Is It Time to Leave Instructional Design?!

Summary

Tim Slade argues that instructional design is not disappearing, but the work—and the skills that make someone valuable in the field—are changing. AI and new authoring tools can increasingly produce e-learning content, and some stakeholders may create training themselves. But a technology demo is not the same as everyday organizational practice: companies often rely on legacy systems, change slowly, and may not have the time or interest to make subject-matter experts responsible for creating training.

The video’s central distinction is between e-learning development—building courses and other learning materials—and instructional design, which includes diagnosing performance problems, deciding whether training is needed, choosing an appropriate solution, and evaluating its effects. Slade says the field has often been presented too narrowly as learning a tool such as Storyline and producing portfolio pieces. As production becomes easier to automate, tool proficiency alone is a less secure professional identity.

Other key points include:

• AI can scale poor learning as well as useful learning. Low-quality training existed before generative AI; AI simply makes it easier to produce more of it.
• Organizations and jobs are complex. Stakeholders may request training when the underlying issue is not a knowledge gap. Real projects also involve constraints, changing requirements, difficult conversations, and implementation.
• Not all employees learn at a computer. Many roles require hands-on practice, coaching, feedback, facilitation, or collaboration. As digital content becomes abundant, human learning experiences may become more valuable.
• Automation could affect L&D indirectly. Even if AI cannot do every instructional designer’s job, automation elsewhere may reduce the number of employees who need training and allow smaller L&D teams to support them.
• The work may shift away from production. Slade illustrates a possible change from a project split of roughly 10% front-end analysis, 80% development, and 10% follow-up to 40% analysis, 20% development, and 40% implementation and evaluation. The point is to devote more effort to diagnosing needs and checking whether solutions improve performance.

Eight Recommendations for People Entering or Working in Instructional Design

1. Don’t build your whole career around authoring tools. Learn the tools employers require—including relevant e-learning and AI tools—but treat them as part of a broader skill set. Tools change, become obsolete, or are replaced.

2. Learn to solve performance problems. Develop the ability to conduct needs analyses and stakeholder interviews, identify performance gaps and their causes, determine whether training is appropriate, and recommend non-training solutions when necessary.

3. Build business acumen. Understand how an organization makes money or otherwise creates value, what outcomes and metrics matter to its stakeholders, and how employee performance affects those outcomes. Connect learning recommendations to the problems the business is trying to solve.

4. Learn to design more than e-learning. Develop skills in instructor-led and virtual instructor-led training, workplace and performance support, coaching, practice, scenarios, assessments, and blended solutions. Choose a format based on the need rather than defaulting to a course.

5. Understand how work gets done in organizations. Learn practical project skills, including scoping, kickoff meetings, managing deadlines and changing requirements, working with stakeholders, implementing solutions, and navigating organizational realities.

6. Become skilled at using AI without depending on it. Use AI for brainstorming, analysis, prototyping, drafting, asset creation, coding, and automating production. Keep responsibility for instructional decisions and judgment rather than simply accepting generated output.

7. Create a portfolio that shows your thinking. Explain the problem, what you learned, the questions you asked, the decisions and alternatives you considered, what you recommended, and how you would evaluate whether it worked. Include the finished artifact, but make it evidence of your reasoning—not the whole portfolio.

8. Follow the job’s actual responsibilities, not just its title. Read each job description and tailor your evidence to the work, such as facilitation, performance consulting, e-learning development, project management, or stakeholder engagement. “Instructional designer” can describe a wide range of roles.

Slade’s concluding question is not simply whether to leave instructional design, but which version of the profession to prepare for. He argues that people whose value rests mainly on producing attractive courses with a particular tool face greater change. Skills in analysis, business understanding, judgment, collaboration, solution design, implementation, and evaluation remain central to the broader work.

Speakers and Sources Mentioned

• Featured speaker: Tim Slade, host of The eLearning Designer’s Academy.
• Sources and examples referenced by Slade: Articulate and its Articuland announcements; claims and discussions circulating on LinkedIn; a Costco employee using a legacy mainframe system; a former Kohl’s vice president’s reminder that the company’s work ultimately supports selling products; and Slade’s own experience in instructional design and learning-and-development work.

No other speakers are presented as speaking in the subtitles.