Adam Avramescu: [00:00:00] How do I get these people who have super limited attention spans and zero accountability? How do I engage them to be able to get value from my product or from my company in a very limited amount of time.
It’s
Dave Derington: [00:00:21] February 1st, 2019, and welcome to CELab the customer education lab, where we explore how to build customer education programs. With new approaches and exterminate the mist and bad advice that stopped growth dead in its tracks. I’m Dave Derington
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:39] and I’m Adam Avramescu. And today is actually a very special day.
Dave Derington: [00:00:43] What is that? Is it gonna scare me?
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:45] It’s national Texas day. That’s scary. I lived in Texas for about 20 years
Dave Derington: [00:00:51] as that border wall coming along.
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:52] Oh my gosh. I’m moving on.
Dave Derington: [00:00:57] I thought it was natural serpent day to day.
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:59] It is also national serpent day. maybe less political don’t tread on me. Okay. So this episode is actually part three of our informal trilogy.
That’s related to instructional design and customer education because we have so many questions about. How to gather information and do a discovery and needs analysis and how to actually produce really good content. So frankly, we’ll be able to come back to this topic on a regular basis because it’s a really meaty topic and a question that we hear a lot, but today we’ll figure out what it takes to become a great instructional designer or content developer in customer education.
Especially if you’re transitioning into it from another career.
Dave Derington: [00:01:39] Which happens all the time to happen to me. They had happen to you.
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:42] Yeah. Who else? Who has a lot of people we know
Dave Derington: [00:01:45] now you’re hiring your first customer education person, right? This is that glorious moment where you can say I get my first hire, my first FTE.
This is going to help you figure out what backgrounds to look for. So thinking about this in terms of experimentation, Adam, Many people, I think you would say, don’t know what they want to be. Or they grow up. Yeah. W what would it be when I grow? You know what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a physicist at first.
And then I ended up being a chemist and ended up now. But
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:16] when I was at kindergarten and I said, I want it to be a farmer.
Dave Derington: [00:02:18] You want to be a farmer?
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:19] That’s what I said in kindergarten. Apparently
Dave Derington: [00:02:21] it’s amazing. I wanted to fly. I wanted to go the moon, but we’ll get back to customer education. So in terms of experimentation, many people don’t know.
They want to be common instructional designer or they don’t know if they want to go into customer education. Most people in the field don’t major in it, in their undergrads there, I would say there’s probably not a program explicitly for customer education. Maybe we should.
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:41] there are maybe eight universities that I’ve found that have anything like that for an undergrad degree, not customer education, maybe even instructional design.
Dave Derington: [00:02:48] Right related to it. so I guess we would say they get there really through experimentation.
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:54] Yeah. So to put our academic hats on, we were going to interrogate the notion of what it takes to get into the field.
Dave Derington: [00:03:01] Oh, I totally love that interrogation. I didn’t think we’d get to that in this podcast, but now we’re interrogating.
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:06] I don’t think I’ve ever seen a thesis presentation that doesn’t use the phrase, interrogate the notion at some point. So let’s do it.
Dave Derington: [00:03:11] I’ll have to go back and look at my thesis. All right. so as always. We’re beginning with the hypothesis. so Adam, so what are you thinking about this?
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:21] All right. the way I see it, most instructional designers, owners, and content developers and customer education come from really one of three places.
And we’ll go from most to least frequent. I think most frequently you see people coming into customer education from parallel roles in the business, like support agents or CSMs. then maybe second, most often you see people coming from internal L&D or enablement roles, and they say, Hey, you know what?
I had a great time training my employees. Now I’m going to train customers, and then maybe least frequently from an instructional design or an ISD type of master’s program. So the big question that people are asking around this is what’s better. Do you want to have someone who has a degree in instructional design?
Do you want someone who has field experience with learning and development, or do you want someone who has that customer facing experience and the customer empathy?
Dave Derington: [00:04:11] Or all of the above
Adam Avramescu: [00:04:12] or all of the above? all the above, that’s the unicorn,
Dave Derington: [00:04:15] the purple squirrel. Okay. So then that hypothesis we’re testing today, Britain and words, or it’s told in words to become an instructional designer in customer education, you’ll be most successful.
If you have a degree in instructional design.
Adam Avramescu: [00:04:30] That’s a notion worth interrogating.
Dave Derington: [00:04:31] Let’s rip on this. Let’s
Adam Avramescu: [00:04:33] get into it. Okay. So again, going from most to least frequent, let’s start with CSMs and support agents. Who ended up becoming customer education professionals. So really this is one of the most frequent places that trainers and content developers come from because they’ve already been working with customers quite a bit in their career.
And frankly, the younger the company, the more frequently I see this happen, they’re the rockstar, CSMs or support agents who naturally end up gravitating towards training customers. Or documenting things. Do
Dave Derington: [00:05:05] you see that often, Dave? You know what I mean? I’m actually going to give one of our listeners a shout out today.
our friend, Eli, he’s been in the customer education channel that we
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:13] talk on Eli from guru.
Dave Derington: [00:05:15] Yeah. Eli, if you’re out there. And I know he recently had gone through this very thing, shout out. And, so being serious though. It’s so I worked at Gainsight and Gainsight was probably had more customer success managers.
You could shake a stick at because that’s what we did. And that’s how I got my start. I was in the customer success org. I came in to do, to start developing some training material, but that was always on the tip of everybody’s mind. They were trying, they were doing training, they were building decks.
They were doing all this stuff. But that didn’t lead to some problems. yeah, that’s definitely an entry point, in Eli and other people have said this to me. Oh, I got my start in as a customer success manager. And then, I decided I wanted a little learn more and I really liked talking to people.
And now I’m here.
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:57] Yeah. so what kind of problems Dave?
Dave Derington: [00:06:00] What kind of problems coming in from customer success?
Adam Avramescu: [00:06:02] You met, you mentioned there were some problems.
Dave Derington: [00:06:03] one of the cases that I had actually had very explicitly is. with, as a customer success manager, there are, or there’s a different, there’s different segmentations to how you do your job, right?
You might be on one end where you’re really active and you have a low customer count that you support. So maybe 10 or 20 accounts. not massive because you’re very high touch. And in those cases, commonly, what you’re doing is, Hey, a new feature comes out. I have a doc, I sit down and I talk to somebody maybe.
And I know that some of the customer success managers that I’ve worked with more recently have done this as well. They do training. They have done training before I showed up. So that’s good. And that you have that personal narrative, but guess what? It’s one-to-one, it’s not one to many. It takes a lot of time and sometimes things are wrong.
Not because the person’s got it wrong because they’re , they don’t have time to update it. maybe they don’t like doing it. Maybe they do doing it and they sacrifice the rest of your job. It’s just not your role. It’s not your function. It’s not what you should do to really aspire to having a great customer education outcome.
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:06] Yeah. And so if you’re a CSM or your support agent, even if you are naturally good at it, and you naturally gravitate towards it, you don’t. Necessarily get the coaching or that’s not what you’re measured on. No, like how well you train or how will you develop content?
Dave Derington: [00:07:20] And, you’re that person.
And I think of Eli and I think of other people that I’ve been talking to before, this is a really great opportunity for you. This is career development. if you’re spending all of your times with customers, you understand it, you understand the product. Yeah. You’ve got empathy.
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:32] Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:07:33] Y like one of the weaknesses of somebody who comes in from maybe an ID background and structural design background, who hasn’t been working with customers as directly is they don’t have that.
That one-to-one that like, I have a relationship with you, Adam, and we work together to build this podcast and we can talk and bounce ideas off of, so I might not have that. You do as a customer success manager and that’s amazing. we don’t frequently factor that in now. If you love training customers, you love helping them to learn.
That could be a career that could be a career for
Adam Avramescu: [00:08:03] you. Yeah, absolutely. it’s pretty common. When, someone really has been successful working with customers or they’re the. w one of the trainers on my team at Optimizely, he’d gained a reputation. In his previous role as a, the customer whisperer
customer was my guy.
I couldn’t even say it because it’s a tongue twister. yeah. So w when you have that empathy and when you have the ability to captivate an audience and really empathize with them, that’s something that honestly is hard to train. I can learn the instructional design skills, but I can’t necessarily learn empathy.
Dave Derington: [00:08:37] No, not at all. that’s something you just have to
Adam Avramescu: [00:08:39] have. you also, in terms of career development, you get that benefit of learning instructional design and content development skills. And that’s something that, because you’re not being coached on it, you’re not being measured on it in your previous role, that’s career development for you.
You get to actually learn those things, but that’s also the risk, right? Cause if you come in from that side of the house, a lot of startups, especially don’t realize what those skills actually are. you’re a support agent and you become the training person. I’m putting that in quotes at the org, you start to get asked to, Hey, put together this deck or make this webinar, or why don’t you just go deliver this?
And you’re being asked to do stuff, but you don’t necessarily have the perspective or the a theory to say, Hey, the thing you’re asking me to do is, or isn’t reasonable.
Dave Derington: [00:09:23] well, you don’t have, yeah, you don’t have that, that steady practice in working to articulate these programs like a, someone coming in from an instructional design background might have that being the case.
that’s not always problem. I think we’ve talked before what this whole podcast is about is finding the others. So you may need to reach out, it’s sometimes hard to find a mentor. Somebody that’s been there and done that because I, and I think I told Eli and some other people about this, that, okay.
I think it’s easy to freak out. I know you’re really excited about doing this and you want to go do it. And some people have said to me, Oh, I’m going to go get a degree in instructional design now. Oh, wow. Okay. that’s a commitment and kudos to you for doing so, but you could equally turn and find, try to find a mentor to help you do that.
What are the key tips?
Adam Avramescu: [00:10:13] Yeah, a lot of times you’re not going to find that at your company, if your company is small enough, cause you, you are going to be in a company where nobody has ever really done instruction design.
Dave Derington: [00:10:21] Yeah, that’s true. So you need to get outside regardless of what you’re doing. Like I, I think the phrase you’ve used in passing as the accidental instructional designer, I’m one, right?
I didn’t start out in this field, but I’ve written technical manuals. I’ve done all this stuff. I know how to write. I went out and I started looking at websites like ATD. I’m picking up a class here and there getting a book about it. fit it into your day. You don’t have to get in. You don’t have to get so far down the road such that you have a degree under your belt.
Adam Avramescu: [00:10:49] Yeah. I think it’s important to get yourself to the point where, you know, what others’ experiences are and you can pull out either benchmarks or best practices or, really just. Share what other people are doing because you don’t want to become an order taker. When someone comes to you and says, Hey, build this training.
You want to be able to actually ask some intelligent questions about how to put this together and maybe be able to make a recommendation about what to experiment with. So I would say, for these accidental instructional designers out there, find a mentor, go to what is a customer education.org to go to the customer education, Slack channel.
find the others. but then there’s also, there’s real professional development, right? there’s courses and conferences, people can take totally recommendations.
Dave Derington: [00:11:30] I think one of them here, like LinkedIn learning, I think we’ve talked about that before on online learning site, I just mentioned ATD, technology and DevLearn have, Great material, instructional design, material, content development courses, boot camps, you name it’s all out there.
And
Adam Avramescu: [00:11:47] I think the technology and DevLearn for our listeners who aren’t familiar with them are our conferences. And so they’re held annually.
Dave Derington: [00:11:52] Yeah, and that’s great because not only can you go and you pick up great details on how to do things, but guess what? Networking opportunity.
Adam Avramescu: [00:11:59] Yep, absolutely.
And you’re going to meet a lot of people who got and speak on this. and these people, a lot of the time are blogging and you can find them on LinkedIn or on their own blogs. So for instance, Melissa, Millaway, who’s a learning experience design manager at Amazon. She is a great person to follow and she has a LinkedIn column that she writes, I think, weekly.
On instructional design practices, but she’s also all over these conferences. Like you’ll meet her there. there’s communities out there like articulate has. e-learning heroes, community, where you can talk e-learning with people. but there’s also books and blogs, designed for how people learn by Julie Doerksen.
That’s a pretty fundamental, instructional design designer. I love,
Dave Derington: [00:12:38] yeah. Oh, let me take the next one. Michael Allen’s guide to e-learning I’m pouring over that right now and it’s just. It’s amazing. he, he has such a, an interesting take, particularly on demand. That’s so cool and great. A great read.
You need to pick that up.
Adam Avramescu: [00:12:53] And, Cammie bean wrote, she was actually the one, I think that came up with the term, the accidental instructional designer. that’s her book. Kathy Moore has a great blog. She has a whole system called action mapping. That’s an alternative to some of the ways that we analyze.
our instructional design projects. So there’s a lot of good stuff out there. and we can put some of these links in the show notes, it’s not just about finding your people, but finding some of these really experienced practitioners and leaders who can point you in the right direction.
Dave Derington: [00:13:19] Yeah, no, I would say my recognition potentially our recommendation is don’t worry so much about having to boil the ocean. There’s so much experience and there’s so much to learn about that field. But for you to get started, it doesn’t require all that much. Get out, pick up some books, go talk to some people, find a mentor,
Adam Avramescu: [00:13:36] do something, Because most people do nothing. Yeah. And because we’re getting it out there, they’re freaked out and they don’t know who to turn to. And they feel like their time is just all getting put into the things that their business are asking to do. So it’s get out of that order taker, mentality, stop doing everything that everyone is asking you to do and make sure to carve out some time to actually learn.
Totally. Okay. So that’s, the support agent or the CSM who ends up becoming the accidental instructional designer. Now there’s another place that we see customer education professionals come from, which is these parallel roles in L&D or in sometimes sales enablement, or other internal.
Enablement roles. And to becoming customer education people,
Dave Derington: [00:14:19] it was like a natural thing because you’ve had these similar skills, arguably sometimes the same skills, but then again, you’re inside your company. So let’s pair that down and see what are the pros and cons.
Adam Avramescu: [00:14:30] Yeah, absolutely. And I think that one thing that’s interesting if you come from that background is so many of the conferences and so many of the books and a lot of the things, even that we just mentioned a moment ago are really.
Designed with internal enablement and learning and development professionals in mind, it’s about workplace learning. It’s not necessarily about customer education. So you already have this really strong field of development opportunities available to you if you came from that background.
Dave Derington: [00:14:59] So let’s think about this again.
And I’ve been in this place you’ve been in this place. We’re trying to hire somebody. Yeah.
Adam Avramescu: [00:15:05] And we’re hiring manager and you’re actually trying to hire a. An instructional designer or a content developer. What do you look for? this is,
Dave Derington: [00:15:11] this is super hard and I’ve been there several times since what do you want?
And again, in customer education, we’ve got to think about the big picture. We need a lot of different skills. We’d love a purple squirrel. We’re not going to find it maybe. so we find. Again, people that have a lot of internal L&D experience and they’re going, Hey, I really love, I want more, I want to talk to my customers.
I’m excited about that. It’s a different cohort because when you talk to people at work, they’re like, I got to go do no training. And, but you have some kind of you’ve got them on your thumbnail a little bit because you got to get them going. Now we have to go out and inspire and get other people who may not.
Naturally want to do, we are training
Adam Avramescu: [00:15:49] into, so unlike in an internal workplace learning environment, you can’t your customers, aren’t going to get fired if they don’t do the things we train them to do. So the accountability looks different.
Dave Derington: [00:15:58] Absolutely. But that might churn,
Adam Avramescu: [00:16:00] right? They might turn so, so you actually have to be more persuasive in some ways, because you end up having less face time with your audience and less direct control over what they’re going to end up doing.
Dave Derington: [00:16:11] That’s absolutely right. You’ve got other things now you’re going to have to balance speed and quality or, doing it right with, and I think we all start with this. I would argue that, Oh, I know I’m a perfectionist. Would you say that you strive to be perfection?
Adam Avramescu: [00:16:26] I struggle with perfectionism,
Dave Derington: [00:16:27] perfect is the enemy of good, perfect.
Is the enemy of done it in customer education. And this is the hardest thing that for me to break out of my soul, So if you’re coming in for that background where you’ve had plenty of time and you work internally, so if you push a week, it doesn’t matter customers in pain right now. Yeah. That’s commonly a struggle that you might have because you want this thing to be perfect.
Just like you would do it internally, but you know what the customer on the other end, who needs to learn this feature is need to get to this outcome. We need it. You get done now.
Adam Avramescu: [00:16:55] And if you say this to a, an internal. Instructional designer, an HR L&D type person, they might say, we have deadlines.
We have to work quickly. We have to release things that are imperfect all the time. It totally true. I think one of the biggest differences is when there is a customer. Involved. And when there’s revenue at stake from it, the pressure to deliver for that customer becomes so much more immediate.
So you have to be able to empathize with the customer and make sure that they’re ultimately getting what they need for the term. but that you’re not sacrificing the integrity of what you’re delivering. So there’s, there has to be a little bit of push and pull.
Dave Derington: [00:17:29] Yeah. that’s around quality too.
Like the more customer facing customers and employees. Adam, I have a philosophy about this and it’s a little bit radical for me. I don’t see a difference between a customer and employee or even a partner. When I develop training material, I see presentation being somewhat different risk being somewhat different.
But for me, I look at all content the same because I want to reuse it, many different modes. I look at doing customer training, but I know I’m actually going to be using those internal L&D skills because I have to do the same thing for my own team. The more customer facing content is the higher, the quality part, but then you’ve got that time factor in there too.
It’s a trade-off.
Adam Avramescu: [00:18:10] I don’t know if I agree with you, Dave. I don’t. it’s tempting to say that, people are people and we’re educating humans and let’s be colorblind about this, but I actually, I think that as a customer education instructional designer, you really have to be thinking about the customer first and certainly you can repurpose.
What you’ve built for an internal audience or for partners, but really your first instructional design challenge and your foremost instructional design challenge has to be, how do I get these people who have super limited attention spans and zero accountability? How do I engage them to be able to get value from my product or from my company in a very limited amount of time?
Dave Derington: [00:18:49] Yeah, no, I can’t argue with that. I’m, my opinion on that is that. That’s a high bar, but if I build content towards that, Surely I can reuse it in other capacities.
Adam Avramescu: [00:18:58] Absolutely. You definitely. I ever used it to, and it, when you build something that’s customer quality and you’re using it for internal training.
A lot of times the internal people love it because they’re like, Oh my gosh, this is so much better than that. sexual harassment course that I took when I onboarded or, whatever it was. yeah. and it’s a different scale too, right? Like even if you work at a large enterprise and you’re doing internal L&D for a company of a, What, 30 thirty-five thousand people.
Typically at that point, you’re not educating the entire company. you’re educating for one business unit. Whereas if you’re doing customer education, you actually might be responsible. For producing material, that’s going out to hundreds of thousands or millions of end-users.
Dave Derington: [00:19:37] Or, and those are people you don’t know, like when you’re doing an internally, you’ve got slow scale, you it’s containerd but yeah, you could go sky’s the limit.
Adam Avramescu: [00:19:46] Yeah. So you have to make some assumptions about learning styles, similar to how you would do in, for an internal audience as well, because obviously you can’t produce content that appeals to everyone at every point, but you’re going to have to make. More assumptions about who your learners are, what their level of accessibility is going to be, how to create affordances for them.
So on and so forth. I also think that, th this role, when you think about it along those lines, you’re actually thinking about something that’s more like what we would consider a learning experience design today than maybe traditional instructional design. So you can’t.
Just design a course and then hand it off to a content developer.
Dave Derington: [00:20:23] I’ll explain that a little bit more. So what do you mean by, I can’t just design a course.
Adam Avramescu: [00:20:28] here’s what I mean. when you get into larger organizations often for their internal learning teams, they have their instructional designers in their content developers, cordoned off from each other.
They’re not the same role. And so if you’re an instructional designer at a really large. Organization. And then you’re applying for a role as a customer education manager at a smaller startup. For instance, you have to start getting comfortable with the idea that you are going to be asked to do everything.
Yeah, that’s tough. Just going to be able to come up with a design doc and then oversee the project while someone else creates the content. No, you’re designing it and you’re developing.
Dave Derington: [00:21:03] Yeah. And more and more, and look in the animal analysis of it,
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:07] measuring it. You’re often you’re delivering it. If the company is small enough, you might be doing both the design Angelo.
Dave Derington: [00:21:12] Then you’re presenting the leadership on how well it all worked.
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:15] If you’re the, if you’re the leader of the team, if you’re just coming in as instructional designer, you might. Not have to do that, but Hey, sometimes, you might have the opportunity to do that as well.
Dave Derington: [00:21:22] So may I think that would spill over into one of our last points on this, is that.
when we talked about analysis, now we’re talking about measurement works somewhat differently. So at first pass level one, I guess you could say
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:34] on the Kirkpatrick reaction metric.
Dave Derington: [00:21:37] Yeah. That one is pretty much the same. you can literally take rip and replace, put that up from here over into customer education and that’s relevant.
If
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:43] the person to hear, I agree. It’s People are people, did the person, like the course, did the person get value from the learning experience? So just like you would measure that for internal L&D you’re going to measure that for your customer.
Dave Derington: [00:21:53] Yes. But unlike internal, let’s say you and I worked at the same company, I can go over to you and say, Hey Adam, what did you think about the class?
And you say, suck Dave, hang up. Cause we’re friends. And you can honestly say that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:22:04] Yeah. Or I can go to the manager of the team that I’m training and I can ask them for longitudinal feedback. Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:22:10] Or yeah, whatever you have internal type feedback mechanisms. if you’re lucky
Adam Avramescu: [00:22:15] yeah. Who your learners are and you’re gonna be able to stick with them for longer.
Dave Derington: [00:22:18] Exactly. But now we’ve got this scale. We’ve got people that we don’t necessarily know, nor if we’re doing on demand, we might not ever see them face to face. So how is that, how does that complicate that next level of
Adam Avramescu: [00:22:31] it? It means that you’re going to have to think about it a little bit differently, Because when you’re starting to get into those higher levels of measurement, Measuring application or measuring the results of the learning program. You’re not necessarily going to be able to track that same team over the same amount of time. you have to think about it more in terms of the customer life cycle.
So you might be measuring things more like how quickly did this customer get to first value or what percentage of this team is currently certified? Cause you’re going to be dealing with just different time periods, different life events, so to speak. So it just, it changes the way that you measure, especially as you go past that initial reaction.
Dave Derington: [00:23:09] That could get a lot more complicated and requires some additional tooling. But yeah, it’s interesting.
Adam Avramescu: [00:23:14] Yeah. So it’s a cute in your instructional design measurement tool belt with you, you bring your Kirkpatrick and your Jack Phillips and whatever else you want to bring in, but you are going to have to adapt it a little bit, knowing that.
Customers, come and go in a different way than internal employees come and
Dave Derington: [00:23:28] go.
Adam Avramescu: [00:23:29] Excellent. Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:23:30] So let’s get to our last topic for today, which let’s talk about instructional design
Adam Avramescu: [00:23:36] masters first. Yeah. This kind of gets back to the core of our hypothesis. Should I get my master’s in instructional design?
th there were some great masters programs out there, and there are also some great, certificate programs for instructional design. So you might see these called, masters of science and instructional technology or a master’s of education and instructional design. but generally you’re looking for something like instructional design, instructional technology, educational technology.
Instructional systems. it’s all, it’s some combination of those words and we’ll, we’ll share a link in the show notes. Connie Malama who’s the, the e-learning coach. She has actually a resource page with all the instructional design graduate programs that she’s compiled.
Dave Derington: [00:24:18] Excellent. So now there’s also online versions of those available that from what you’ve seen, right?
Adam Avramescu: [00:24:22] Yeah. Yeah. So you can do some of these onsite as, full master’s programs, but some do these as online degrees. And in fact, some don’t even do degrees, but they do online certificates. So you know that’s better for someone who doesn’t have a formal background and wants more of a continuing education program.
It might split the difference a little more between doing a full. Masters and, just learning completely ad hoc.
Dave Derington: [00:24:46] Yeah. For me, I think this is a really interesting topic because I did not come in with an instructional design background. My background quite frankly, is I’ve got a master’s degree, but it’s in computational chemistry.
How does that relate to anything? it’s Oh, I’m pushing chemicals around. but I toy around with that idea for me. I already have mastery. I didn’t want to get another one. Yeah. I’m more akin to going out and getting an online certification to say, I have that in my back pocket, I’ve gone through these.
I understand all the things that I would normally be presented with as an instructional designer. And that would be a good add to my career.
Adam Avramescu: [00:25:19] Yeah. for me, I don’t have a formal education in instructional design either. I’ve gotten a lot of it, frankly, in the workplace and from reading and from doing the work and from taking courses on it.
But yeah. as much as we like to talk about professional certifications, I don’t have a professional certification in instructional design. I was thinking about taking one called the CPLP.
Dave Derington: [00:25:42] Yeah. A few years ago. I’ve seen that looks like a really good program.
Adam Avramescu: [00:25:45] Yeah. and I actually went through the whole, the study regimen for it.
So I read up on all the topics and I learned everything that I needed to learn to take the certification. I actually never ended up taking the,
Dave Derington: [00:25:55] we basically did. no,
Adam Avramescu: [00:25:57] that’s like an ABD, right? Like you can’t be a PhD or an ABD
Dave Derington: [00:26:02] all, but
Adam Avramescu: [00:26:02] the doctorate. So I, here’s how I see it in academia. It’s important to have a master’s it’s important to have that really formal credential, but from what I’ve seen, at least in most businesses experience wins out,
Dave Derington: [00:26:18] to that point.
Here’s the experience that I’ve had that I thought that blew my mind. I have been an adjunct professor and actually I designed an entire BA program in game design for Webster university in st. Louis. When I was still there, did I have that formal training? No, but by merit and it in this is another Avenue that I think is really helpful.
You’re doing those for your day job now. But if you’re thinking about moving into this field, go sign up to teach a class community college. universities are always looking for adjuncts. Why? Because you don’t want to do that full time. Trust me on that. But no, I learned so much. About people by being at a good liberal arts university, not just the things that you would have expected I had to learn.
Yeah. Here’s a really great example, Adam. I learned the hard way of what it, what happens if you’re not prepared. And what I mean by that is I’m going into an instructor, led class. I’ve got 30 students in front of me and I blew it one day once out of the many times, because I didn’t have all my talking points.
I didn’t have my notes. I didn’t have my outcomes. Those are that’s another great Avenue. I don’t think we really had listed that out before, but I just wondered.
Adam Avramescu: [00:27:25] Yeah. that’s really cool to think about it. If you get your, experience from both the theory and the practice and have the experience of being in front of a classroom and trying to test out some of those skills, you end up learning a lot of what you need to learn.
Dave Derington: [00:27:39] You learn a lot and you learn it fast.
Adam Avramescu: [00:27:41] Yeah. that’s what we’re saying. experience wins out and. I don’t mean to sound anti academic. When I say this, I think there’s a lot of value in, getting formal education and formal training because ultimately you have to be able one way or the other to learn the theory and to be able to be confident about the way that you design courses and the way that you talk about the value of the courses that you create.
but when we talk to people who have formal training and they’re trying to get into the field, One thing that I see that they struggle with all the time is that the formal processes that they learned in their graduate programs, they go out the window because
Dave Derington: [00:28:20] really
Adam Avramescu: [00:28:21] because they’re all of a sudden getting asked by their businesses to move quickly and to just get it done.
And they can’t do things, quote unquote, the right way. So it becomes a real struggle
Dave Derington: [00:28:32] if the right way by the authorities who say ADDIE and SAM and all these other methodologies of the way to do it
Adam Avramescu: [00:28:38] well. So thinking about it, we’ve talked about ADDIE and SAM as instructional design methodologies in a previous episode.
And there was, I think a long time where if you went to your master’s in instructional design, you would learn these theories and you would even maybe create sample projects under the assumption that you had these really long ADDIE, like. Timelines, because you were creating curriculum say for either a, a, a higher education use case, or maybe even a really large corporate style of initiative.
And then you come into a startup and all of a sudden, you can’t do your full ADDIE. All the assumptions. Yeah. Different.
Dave Derington: [00:29:15] Yeah. And you don’t have the time.
Adam Avramescu: [00:29:16] again, don’t want to, sounds like you shouldn’t go through these programs, but as you’re going through these programs, I would say it’s worth investigating.
how close to the real world job that you’re going to be walking into, that it’s going to hue. So are you going to be working with modern instructional technology that you might be using and implementing on an actual job? Are you going to be learning about different rapid development methodologies that you would be using?
if you’re going to go. work into instructional design in a tech company or in a startup. So things like that, maybe most importantly, are you going to be doing actual projects that you can put in a portfolio, to share with potential employers? Cause I know people who have gone through masters degrees where they don’t actually have any projects under their belt, they’ve learned the theory, but they haven’t done any of the practice.
coming into a startup, it’s a rude awakening. I think that a lot of people in our profession, just to be clear, no, too little, not too much about what makes learning effective. So again, I’m not saying don’t get the degree. I just think that, on one hand, people who come in with master’s degrees, they can get a leg up in finding jobs and bringing something to them that an accidental instructional designer would have to pick up elsewhere or alone on their own, or go find mentors.
And that can be a struggle too, but. I would caution against letting the theory get in the way of practice too much or aiming for kind of, as you were talking about earlier, perfection, not progress.
Dave Derington: [00:30:44] so when you say that’s you’re going to have to put yourself on the shelf a little bit.
If you’ve got that kind of background, you’re coming into it, you’re going to have to sit down and realize, Hey, now I may be at a startup and things are moving really fast and I’m get this stuff done. I’m going to take what I can and I’m going to move and you might be able to get back towards that angle for right now.
You might have to adapt to the reality of your environment.
Adam Avramescu: [00:31:02] yeah, it’s the, the form versus the function right. Way to think about it. if you’re walking in and you have all of this knowledge about what makes learning effective, you can definitely use that to argue for the right way of doing things.
but you can’t be so married to the theory. That you’ve learned up to this point and even for, so even for me, I didn’t go to an instructional design masters program, but I did learn a bunch of instructional design theory. and I’ve walked into jobs and roles where I’m like, no, this is the right way to do it.
This is the process that we were supposed to follow and. What I found as time went on is that the process and the assumptions that I was making just weren’t working, they weren’t letting me develop quality content. they weren’t letting me produce things that I could measure and were shown to have an impact.
you have to be able to balance those.
Dave Derington: [00:31:49] Yeah. It’s tough, but it’s a good it’s. It’s good to have that background.
Adam Avramescu: [00:31:53] Yeah. Yeah. Especially, if you’re going into software, things are gonna change so quickly. the assumptions have to be a little bit different. All right,
Dave Derington: [00:32:01] Oh, okay. that brings us to wrap up another episode.
This was a good one. So if you’re coming in from any of these different roles and looking into this position, what I think again, we’re doing here is we’re finding the others. We’re bringing everybody together and we want to start hearing these different voices and how they reflect, how we can build this as a discipline.
Maybe someday there will be a degree out there. So for now, A customer education degree. I can see it. you’re starting to see programs and customer success at universities. This is like one of the next trends.
Adam Avramescu: [00:32:30] Dear universities, consider making this a curriculum.
Dave Derington: [00:32:33] I’ll talk to washy our university of Washington about it.
Okay. So if you want to learn more, you enjoyed this podcast. We have a website too. That’s at simply. Customer.education. You heard that, right? Just spell them out with a.in the middle and you got it there. You can find show notes and other material as we grow this, you’re going to see a whole lot more. And please, if you found value in those podcast, we’d encourage you to share with your friends, share with your peers, share with your network
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:00] and help us
Dave Derington: [00:33:02] find the
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:02] others, the others.
So the other thing that would be really helpful is if you can go to Apple podcasts or, Podcast addict or Spotify or wherever you rate things and, give us a nice rating and a review. it doesn’t need to be nice,
Dave Derington: [00:33:19] this is nice and
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:19] nice is good. I am at on Twitter
Dave Derington: [00:33:24] and I’m at Dave.
Derington also on Twitter
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:26] and to our audience. Thanks for joining us. Go out and educate experiment and find your people.
Dave Derington: [00:33:32] Thanks everybody. Thanks for listening
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:37] everyone, Adam, here from the CELab podcast. I am proud to announce that I just released a new book. It’s called customer education. Why smart companies profit by making customers smarter? You can actually find it now on amazon.com in ebook or in print format. You could also do bits dot Lee slash customer education, collegial, easy little Bitly link.
So I’d really appreciate it. If you pick a copy up and let me know what you think. Thanks everyone.