November 7 Week 12B Blog

It is important and interesting to learn some research regarding the instructional designer's job market. The article "Examining competencies for the instructional design professional: An exploratory job announcement analysis" by Dr. Wang and others shows us their research about examining core professional competencies for instructional designers through a job announcement analysis involving both qualitative and quantitative produces used on a qualitative data sources. The study provides a current overview of the knowledge , skills and abilities of instructional designers. It would be very helpful for students to read and learn what're the more important knowledge and skills in the job market for the instructional designers.

After analyzing over 1000 job announcements across united states, California, Texas, and Florida are the top three work locations that offers the job positions. And the most context of job announcements is professional, scientific and technical services. The minimum education requirement falls on to Bachelor's degree. About 2/3 of the job announcements requires Bachelor's degree.

For the knowledge domain, top three most important knowledge are announced in the market are knowledge of productivity software, video and audio authoring, and online, blended and traditionally learning.

In the skills domain, soft skills are the most frequently observed while Technical skills are the least observed.

As for the abilities domain, the ability to collaborate with diverse stakeholders is the major factor, more than half the job announcement requires that ability.

This research is very helpful for us the learn. It also could be very benefit and a good direction about which knowledge, skills, and abilities are more job favor. We can combine what we love to do in the instructional design and strengthen what's need to be ready for the furfure job market and personal development.

References:

Kumar, S. & Ritzhaupt, A. D. (2017). What do instructional designers in higher education really do? International Journal of E-Learning, 16(4), 371-393.

Wang, X., Chen, Y, Ritzhaupt, A. D., & Martin, F. (in press). Examining competencies for the instructional design professional: An exploratory job announcement analysis. International Journal of Training and Development. DOI: 10.1111/ijtd.12209

Shironica P. Karunanayaka & Som Naidu (2021). Impacts of authentic assessment on the development of graduate attributes, Distance Education, 42(2), 231-252, DOI: 10.1080/01587919.2021.1920206