Feeling like Instructional Designers and Learning Developers are undervalued? Understand this shift yourself, and help others see it. 👀 👇 Every day, the price of information drops ⬇️ . More content becomes one-step accessible. As a result, it gets harder and harder to tell what truly matters, and what will actually work 🚀. So what does matter? Experience. Real, lived application of knowledge in context: - how it works in practice - what choice to make, and when - which approach fits which situation - what pitfalls to expect, and what opportunities to use That’s what Subject Matter Experts (SME) bring. Their value isn’t “what they know” anymore, it’s how they’ve seen it work (or fail) in real situations. And that’s a good thing. But here’s the catch. 🪝 Without a deliberate way to spread that expertise, making it accessible to the right people at the right moment, it stays local. Great insight remains trapped in conversations, documents, and individual heads. To make it travel 🧳, you need a specific approach, you need packaging. You need methodology. You need a deliberate approach. You need to package expertise into a meaningful learning product, designed for clarity, adult learning, and transfer. That’s why Instructional Design matters 💪 . It’s the craft that turns raw material into something that can be used, repeated, and scaled, and that actually changes behaviour. and drive organizational growth. Knowledge is abundant. Experience makes it valuable. Instructional Design makes it usable and scalable. #instructionaldesign #learninganddevelopment #adultlearning #performance #LXD
Well articulated. The missing layer many organizations underestimate is extraction. SMEs don’t struggle with knowledge. They struggle with articulating decision patterns. Instructional Design at its best doesn’t just package expertise it reverse-engineers: • how experts prioritize • what they ignore • where judgment shifts with context • what signals trigger different actions That’s the layer that makes learning transferable, not just informative. The real leverage is converting intuition into structured judgment.
I prefer to call us, Learning Designers because to design instruction is not enough. Further, if as an ID you are not starting your work at the end pillar, you have not been doing it right. Whether the outcome only requires knowledge acquisition, experiential, situational, action learning or others, is a result of a proper needs analysis. Thus, adding the term “Experience” in the title only complicates the definition of what our role should be. I feel HR creating different titles or the attempt to define it more precisely, has blurred and complicated roles and even cteate a divide between IDs and those with experience in titles when it is clarity on responsibilities and skills that matter. Do we say that IDs only produce resources? I do not think many would agree to that. A comment here mentioned that IDs or IEDs is not about delivering a package and I could not agree more. Resources are artefacts of our work to support and scaffold learning but we need to think beyond resources that end up in drawers. Think now about how AI can play a role in reducing cognitive load but rather enriching learning in the flow of work but I have a caveat: without being a slave to it.
This is a very clear and much-needed explanation of where value actually comes from today. The shift from knowledge → experience → design is real. And especially the point about experience staying local without deliberate design is something many organisations underestimate. What I keep seeing in practice, though, is a next gap emerging right after that: Even when knowledge is well designed and usable, it still doesn’t necessarily translate into recognition, mobility, or real opportunities. So the question becomes: What happens after learning is usable? Because that’s often where systems stop carrying people forward. Curious how you think about that next step.
If you're like me, you run into people in your training sessions who talk about wanting to "be a trainer." They sit in the room, consume the material, access the information, participate in the activities/discussions and walk out thinking "I could definitely do that." I routinely tell people that everyone wants my job until they have to do it. They think "training" is just getting in front of a room full of people and talking. Most have no idea of the principles of instructional design, adult learning, neuroscience, presentation and facilitation skills, understanding cognitive load, learning how to scaffold information and material, maintaining stamina and energy, managing diverse learners who may or may not be neurodivergent, material that's not always sexy, exciting or inherently compelling. Yeah...that's all I do...talk all day. 🙄 In some ways, I have learned to take it as a compliment- it looks easy because I'm incredibly good at what I do and I work my tail off to make it look like effortless.
As the founder of Learning Designs in Turkey, I strongly believe that learning requires strategic design. Just like architecture shapes how people live and experience a space, learning design shapes how people think, grow, and transform. Good design does not just organize content, it creates insight, clarity, and motivation. When learning is strategically designed, it inspires people to grow with purpose and confidence.
This framing hits exactly right. Information has never been cheaper, but the ability to extract what’s actionable from it, and make it transferable at scale, is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. I’d add one layer from the field: the gap between what an SME knows and what a learner can actually use is where most capacity-building initiatives fail. Instructional Design is precisely the bridge, but only when it’s grounded in real implementation contexts, not just learning theory. I have learned that’s the combination that actually changes behavior: lived expertise + deliberate design. Neither alone is enough.
I think you're right about this 3-step model Antonina Panchenko but I think we IDs don't only package we do more. For example, if an SME tells you that salespeople "need more product knowledge." An executor builds a course. An ID asks: what do the best salespeople do differently in conversations? And what prevents the rest from doing the same? That question changes everything. Suddenly, you're not building a knowledge module, but a training program that simulates what really goes wrong with the customer. Packaging to me sounds like only adding a box :-) What an ID does is to see if we should package it in a box after or maybe in plastic, and what is the best way to transport it.
I would put that diamond on a ring. Meaning Facilitators bring design to life and make the learning relevant and sticky.
📌 Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about this while working with different SMEs, and I realised my own approach has quietly evolved. A while ago, SMEs were often my primary source of information: they brought knowledge that was hard to find, so most of our time went into capturing and validating content. Now that information is one-step accessible, you’d think the SME role would shrink, but I’m seeing the opposite. Because I come prepared, our conversations have become more meaningful. We spend less time on “what is it?” and much more time on how it actually works here: the organisational context, the nuances, the trade-offs, the real decision patterns, the stories behind what works (and what doesn’t). In other words, the value of SME work is growin, if the work is designed well. And that means the value of Instructional Design (and the Instructional Designer) grows too: not as a content “packager,” but as the person who structures the collaboration, pulls out experience (not just facts), shapes the core message, and makes those insights transferable inside a specific organisation.