30
Employees need minimum
number of PD hours per year
Employee
Employees seek out and attend
training opportunities
Trainer
Supervisor reviews
evidence of PD for annual
performance review
Supervisor
Aaron is an instructional designer for a state college. In order to document his Professional Development, he keeps copies of seminar descriptions, certificates of attendance, receipts, whatever artifacts he can, hoping it’s enough. He often thinks he learns as much from online resources, but since he can’t prove it, he attends often boring and uninformative workshops, just to get the certificate of attendance.
Asha is the owner of a small company that offers workshops and seminars for a variety of organizations. Each organization seems to want something different to verify employee attendance: a certificate, an assessment, or just a receipt for payment. She gets frustrated when attendees just show up for the credit, clearly not interested in what she’s trying to teach.
Phil is Aaron’s supervisor. He reviews and approves PD activities, but generally has to just trust his employees. The certificates of attendance don’t prove knowledge, and he doesn’t know if employees attend conference sessions, or just socialize in the lounge. And conferences are so expensive! Sometimes it seems like off-site PD is just a nice way to get out of the office.
Instructional Technology is a relatively new as a field, though people have been performing difference aspects of it for a very long time.
Having different paths to enter other than a specific college degree provides opportunities for those with informal learning and experience to work as Instructional Technologists.
Using portfolios provides evidence of skill and ability above just having a degree, which varies widely from institution to institution.
