Learning from the Process

Reflection on Chapter 6: How Do You Build a Portfolio?

Each blog post in this series (#WIWIK) will take a moment to reflect on the questions at the end of each chapter.

Feel free to join the conversation by responding in the comments with your answers to the discussion questions (with plain text or a link to your post).

Here is the reflection question for the sixth chapter:

What is one major finding you learned about from a project?

My first job in corporate L&D was a contracted position with Junior Achievement. My role in team was to ensure builds met the branding and style guidelines, the focus order was correct, making descriptive transcripts, and adjusting the existing build based on feedback from the review process. I learned a lot about Storyline and branding from this job, but the biggest benefit of the job from a learning perspective was seeing how various intructional designers and e-learning developers made things happen.

Storyline has an abundance of features that make it so that there are usually multiple ways to create an interaction. The team I worked on had multiple people making the initial builds, each with their own approach. Being able to look and see how they used triggers, variables, and object states differently taught me a great deal about Storyline and I was able to use the techniques I picked up from others in many of my builds since then.

Now that I'm often building courses end-to-end, this isn't the case any more. However, one thing I love about instructional design, and the main reason it became the position I pursued when I decided to leave the classroom, is that I constantly get to be learning. My courses have ranged from LinkedIn profiles to swimming pools to podcast audio recorings and professional development.

While I don't know what kinds of courses I'll be building in the future or what SMEs I'll be collaborating with and learning from, I do know that I love learning and I'm going to enjoy this new career.

References

Hobson, L. (2021). What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming an Instructional Designer. Independently published.