It often feels like I am in a catch-22. I am trying to get that first ID job yet I can’t get any experience until I get a job, and I can’t get a job without experience. Knowing that having a masters degree in instructional design it is going to be less challenging, I still wonder if the experiences I have gained while teaching will be sufficient enough for an entry-level position within the instructional design field. As I researched that question, I found a blog by Christy Tucker who is on an interviewing team who interviews teachers for instructional design jobs and graciously shared a few questions that they would ask a teacher interviewing for an instructional design position. The questions follow:
- Have you developed any curriculum or lesson plans collaboratively, or have you always developed by yourself?
This wasn’t a deal-breaker for us, but being able to talk about how you worked with others to develop lessons is a big plus. IDs hardly ever work alone; you always have a SME and often several other team members. If they don’t ask about this and you do have experience developing collaboratively, bring it up yourself. Committee work is OK, but not nearly as good as collaborative curriculum work. Developing lessons for someone else to teach is good too. It isn’t the same when you’re developing just for yourself and no one else has to know how to teach what you designed. - How would you deal with not being in front of the classroom and interacting directly with students? Talking about how much you love working with students is a great thing if you’re interviewing for a teaching job. When you’re interviewing for an ID job where you’ll be behind the scenes and may never talk to a student, it isn’t so helpful. I’ve seen candidates rejected because they talked too much about how important seeing the light go on in students was to them; we didn’t think they’d be happy.
- What is your process for developing curriculum/lesson plans? If you get this question or a variation of it, focus on the process of development and not your content area. Unless your content expertise is specifically part of this job, that isn’t what they want to hear about. If I’m interviewing someone, I want to know how you figure out what you’re going to teach and how you teach it. Do you start with your objectives or end with them? Do you write your assessments first or last? Do you start from high level goals and break down from there, or do you start with the daily lessons and build connections?
- How would your skills transfer from teaching to instructional design? Your skills do transfer, which they probably know or they wouldn’t have set up an interview. You need to explicitly connect the dots for them though–explain how developing lesson plans and curriculum is similar to developing higher ed courses or whatever you’re interviewing for.
- How would you make the transition to this environment? Talk about any work with adults that you have done. If you coached other teachers on how to use Excel, that counts here. I’ve been asked something similar to this just about every time I’ve switched from academia to corporate and back. If you’re interviewing for something in higher ed, talk about your experience in that environment; ditto for corporate or nonprofit jobs. If the job involves online education, be prepared to talk about any experience you have taking or teaching courses online. Hopefully you can also get a feel from the job description as to how much technology you need to talk about.
- How do you assess learning? In the previous job where I interviewed many people, we always asked candidates to tell us how they would assess a specific outcome online, given the caveat of no tests or traditional academic papers. We were very focused on authentic, real-world assessment. Teachers who could come up with a scenario-based assessment on the fly were likely to move forward to the next step in the process. I don’t think that’s as common an interview question as it should be (it’s a better test than “what is your greatest weakness” after all), but it does show the value of knowing your audience. People who had done their research and knew from our website that we were looking for practical assessment did much better than those who talked about how much they love writing multiple choice questions. And yes, we had a candidate who went on and on about how much she loved writing and validating multiple choice questions.
-Amber
