Should I Pursue the Job?

I have taken jobs at a lower salary than I wanted, because at the time I needed to get out of a horrible soul-sucking job or because I needed steady income vs freelancing. Mostly it's worked out ok for me, but no one can tell you what to do because only you know your unique circumstances and career goals.

IMO you are not going to get much valuable experience running webinars and maintaining current training materials. What would you add to your portfolio? The starting salary probably has less to do with your education and experience, but more to do with the fact that it sounds pretty entry-level.

I was working in a sort of marketing and program management role for a test-prep company (that's vaguely "educational," right?) at the time I was going to grad school for Adult Education and Training. Many of the foundational courses included people who were preparing for Adult Basic Ed, or EFL, or higher-ed type of careers. I proceeded with the human resource development/instructional design track. I did a couple of freelance gigs, one was technical editing (applying formatting styles to loooong manuals) and one was designing a program evaluation at a place where I had done one of my internships. About a year after I'd graduated, a friend of mine handed my resume to a training manager at the headquarters of a large telecommunications company where he worked, and I got a job, starting as a Senior Instructional Designer with a starting salary of about $63k (plus bonuses before the economic shit hit the fan). That was in 1998. I think I had the "Senior" title because of my degree, because there were other IDs on the team who had been there for a while and weren't senior.

I think one of the things that helped me even get interviews when I started out, was that for months I had been collecting instructional design job descriptions from want ads, identifying the most common words, doing a self-assessment of my skills in those areas, and then re-framing the work I had done using more ID words. I didn't lie, I didn't elaborate, I just put emphasis on different aspects of my job that weren't necessarily the biggest parts of my job (like how I created a webinar and new observation checklist for doing marketing presentations at the test-prep company where I worked, which was actually one of my school assignments also).

This enabled me not only to get my resumes looked at, but also to speak confidently about my skills using industry words such as ADDIE, Agile, SAM, storyboards, training plan, authoring, etc. And I knew exactly what my strengths and weaknesses were, so I could say, for example: "I'm really good at developing measurable performance objectives" or "I'd like to get more exposure to e-learning since that wasn't a focus of my grad school program. We studied learning models, instructional design best practices, evaluation methods, adult psychology, and so on."

Networking is also a great use of your time. I'd suggest finding your local chapter of ATD and going to meetings and events. Chapter dues are inexpensive compared to national memberships, and IMHO a better value for the money. Joining this forum was also a good idea. Anywhere where you can hang out with other IDs and learn to talk like one of them.

I've worked at fortune 100 companies, higher-ed institutions, and consulting agencies, and I would say the only difference is that big companies use more corporate-speak bullshit words. Sprinkle your conversation with words like nimble, ROI, LOE, solution (as a verb), and "heavily matrixed organization." Know that "comfortable with ambiguity" may mean that you will have a new manager every six months, be re-orged annually, and have seventeen approvers for every project and they will all disagree with one another. Know that "juggling multiple tasks and priorities" may mean that there are only two people doing the work of ten. Know that "working to deadline" may mean that deadlines are often both arbitrary and impossible (e.g., by the end of Q3 to develop 42 elearning modules with no budget, limited access to SMEs, and no supporting resources such as developers or graphic designers).

TL;DR: No, I would not take a lower-paying job just to get experience if I already had done an honest self-evaluation of my skills (but I might for plenty of other reasons, such as needing to pay the rent). Yes, I think you should probably look for, qualify for, and get hired for, a job with more needs analysis and autonomy, and there are plenty of them out there if you know where to look.

Hope this helps!

The I-Diva (TM)

/r/instructionaldesign Thread