Week 12B: Career & Professional Development

Something I found really interesting during this course was the difficulty of developing professional certifications for such a broad range of potential careers. As IST continues to become more important to online learning, HPT, educational technology, corporate training, and other applications, I understand that a single unifying certification for this field wouldn't make sense. I would be interested professionally in seeing a professional association like AECT develop certification standards for different fields or skillsets within the umbrella of IST.

When I first started looking for doctoral programs that fit my interests, I initially didn't consider IST as a potential fit for me. I was working as a systems manager and had received my masters in management information systems, and my strengths were in systems development and (though I would never have described it as such) human performance improvement. However, I was working in higher education, and all of my work was colored by the context that valued outcomes centered around learning. The training programs and learning environments I developed were all designed to improve knowledge and skills for students (undergraduate and graduate) to help them succeed, improving their experience of using the systems they were required to work within.

When I began this type of work, I didn't have the language or educational background to properly contextualize what I was trying to create. I started doing research, and beyond discovering instructional design and learning best practices for developing online training programs, I stumbled across a book called "Design for How People Learn". In hindsight, I credit this book by Julie Dirksen with leading me to IST. The educational psychology and clear explanations for learning design drew me in, and eventually I was invited to teach instructional design (mostly to other instructors and teachers through a local non-profit).

I deeply enjoyed instructional design, despite having no educational background in the subject, and that knowledge gap led me to seek out a doctoral program that would combine my professional systems and software work with instructional design, but in the context of learning systems. I'm laughing now, having just completed my first semester in the Instructional Systems Technology Ed.D. program. Somehow I never knew IST existed until I found Indiana University's program on Google and decided to apply after reading more about the courses available and the descriptions of the program. Now, at the conclusion of my first semester, I can't fathom how I never knew this field existed, as it encompasses everything I am professionally passionate about and adds dimensions I never even considered.