Who is an Instructional Designer? Key Responsibilities, Skills & Salary 2024

What is an Instructional Designer?
Key Job Responsibilities of an Instructional Designer
Required Qualification/Education
What makes you qualified for this job?
Top Companies/Organizations Hiring Instructional Designer
Instructional Designer Developer Salary Statistics

What is an Instructional Designer?

An instructional designer is an individual who has to systematically design, develop, and deliver instructional materials and experiences which are both digital and physical. These materials and experiences have to be delivered consistently and reliably which can then result in an efficient, engaging, effective, appealing, and inspiring acquisition of knowledge. An instructional designer constantly has to determine the state and needs of the learner and then define the end goal of instruction.

These are known to be paramount in the learning process and are tasked with redesigning courses. They also have to develop an entire course and curriculums as well and create training materials including student guides and teaching manuals.

Key Responsibilities of an Instructional Designer

An instructional designer has very important responsibilities to fulfill and some of them have been mentioned below:

An instructional designer has to look for any kinds of gaps in knowledge and come up with different ways to fill them. They usually do that through games, articles, or tutorials.
They are supposed to collaborate with subject experts and develop curriculum and test learning and make sure that all the students are ready for the next challenge.
Similarly, it is their job to stay updated on the latest trends relevant to technology and education.
Instructional designers also have to work for school districts, colleges, universities, and even companies and are supposed to train consumers and employees on how to deliver learning material.
Moreover, they have to design instructional management systems.
Next, they have to create educational podcasts and videos, and content as well.
Instructional designers also have to design and revamp new and established learning models.
Next, they are required to implement feedback from program reviews.
Above all, instructional designers also have to research new innovations in both learning design and education.

Required Qualification/Education

To become an instructional designer, you need to have a Bachelor’s degree but majority of the professionals holding this job title have a Master’s or Doctoral degree. This is because this job title demands an advanced degree and thus a Master’s or Doctoral degree would serve the purpose.

Recommended Courses:

Instructional Design Foundations and Applications

Illinois via Coursera
35,798+ already enrolled!
★★★★☆ (482 Ratings)

Instructional Design for eLearning

Marina Arshavskiy via Udemy
17,976+ already enrolled!
★★★★☆ (5,074 Ratings)

Instructional Design Models

University System of Maryland via edX
Study Type: Instructor-paced
08 Weeks (8-10 hours weekly) of effort required

What makes you qualified for this job?

Those who expect to do justice with their job title should develop a certain skill set as these are the skills that enable them to do their jobs effectively. Below we have listed down some of the most relevant hard and soft skills required by an instructional designer:

Hard Skills:

As an instructional designer, you need to have the know-how of the learning models which are ADDIE, Kirkpatrick’s Level of Training Evaluations, and Bloom’s Learning Taxonomy.
With that, he must have the ability to create, develop, manipulate, and share learning content using a variety of technology.
Similarly, the know-how of SharePoint and Captivate is always preferred by the employer.
Moreover, the instructional designer should be able to whiteboard ideas for learning materials and develop presentation slides and handouts along with efficient design and script writing.
He should know all about video production.
Furthermore, an instructional designer should know how to use Articulate, Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Canva, and other visual design tools.
The individual should also know how to create powerful assessment elements to accompany the course.
Next, he should know what Virtual Reality (VR) tools are and their applications which allow learners to immerse in real-world simulations.
In addition, he should be mindful of his performance metrics to measure his success.

Soft Skills:

Soft skills are also important and play a vital part in helping you perform well at your workplace. This includes to be;

Being a strong communicator who has the ability to work with others comfortably and tackle all issues in a reasonable way.
He should be a self-motivator who has the ability to tackle a project on his own.
Similarly, he should have problem-solving skills as in this field, any problem can pop up at any time, and having the ability to solve any problems is critical.
Similarly, a sign of a good instructional designer is that he knows how to gather the right information and then deliver it to others in an easy-to-understand manner.
Even though an instructional designer is not required to write a code but know-how of the programming languages is important to possess. This includes basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
He must have the ability to generate new ideas and put them into action. When trying to create eLearning courses, innovation plays a vital part.
He should be vigilant enough to stay updated on the latest trends in technology and education.

Top Companies/Organizations Hiring Instructional Designer

So you see, as more organizations have started to adopt learner-centric models of teaching, automatically the demand for instructional designers who can create effective programs has increased as well. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also projected job growth of 9% in this field during the next 10 years in 2018. And to your knowledge, this rate is higher than average for all other career fields.

Companies like Apple, Spectrum, IBM, Aquent, Lambda School, Udacity, Udemy, Twitter, and many others tend to hire instructional designers.

Instructional designers are employed across different industries like Kindergarten, college, schools, government, business, and military. They have the option to either work individually or as part of a team given they complete their tasks accordingly.

Instructional Designer Salary Statistics

This section contains details of the average annual salary of an instructional designer in different major countries. By getting a picture of what you can earn working as an instructional designer in different countries, it will get easier for you to decide where you can start a career as an instructional designer.