As I was sitting in the various discussions of the 2011 Learning Solutions conference, it became clear to me that my career path was in a huge state of flux. I was both excited and scared at the same time. At my office, for quite some time, I was the sole Instructional Designer/Media Developer for my team. I handle the eLearning development of content for two enterprise systems that serve the financial industry. We had other people with the same role as I held throughout other areas of the company, but in our group, I was the only one. In my role, I use at least eight different eLearning skills and roles on a regular basis.
IT ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH TO CHANGE JUST ONE THING OR LEARN ONE NEW SKILL/
What had me a little concerned about all this change was that it was so interconnected that it wasn’t like you could really just pick up one thing, change that, and be done.
If I wanted to discuss eventually implementing xAPI, I had to bring the discussion of updating our Learning Management System to the table. I had to be able to understand how xAPI worked and it wasn’t documented clean enough for us non-programmer types.
If I wanted to bring video production into our deliverables, I needed to learn motion graphics, new video editing software, purchase the necessary equipment, and have a reliable way to deliver this content to my audience.
If I wanted to discuss implementing mLearning, we needed tablets to test on, we needed a familiarity with HTML5, we needed tools that could publish in that format, and we needed web servers we had ready access to use for testing.
Of course, the overarching concern in all of this was internet/data security. Being part of a financial services company requires a very high level of security. No direct access to WiFi, levels of control as to how large of a file you can put on a web server, and an LMS that affects multiple training and IT groups within the company.