little bit different.

Holly Owens (05:56.971)
As far as your engagement with people, like in your teams, K to 12 involves the administrators, whereas instructional design involves subject matter experts, stakeholders. You know, you have a supervisor, your team, or if you're a person of one, it's just you. So really, there's a little bit of, there's a difference there in terms of the people that you're dealing with and the personalities and the different agendas.

So in teaching you focus on grading, focus on lesson planning, and then in instructional design you're really project managing. You're planning different projects, you're developing them using Addy from start to finish. It's not linear all the time. And then as far as assessments are concerned, in instructional design it's not just a formative or summative, it's like you need to change your behavior. So you're doing some different types of behavioral assessments along with

evaluation of the course, which is like the Kirkpatrick model. So there are, there's some commonalities across them, but there are some different, key differences as well. So people that I've worked with in the past have asked me like, if I'm a teacher, does that mean that I'm an instructional designer? And I'm always like, no, not yet, not yet. You have to be in the industry and experience it live and in person and in the real world to be an instructional designer.

but we're not here to talk about that. All right, so as much as I love ID,

I love learning and development too, and that's a vast field of different things. So I decided to do this webinar with you to give you some insights into different roles that kind of translate out of education that you could do that are L &D related, they're not instructional design. There's different things you can do, and I've done some of these roles.

Holly Owens (07:56.679)
So how to, you know, like I'm gonna go over these seven roles. I have some examples that I'm gonna provide of these different roles that you can review in the chat. And I just want you to be aware of what exists out there so that you don't think that there's only one place you can go if you step out of the classroom. There's more than one place. How to choose your lane, you know, how you're like reverse engineer, have some exercises that you can do to kind of figure out

where you wanna go based on your passions, your strengths, what's happening in the market, and then of course I have resources for you. I have tons of resources, and I'll be sharing those throughout the presentation. But please, this is interactive, I know I'm live on LinkedIn, I'm paying attention to the LinkedIn feed. If you have a question, please, please, please put it into the chat, I'm happy to answer that.

I just, I want this to be very interactive. see as of right now we have about 18 people. So please engage, put stuff in the comments. I'll come and I'll answer those questions live for you. All right.

So one of the things that's happening with learning and development, especially in a post-COVID society, is that we, companies understand that they need these people on their teams. They need e-learning developers, they need instructional designers, they need LMS administrators.

And one of the things that I think is happening with teaching is like so many of the regulations that teachers have to go through the constant adding of things that you need to do, the constant to-do list, it kind of, it's traumatizing. I'm not gonna lie. When you transition out of teaching, you're gonna have a little bit of trauma that you're gonna have to deal with, maybe some PTSD, and I'm not saying that lightly because of the things that you, depending upon where you work and what you've had to deal with. there are gonna be some mental shifts in that as well.

Holly Owens (09:56.059)
But one of the things educators and other people really bring to the table, I'm not just gonna, this is focused on educators, but I want you to know if you're working in a different area of L &D, this is for you too. You are great at storytelling as an instructor. You have empathy, you know how to facilitate things, you know how to build assessments, you know how to make things engaging. Lots of corporations and organizations may not have that. They're really focused on the business goals, what's happening with the revenue, what's happening in the

marketing space or what's happening as far as sales and stuff like that. But teachers have this ability to come in, simplify things, tell the story, make it feeling like it's important, which it is, and the learning aspect of that just gets injected with this sense of this is something that needs to happen, and this is something that people need. People need to feel supported in this continuous shifting landscape, especially with things like AI coming down the line.

Yeah, it's here. I'm not gonna say it's coming down the line. It's here. So just thinking about those different things and how much you can offer as an instructor. no, it says the link to the event's not working. I posted a new one. Hold on one second. Let me make sure. It's live on LinkedIn. People can hear me, right? Can you give me a thumbs up if you can hear me and everything's live? I'm seeing it, but I'm not sure.

I see people in here.

Holly Owens (11:32.937)
Let me provide, let me get that link so people can come in. Let me invite, make sure, you can come in either to, when I do these lives, you can come either into the LinkedIn Live or you can come into,

Thanks Ross, it's working for you. Okay, great. Thank you so much. see all the, okay, great. Okay, I'm just gonna keep going. Great, great. This will be released as a podcast episode too, so you're gonna be able to go back and review what I've mentioned here. All right, let's jump into some of these roles. So for the first one, I wanna talk about that.

is very closely related to instructional design, but it's not necessarily instructional design. It has a lot of components, and some companies see this as, some companies see this as,

You know, like there are instructional designers, there are e-learning developers, and then there's learning experience designer, which is an LXD. So basically you are focused on from start to finish how people are starting their learning journey and how are they finished their learning journey. And you have that instructional design aspect of helping develop, helping design things, helping get evaluations. You might do have conversations with some of the, you'll have conversations with some of the stakeholders or your work with the instructional designer.

who is maybe managing the project. You'll also be very in tune with the learners because you are so focused on their experience through this. And I do want to share a link to an LXD role. This is one that was listed. I'm going to put this in the chat on LinkedIn.

Holly Owens (13:21.625)
And this is a learning experience designer role for Ring. So I want you to take these job descriptions and really use them as your research base for the different roles and kind of compare between what an instructional designer does and what an LXD does. But also too, why is this a great...

great area for teachers to be in because as teachers you are super focused on your learners, you're focused on your students and what their experience is. So all the different things that you do from lesson planning, from differentiating instruction, making sure students have what they need in order to be successful, you know, you're like putting the knowledge in and then you can directly translate that to a role in LXD because you are going to have the experience with knowing what happens end

and for things. So I think it's important that LXD is another great shift from...

teaching to LXD, so you can look for those roles out on the web at different companies, and you'll see sometimes LXDs do a lot, they do, LXD and instructional design are very similar. And one of the other things I wanna mention is that how these look.

In LXD, so like for teaching, you'll see this, I'm going to the bottom part here. I map some of these things out. So lesson planning is journey mapping. Like what is the experience of the learner going to be? And then, differentiating instruction is gonna be persona-based learning. So you might have some personas throughout your learning experience that they're following along with. And this gives people different insights into what maybe a customer might experience, depending on what company you're working for. Differential instruction also

Holly Owens (15:09.851)
can include things like personalized learning in LXD. So designing, know, designing in classroom like management stuff, all that stuff you do for classroom management, that's user testing. Like figuring out what's gonna work best for the user. So you might have to do some pilot things when it comes to LXD. Just know that these rules do vary by, just like instructional design, the responsibilities and the priorities of the

role do vary by organization or institution.

Typically we see LXDs in the corporate world or maybe in the government, but that is not something that I have not yet, and I'm not saying that doesn't exist, I have not yet seen an LXD in higher education. I see instructional designers and I see instructional technologists. those are the most common ones that I see in the education space, not necessarily an LXD. So things like, I do wanna,

to have a little disclaimer on this, for tools and metrics and things to understand, especially when it comes to technology, people often have the misconception that technology and knowing articulate, know, Figma, Rise, all these things inside and out is going to get you the role. While that's beneficial, as you're doing the interview process to have proficiency in those roles, that's not necessarily just gonna be the only thing that lands you the role.

Technology, and this is my motto, always comes secondary to the person you are, the experience that you bring to the table. Any good company is going to be able to give you the time and help.

Holly Owens (17:00.091)
you to upskill as far as the technologies that you use, because all companies use different technologies. I didn't even list all the tools here. There's a lot more that are used across, there's different LMSs, there's like iSpring that can be used in course development. They also have an LMS. There's a whole bunch. I could sit here for days and list all the different tools. And then as far as metrics are concerned, this is where the shift a little bit is for teachers.

is understanding like KPIs and understanding business goals and understanding like what's happening. So as far as like the engagement rate, is one I listed, is what people are doing inside the course, where they are engaging, maybe where they're getting held up. So you're gonna have to get some metrics from those areas so that you can continue to refine the experience. So this first one, LXD is most like instructional design.

have a lot of overlap, but LXD has more of the human component, whereas instructional designers, we have that too, it's just more like we're focused on development and really designing something, and we may work with an LXD to really make sure that that experience is good. So again, very similar. All right, let's go to the next role. E-Learning Developer.

And this is one that, again, is very similar to instructional design. I'm going to plug Tim Slade here because he talks a lot about eLearning development. And if you don't know Tim Slade, you really need to go out to LinkedIn and follow him and watch all his videos. He talks a lot about eLearning development, instructional design.

all the different tools that are used within the industry. So 100 % go out there and follow Tim Slade. So as far as a teacher is concerned, where the e-learning development transferable skills come in is really in your creativity. Like you understand ed tech. I probably could ask people in the chat or if you want to put a thumbs up or a heart, whatever you want to use. If you've used an ed tech, more than one ed tech tool in the classroom, put a heart.

Holly Owens (19:16.447)
or a thumbs up and just let me know because your EdTech experience really shows that you can translate EdTech and to put it in a lesson to where the technology is really helping the learner. It's not necessarily distracting the learner.

So those lessons become very multimodal and rich. And I love the technologies, and I'll just say this, that you know you're using them, but you don't know you're using them, because the students feel the same way. So transferring over into e-learning development is really where you start, I see a lot of hearts and things, great. If you wanna, in the chat, tell me some of your favorites so people can kinda see what everybody's using, I'd love that too.

So this really, if you know EdTech and you've put it inside of your module, or excuse me, inside of your lessons before, this translates over into interactive modules and simulations. So these are things that you're putting in that the learner is experiencing. I always relate, you know, I always think about when I'm designing a module, or if I'm designing a learning experience, I think about Disney World, and I love Disney World, I'm a Disney adult. I'll admit that right away.

What is the experience like for them? If you think about, if you've ever been to Disney World and you've been on one of their rides or you're waiting in line, they have all these interactive experiences before you actually get to the big experience. So you can think about that, analogous to instructional design where you have all these things leading up and then there's the big thing that's happening at the end. Is there an assessment? Is there some sort of test you have to do? Do you have to go through a simulation of some sort to prove that you can complete your role? And then when you're thinking,

about mapping out your skills like the one-to-one. Like I said, creating the engaging activities, troubleshooting the tech for students, and maybe fellow teachers too. That completely translates. You are strictly working in the development phase. You might have some influence over design and some other phases, and you might be working with an instructional designer or an LXD, but you are techie. know the ins and outs of the tools like iSpring that you are.

Holly Owens (21:30.481)
You were authoring, you were authoring things, know, to say eLearning development isn't, you know, what authoring tool do you use? So like Storyline, Captivate, Eyespring.

You also have a little bit of insight and data. That's the thing about L &D roles. There isn't a strict, like, this is where it starts and this is where it ends, because I've seen e-learning developers who are also instructional designers, and I see job postings that say, e-learning developer and instructional designer, and they put those two roles kind of together because they're thinking of it in a similar fashion. So just know there's no start, there's no really end, and you're not just, when they list your job description, it's gonna be something in the,

along the lines of like other duties as assigned, you might get into more of the instructional design aspect of eLearning development than you previously anticipated. So let me go back. I'm gonna take a quick peek at the live and see what's going on there. Everybody can hear me, that's great.

Interactive circle time, you know, like that is great for learners. Like how can you turn that into an interactive? multimodal experience online Terra that's that's awesome Smartboard dream box see Saul Lexia. Yep, all of these different things So these also to what's interesting is and my mind's going everywhere right now because I love talking about this stuff so I'll I'll calm down a little bit, but

I've brought a lot of the EdTech tools that I used in the classroom into the corporate realm. I see corporate using cahoots and stuff. I've always leaned on some of those tools and I brought them into the corporate space. it looks like my video froze. let me fix that.

Holly Owens (23:25.447)
Hmm. Well, you can still hear me. there I am. Just a little pause. So I used my experience with the EdTech tools and brought that into like...

as suggestions for the corporate. If you want people to have fun and you want them to be engaged, you need to make sure that you're using different technologies that do that. So maybe as an e-learning developer and you're coming out of the classroom, you can recommend some of those tools and maybe work with the team. So I'm back. I just saw on LinkedIn I came back. So again, another great role to transition out of for...

for a teacher thinking about jumping into the L and D industry. All right, next one, LMS administrator. So as an instructional technologist, one second, I gotta put in, so I have an example of an e-learning developer role.

And of course I'm going to share all these notes when I release the episode. So I'm going to put that in the chat so that you can see an example of an e-learning development role. I definitely need a moderator for these sessions. So there's an example of an e-learning developer role. Now let's talk about LMS administrator. So an LMS, if you're not familiar, is a learning management system. So think of in education, think of Canvas, think of Blackboard, think of Brightspace, the Moodles of the world.

In corporate, think of things like Cornerstone, Talent LMS, Deceibo, those are learning management systems. Those are used to house courses and content. And that's the experience that the learner logs into to go into the course and to complete any sort of required training. So I've been an LMS administrator, but I've also been an instructional technologist, so sometimes this role sits by itself, depending on where you're at.

Holly Owens (25:23.659)
and education do have various expectations when it comes to what an LMS administrator does. As far as teachers are concerned, if you know grade books and you've pulled reports in your grade books for your students, you're gonna need to pull reporting for people. It might be a little bit more challenging in different types of reports than you would pull, say, in the classroom if you're using a certain type of grade book, but that reporting is essential.

I forgot to mention Google Classroom because I know a of K-12 institutions use that as well. It's just not one that I typically encounter when I am in my travels from higher education and a corporate into EdTech. So just making sure that you know that the reports and things and data that you're pulling out of your gradebook, that can translate into reporting and things you're doing in the LMS. And admin really means you're the person controlling the back end of things. You're not necessarily at the

front but you're controlling the back end.

Also too, providing any support for students or end user support as an LMS administrator, you're gonna be seen as the expert. You're gonna be seen as the person who knows how to do these things. And nowadays, it's really easy to kind of become an expert in those things, because all the different LMSs offer like help sites or knowledge bases to get you started. And then you can work with your rep from the company, they will walk you through and offer different types of trainings, but you wanna be sure that you are able to answer

the most common questions and teachers do this stuff all the time. So making sure that you are the technical expert. Like I said.

Holly Owens (27:04.467)
the one-to-one roadmap, you do the gradebook stuff, setting up your course, and then providing that technical support. And the key tools here, like I said, there's Moodle, Cornerstone Workday, knowing about SCORM, that's mostly for corporate, user adoption, uptime, data and analytics, and different institutions and organizations see these differently. So an LMS administrator, you are just focused on the LMS and all the different things that your organization or institution might need to see as far as data.

For example, how much uptime do we have? it 100 %? Is it 99? When do things go down? How do we manage that or mitigate that? How many students are currently users in the system? What are their various roles? How are they interacting with the different courses and maybe some of the tools? So I really think that you as an instructor can definitely take on this role.

And I am now going to put a link in the chat to an example of an LMS administrator role. Again, these vary widely depending upon what institution or organization you are going to. Let me just make sure this is, okay. So this is not like set in stone. These jobs are all really flexible as far as how far they overlap with other things like instructional design or e-learning development.

You know, one of the things that we did at an institution I worked at, had a primary LMS administration, and then I was a secondary, so I knew everything that the other person was. So sometimes, again, you'll see this role combined with other roles. so when you said in the chat, she used Google Classroom during COVID, but after that, they transitioned to Canvas. Where I teach, we currently use Canvas. I know Canvas, Brightspace, D2L, Blackboard, like they've all been around for quite a while. So I'm glad to hear that people are...

using different things as they're in the classroom. I really feel this is beneficial to you when you're wanting to translate into, or transition into a role into L and D. All right, got a couple more roles to go through. Let's keep going.

Holly Owens (29:13.001)
And feel free, like I said, if you have questions, put them in the chat. If you have any statement, whatever, put it in the chat, I'm checking it. And I love that we are talking about different things, and this is also a networking opportunity. So talk to people in the chat, or connect with them on LinkedIn. All right, next role, LND Analyst. So it sounds exactly what it is. It's an analyst role that deals with data.

And I think that as instructors and educators in the classroom, we unintentionally deal with data. Maybe if there's county or state scores, things that come back from them, or as a school, how you overall did. We don't necessarily pool the data, but we analyze the data that we are getting from our schools and from our administrators. So.

One of the things that you do as an educator, you're able to take that data and what's happening and tailor your teaching to that. So that directly transfers into a skill is where you are able to look at the data and then correlate it with a business goal. So if you have a KPI, say, your pipeline, so there's gonna be a certain amount, what's the business goal there? How much is your company looking to grow over the next one, five years, whatever that may be? So you can take that skill and you can translate that

into an LND analyst role.

So like I said, testing scores, talking to parents, and I know people set up their own data within Google stuff and they track different metrics. Formative assessments, so that all translates into this L and D role. So if you're somebody that likes to look at those test scores, look at different charts, look at different graphs, or do pivot tables and you're just a data nerd, I would say this is a great role for you. Because one of the things that you're responsible for is reporting.

Holly Owens (31:06.779)
this information to, let's say, the higher ups, or reporting it to different L &D teams, explaining to them what might be happening within the eLearnings that you're developing, or the instructional design team, and give them some insights into what's happening with the users. And most commonly used tools and metrics here, the Power BI, the Tableau, the Google data stuff, dashboards, heat maps, you name it, return on investment, it's all a part of this.

particular role. So let me go ahead and share that role in the chat so that you can get a better understanding. So if you are a data person, this is the role for you. If you're like teaching, like teaching, love looking at all the data, I love seeing all the stuff, then this is 100 % a role for you. All right, moving right along.

Learning consultant, and I would say that this even has some freelance type feel to it, depending upon how you're doing it, because there are people who exist in corporations as a learning consultant. They're consultant within the organization, but there are people that come from the outside, and we call those freelancers or consultants, that come in and they make recommendations based on what they're seeing internally. So basically you're coming in and you're like, this is where gaps exist.

and this is what the solution should be. One of the things I wrote here, it's not always training. If you read Cathy Moore's book, Map It, training is not always the answer. It might be something as simple as a job aid or something where there's a one-on-one conversation happening between an end user and a supervisor. It really does depend. So you come in as a learning consultant, you look at the top level of things, you get down into the details, and then you recommend,

like solutions that are going to stimulate things and gonna make things better. And one of the reasons this is a great role for teachers is because you have to really, you get, what is it? gosh, what's it called? It's escaping me now. You get.

Holly Owens (33:19.645)
So the administrator comes into your classroom and they kind of review your lessons and they give you feedback on that. So you really have to analyze those conversations and then align that again with tailoring your teaching. And that transfers over into business where, like I said, I've been mentioning KPIs, which are key performance indicators. I'm sorry, I forgot to say what that was.

So you really have to understand how it's impacting what the business is doing as far as the learning consultant role goes. And one of the things you'll notice that in the key tools and metrics here, Addy is a part of that. Addy is a huge part of that.

So you really need to understand adding. So as a consultant, you have to have some of those skills and knowledge of an instructional designer. HPT models, client interviews, time to competency. This is something I definitely experienced inside the corporate space. NPS scores, how are we doing? How our customers think we're doing? How are things, how are we performing? Basically, what is their opinion? And then again, the teacher, the mapping, the one-to-one skills, needs analysis.

understanding your conversation, it's going well for your students, what's not, talking to administrators, what needs to change, like analyzing those conversations and maybe some of the data and then aligning it to any curriculum and another thing too I know a lot of teachers who do professional development things outside of teaching like not outside of maybe they do it within the school or they do at the Board of Education but you also train other people so this is a great skill for a learning

consultant that you can translate into. And you can do your own thing. You can do some freelancing stuff, make some money on the side, and really help companies and organizations or your own school translate that. So here's an example of a learning consultant role.

Holly Owens (35:23.241)
So this can be a variety of different things. You really have to be well-rounded in instructional design, LXD, e-learning. You have to have the knowledge of these things to perform well in this role.

Holly Owens (35:37.007)
Alright, next one. Training coordinator and program manager. I am seeing this more and more and out on L.

LND sites or organizations that are looking to hire people in LND. So if you're a coordinator or you're program manager, you're basically, taking, there could be multiple, for example, in our pharmacy, we had multiple different programs running at one time, like for customer success, for our pharmacist, you know, the pharmacist, we had a whole bunch of different programs, and you are responsible for them to keep running and on a budget.

So that's where a little bit of the difference come in. You have to understand what the budget is for it. Of course that involves time to competency for your saving time. That usually saves money. So this is a role where you do have to focus on, every role you have to focus on money, but this one specifically has that as a part of it. So why it's great for you as a teacher, if you look at the one to one roadmap,

You schedule field trips and then you schedule everything as far as parent conferences and things are going. The cohort scheduling, that involves when is this particular group, if it's new hires, when are they going through the training and what does that timeframe look like?

Of course, communication, emails, having again those parent-teacher conferences. As a training and program manager, you're gonna be constantly communicating with your stakeholders and telling them where things at. There might be a spreadsheet of some sort or a smart sheet of some sort that you have to manage and you might be using things like a sauna or a cello to manage your different projects. And as far as like planning out your own course for the year, that's project management and that's timelines.

Holly Owens (37:36.347)
that enjoys planning stuff out and managing the project start to finish and really being able to quickly solve problems as you meet them, maybe barriers and stuff, this is a great role for you. So again, I already mentioned some of the tools that are used here. Attendance rate, who's actually in completion rates, who's actually completing the program, and if things are happening on time or if there are delays, how do you mitigate those things? So again, this might be a role where

there is involve some data, definitely. You're gonna have to talk to the L &D analyst about that. So as you can see, these various roles, they do have some overlap. Or you will have another person on your team that has a similar role. All right, so here's an example of a training and program coordinator role.

And again, for those listening to the podcast episode, I'm gonna put all the links in the show notes to these so that you can go back and review these so that you can get a better understanding of what these actually are. The last one is a...

knowledge manager or content curator and I'm also seeing some of this kind of bleed over into a community manager too. So what I would say to you, this is where you are kind of managing the knowledge base or where people are going to find help information. So you want, if you're somebody who's good at sourcing, crowdsourcing resources, I'm gonna get a content curator role.

If you're somebody who's good at, like I said, crowdsourcing resources, this is a great job for you. This is something that ...

Holly Owens (39:29.129)
instructors do very well. When you need to pleasant plan, you need to find the resources and the documentation or the links or whatever as far as what your learners need to do or need to have access to in order to succeed. But they also need to be able to understand what they have to do. So if they're engaging in some sort of ed tech, what does that technical stuff look like? So again, this is a great...

job or a role for ex-teachers because you do a lot of that curation already. Are you using a certain ed tech that maybe does it for you?

I did a project with my, when I was teaching them with my ninth graders, and they had to do a full blown research paper. So one of the things I had to do, and like this mentions here, is I had to work with the library to curate resources to get them to understand how to cite sources. And you know, of course, being able to design something like a knowledge base that makes sense, that's searchable. So some of the different tools here, you'll see confluence, you'll see ...

What other?

It's a SharePoint. There's a whole bunch of different ones that can house your knowledge base. And you want to be able to see how people find your resources if there's a rating. I don't know if you've ever clicked on anything like Microsoft or some of the other EdTech tools that you use and give it a rating, a thumbs up or a thumbs down or comment if this was useful. Is it something that people are clicking on? Does that mean that might be a common problem and you might have to report

Holly Owens (41:05.227)
that to your product team and then article freshness rate. So getting things up to date like ASAP. Like if there's a product change or there's a change in workflow for a certain business, like maybe the customer care agents have to do something different within their workflows, then you need to make sure that that article is up to date. This is probably one of the most challenging parts of this role. Let me go ahead and share the...

Here's an example of.

and there's more out there, content curator. This one specifically has to do with a library. I know a lot, when we think of curators, we think of museums and libraries and resources, primary sources, all the different things. So basically, it's important for you to understand how to organize things here. So teachers are great organizers, so this would be a great role for somebody stepping out of education. Let me take a moment to pause and check.

Live stuff. All right. Awesome. Let's keep going.

Holly Owens (42:21.321)
All right, so those are all the roles. Those are seven different roles you can have in your pocket for when you're doing your LinkedIn searching, your job searching. And again, are all organizations and institutions all see them differently. They might have different titles, but they might have the same characteristics of the role. So just make sure that you are researching out there and looking at the different roles. That's one of the things I tell people when they first are thinking about transitioning to a role in L &D. Research what the roles are.

See what you like about the role, what you don't like about the role. What are things that you think like, this will directly, like lesson planning to project management directly is a transferable skill for a program manager. So you have to think about all those things before you actually start doing the applying, because if you apply to everything, and I always use this analogy, just like the lottery, if you get 1,000 tickets or you get 50 tickets, you still have the same chances. So I don't recommend applying to

millions of jobs to see if something sticks because it's not it's probably not there may be anomalies out there, but it's probably not

So one of the reverse engineer paths activities I recommend is a three circle Venn diagram, and I honestly recommend Googling this and going through the process. So basically what you're doing here is you're reflecting about what your passions are, the skills that you have, some of the knowledge that you have, and then looking at what the industry needs and then relating that, like the three circles, like in the middle is you and then all the different things, and then writing that down. You can do this different ways. You can just write down what your passions are, what your skills

are what your expertise, knowledge is in, and then go out and research what are people looking for as an LXD, what are people looking for as far as e-learning development, and kind of get an idea of what those are so you can go out and search for roles that apply to those things. And that's gonna do two things. That's number one, it's going to make you more aware of where some of your strengths are, where some of your gaps are, but number two, you're not gonna be applying to roles that you may not want. You're not gonna be applying to things like, I shouldn't apply.

Holly Owens (44:28.779)
I've seen so many people come out and they've applied your rule, they took it, and they're like, they took the first thing out and they didn't like it, so they had to transition again. So please do some of the research, please do some of the self-reflecting. The next is an exercise that you can do, is you're taking your top three teaching skills and then you're matching them.

like doing a little match activity to the relevant L and D roles. So how directly that expertise that you have, the skills can transfer over into whatever role or whatever area you're looking to get into. So these two things are really easy to do. can go in and just sit down for 15 minutes and do one or the other or both. And that way it gives you more of a path and a starting point to what you're looking for. Because most times everybody's like, I wanna be an instructional designer. And my response is,

What industry do you want to go into? Because instructional design is huge. E-learning development is huge. You want to be in corporate education, government, freelance. Do you want to develop your own business? just, you really have to know where you're going with these types of situations. All right, and I want to pause real quick and tell you about some of the things that are happening.

in the next couple of weeks. I have some things going on as far as, I'm gonna give you the access to the guide, but I also wanna encourage you to join this Iceberg community where I am posting some exclusive content.

So I put that link in the chat and then I also too want to encourage you as you're thinking about your role one of the things you're gonna start to See is you probably need to update your resume. So I'm doing a free live resume Workshop where you can come you can join And we're just gonna make over your resume. So I encouraged you if you haven't already signed up for that It's it's completely free. No strings attached. There's gonna be like stuff given away and it's gonna be fun and

Holly Owens (46:35.243)
I just wanna help, so please sign up for that as well. And I think it's really important for you to connect with me on LinkedIn too if you haven't already. I share tons of content out there, so if you haven't followed me on LinkedIn or you haven't connected with me, I still have some connections. I think LinkedIn limits to 30,000. I have a few left that I can connect with you, so please, please, please, I'll put my LinkedIn in the chat as well. Please connect with me out on LinkedIn World. Join that learning exchange.

and when this comes out as a podcast episode, share it with your peers. And I just have to shout out iSpring for sponsoring this for me, otherwise I wouldn't be able to do this live with you and help you and share all the information, the guides, the knowledge, the things that I know about so that you can learn from my mistakes and my missteps to find the role that fits you.

Also want to mention, so now it's time for Q &A. I'm going back to look into the chat. Also want mention to you that you can join, so one of the communities that, or one of the places I absolutely love is Chelsea Averitt site, EdSkip, where you can find a variety, again, of these L &D type roles that I've mentioned, and some of those links were from her site. And you can get 10 % off of EdSkip and her subscriptions.

Super affordable, I used them when I was transitioning out from Amazon to the role I currently have now. If you use the code Holly, you get 10 % off. So be sure to write down that code, use that code.

It's gonna be important for you to save some money in these economic times that we're having. So definitely 100%. Go out to EdSkip, use that code Holly. And now it's time for live Q &A. So I'm gonna go back to the chat and I'm gonna see what people have been asking. All right, so Danielle says, I'm a school librarian. To transition, and this seems like a perfect role for me. I love the one I shared about the librarian. David has asked,

Holly Owens (48:42.283)
for someone looking to transition to L &D with no education degree. I come from children's media background, currently working as a content moderator curator, but enjoy entry level while working with curriculum lectures to develop education content. So I would say you would probably look for a curriculum designer role or like a curriculum curator role. That might be good for you, but also too, I would recommend taking a peek at the eLearning development. If you do like technology stuff,

That could be a role for you as well. And these positions again are called different things. So that might be one I would recommend, looking at e-learning development but also looking for, what did I say, like an ed, like a content curator, like you're already doing that, so maybe look for that more in the education space. and it's also good too to look at ed tech companies because they're always looking for people to kind of make their...

their education stuff, like their knowledge bases and stuff, or their experiences when they're warm-boiled, people sound better. Like not sound so much and full of jargon and things like that. So that might be a good idea for you too. I have to think about that a little bit more.

Yay, you're coming to the Webinar. Yay, yay, yay, yay. I think I saw another question here. Let's see, let go back.

Holly Owens (50:13.383)
I mean, if you have that media stuff too, e-learning development or video production or I have somebody who's on my team who's a social media specialist, but they do some video stuff. I mean, you could look at those different roles and just see what works best for you and kind of do some of the research out there. Yeah, Ed Skip is amazing. I love it too, Tara. It is absolutely amazing.

Chelsea has just, she's outdone herself with, with Ed Skip as far as like just the rules and the vast diverse amount of roles she shares and they're all 60K or more and most are remote. So it's amazing. All right.

That's a great question, Jessica. So Jessica's asking in the chat, do many or any of these roles require additional certification? It depends. In the corporate space, they don't really see academic credentials. They do like to see those, but they don't weigh heavily as much as they would in the education or in academic space. So the certificate might be for you to get some knowledge and some skills that you may not have if you're coming out of the classroom to kind of get a better understanding of that. But.

One of the things that I say is I wouldn't invest in something that's paid for until you've exhausted all their free resources first. So exhaust those free resources first, and I'm gonna put a link again in the chat, and this will be in the show notes as well. I'm not sure how many of you have probably seen this, and I'll share this tab instead. My curated resources, which I'm gonna go in and update soon, I have a couple things to add, which if you're stepping out into instructional design or any of these L &D roles,

this is a great place for you to start and think about where you're gonna go. Like, you're gonna go join an academy or you do need to read some books. What are the things that you need to do? And of course my computer's freezing because it doesn't want me to share things. All right, let me put that in the chat.

Holly Owens (52:21.427)
Says we can't access your video, but my video's right here.

Holly Owens (52:27.753)
I should have had that link up. All right, let's get that in the chat as well. And I have a shorter bit.ly link, but that's the longer one. So please, please go ahead and use that as part of your, when you're going and looking for different roles, use those resources. And they're free and paid for things in there. all right.

think we've come to the end of the presentation here. me make sure this goes in the chat.

Holly Owens (53:13.295)
All right. I'm so excited. This was such a great session. I even learned some stuff by just talking through those various roles.

Holly Owens (53:25.801)
If not, everything's gonna be in the show notes. And people often ask me, and this is the final thing that I'll say before I shut down the live, is like, I help people? I do help people. I have some like 30 minute, 16 minute sessions that I do outside of the work day that you can sign up for that are paid for opportunities. You know, can do a free discovery call. But if you want to, we can sit down and have a conversation. I am so happy to do that with you to kind of get you on that path to where you want to be and give you.

advice just my experience what I've seen out in the industry you know transitioning into these various roles so you know come join me and I'd love to have a one-on-one with you all right

Thank you so much for coming to the session. I saw about 30 people join. I had about 141 registered, but I'm so glad there is an interest in this sort of conversation. I'm gonna keep having these conversations and sharing these out as podcast episodes, so make sure you follow my podcast, make sure you follow me on LinkedIn for all the latest and the greatest. Thanks again for joining, and I'll see you next time.