Speaker 1: If you're trying to land your first instructional design job or just land a better instructional design job, then you'll need to do a good job in the interview. So in this video I'll share my top instructional design interview tips. So I've done quite a few instructional design interviews myself and I've seen many people in the field talk about what their interview process was like and share their tips. So this video is really going to be kind of a distillation of those tips to hopefully make sure that you're prepared for your instructional design interviews. So the first thing I would recommend is that you get very comfortable talking about your instructional design background and the way I think about this is telling your instructional design story. So what this looks like is like why are you a good instructional designer and how did your past experiences lead you into instructional design. So I know there are many people coming from teaching so maybe something you would talk about there is how you found that you were really enjoying the lesson planning aspect of teaching or you loved creating these little interactive e-learning experiences for your classes. You want to communicate how you're passionate about the field and what experiences you had that made you realize you had that passion for the field because it is a great field. It's such a good intersect of like technology, education, design. So I'm sure whatever your background is you can think of experiences you had in that role that signaled to you that instructional design would be a good fit for you and that's what you want to get comfortable talking about. So of course we want to talk about the different instructional design interview questions you may be faced with. So your process, this is a very big one. These interviewers will want to know about your instructional design process. So what do you actually do to bring a learning experiences from beginning to end. Addy, this is a bit contentious so you probably know what Addy is. If you do not I will link that video in the top right and the description. But this is really it summarizes all the different tasks you may be expected to do as an instructional designer. So analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. Most instructional design jobs fall between these two D's. So design and development. So you definitely want to talk about your process doing those two pieces. So for example like do you create a design document? Do you create a storyboard? And that's probably something good to talk about storyboarding and prototyping. Those are two pretty common tools that are used and techniques that are used to move instructional design projects forward. And again I say mention Addy because some hiring managers their understanding of a good instructional designer is someone who knows about Addy. Like this is the most popular acronym in our field. It's how people usually come to understand instructional design in the first place. So by mentioning Addy to some people it signifies that you know your stuff. But to other hiring managers they're kind of sick of hearing about Addy. They think that it's overused. So I think the safest bet on this front is to mention Addy and talk about how you pull from it. Like talk about how you conduct your analysis, talk about how you do the design and development, and maybe even talk about bringing that live to your audience and evaluating those efforts. Again I think if they're not looking to see that you mention a formal process like Addy, we really want to see that design and development approach. So get comfortable talking about that. Think about how you've created your projects or just do research on how typical projects run. So yeah I hope that helps. If you have any questions about this feel free to drop a comment below. Working with subject matter experts. This is another common line of questioning. So as an instructional designer you will often need to get content from an expert's brain because you're not expected to know it all. You need to work with the people who know it all and turn that into an engaging learning experience. So how do you approach working with subject matter experts and tell us about a time you've worked with a difficult subject matter expert. These are both common questions and if you have not worked with this to me before do not feel alarmed because what hiring managers and recruiters are usually trying to get at with this question is how are you managing these professional relationships where the person on the other end may not care about the project as much as you do. So they want to make sure that you can communicate well, that you can hold these subject matter experts accountable, and that you can communicate their value to the project so that they can keep providing that value in a timely manner. So some difficult subject matter expert situations are for example the subject matter expert not being not like basically ghosting you and not being very available. So how would you handle a situation like that. Other times maybe the subject matter experts are talking and giving you way way way too much and you need much less. So maybe you orient them more to the behaviors that people need to perform or the learning objectives that you need content for like you can like how do you focus someone who's giving you way too much and on the other hand what if you're dealing with someone who's giving you way too little. And a common approach to that is to maybe to write something out yourself and just give it your best guess and giving that to the subject matter expert to review and critique. So again don't feel like you need to make something up for this like maybe think about a time where you had you had to work with a co-worker or a supervisor and this is if you haven't worked in a formal instructional design role like how did you get them to collaborate with you when maybe they didn't care a ton about the project initially or they weren't really working with you in the way that you needed them to. So these are common questions. Your tech stack. So this one should be an easy one so which technologies and tools do you use to do the job. So this is where you might talk about a rapid e-learning authoring tool like Articulate Storyline or Adobe Captivate. You would talk about your graphic editing tool like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. How do you edit videos. So Adobe Premiere Adobe After Effects or Camtasia and maybe you have some some web development skills like HTML CSS and JavaScript XAPI if you're not familiar with that that definitely will help you stand out in the interview process. So maybe familiarize yourself with that and you do not need to be an expert in all of these tools. So I would suggest just learning enough about each of these so that you can talk about them and so that you're you're confident that if you did need to use them on the job you would be able to to use them effectively. And then of course how how do you apply learning science and instructional design theories and models. So these are common questions as well. They you know people want to check for your theoretical background and understanding of the field. So I'm going to list a bunch of different models theories and scientific domains like psychology domains like I guess you I guess you could say. Sorry but Addy again most popular hit or miss depending on the hiring manager. Sam this is like a more agile approach. So some people like the tech space favor this much more. So make sure you're comfortable talking about that. Garnier's nine events. I have a video on that. A lot of these pieces I I have individual videos on in my become an instructional designer playlist. So I will reach I will link that below if you're not already in that playlist. A cognitive information processing and specifically cognitive load. That's a great thing to talk about in interviews. How you how you manage cognitive load like intentionally. That's that's really good. Bloom's taxonomy and how you use that for objectives. You can talk about Kirkpatrick's and how you use that for evaluation. Again these are all like keywords in interviews I would say to show that you know your stuff. So if you're comfortable talking about all of these things it will definitely come in handy during the interview. So these are all of my common questions. If you if you're watching this as an instructional designer or you've gone through some interviews feel free to add those questions to the comments so that we can help think about the best ways to answer them. And then of course at the end of every interview it's your turn to answer questions or to ask questions rather. And there are a couple I recommend that you ask. These are up to you but these are things that I would want to know. So I want to know what your responsibilities are. So you know the Addy like that really encompasses what an instructional designer may do on the job. So are you doing a whole lot of analysis and not much of anything else. Are you doing only instructional design where you're working on storyboards interviewing SMEs and writing objectives. Are you doing both of these D's the design and the development where you actually develop that project in a tool like storyline. Or are you doing a lot of LMS administration and enrolling people in courses. Or are you doing any evaluation. You want to see what that role actually looks like and thinking about it in the context of Addy is a good way to touch all of your bases with what you may be expected to do on the job. So get a feel for that. Again are you the designer the developer or literally everything the LMS admin the analyst and the evaluator. And then finally what does that analysis process look like. This will give you a pretty good idea of how effective the learning department is. So this is a solid question. How do you identify new training needs. So in some organizations it may just be every request that comes in from anywhere in the organization. We design a training module for and that's probably not going. That's probably going to be very information dump style training projects. And that's fine if you just want to get a job and and someone's willing to pay you to do that that's fine. But if you want to be more picky and only work in positions where you'll actually be helping people improve performance which is what which is what corporate instructional designers like that's what the actual job is about. It's about helping people in the business perform better. But in a lot of departments it's kind of disconnected from that. So asking these kind of questions will show off your understanding of what an instructional designer can actually do and how they can provide value to the organization. And this will give you a good cue of like where the organization is at with the effective effectiveness of their learning department. Because if they're not identifying these training needs effectively it's going to be very hard to design an effective solution because it may or may not even be necessary and it may or may not even help in the first place. So I hope that that was helpful. Again if you have any other questions or you've run into anything in your instructional design interviews and you'd like other perspectives on it feel free to drop a comment below. And if you're watching this because you want to become an instructional designer feel free to check out that full become an instructional designer playlist which again will be linked below. So thank you for watching and I will see you in the next video.