[00:00:00] Devlin: Hello my friends. Welcome to another question and answer session. We have the one and only Joe Stuben. Hi Joe. Today we're talking about how Joe transitioned from academia as a tenured history professor to a full-time curriculum helper at Amazon Web Services.
[00:00:18] And I think what's really cool about Joe's journey is he didn't even really know instructional design as a career existed like seven months ago and now, Full-time at a great position at, , one of the world's biggest tech companies. So yeah, I think he has a super motivating story to share.
[00:00:35] Joe, can you give us a really brief overview of what this last seven months have been like for you?
[00:00:40] Joe: Sure.
[00:00:41] I'm very self-conscious that you're all here, but I am, I'm glad you're all here. And yes, as Devlin said, you'll find my professional name like on LinkedIn and please connect with me. Is Stubenrauch, but that's a mouthful. So my website and this thing is under Stuben a little shorter and easier to remember.[00:01:00]
[00:01:00] So I have been in academia for two decades. If you count up all of graduate school and then being a professor on the tenure track and then being a tenured professor. I had for a long time begun to think about careers beyond academia. I was very happy in my job and at my university, but wondering about personal growth and career growth and all bunch of other factors.
[00:01:28] If you're in academia, or in education, you'll have a sense of what some of those factors could be. But I didn't know the way out. I didn't know the pathway out. And in May of 2020, I did a consulting session with a program manager at Google who she had been a comp lit PhD and had transitioned to high tech and I talked with her and one thing she said was, "you can do it.
[00:01:53] You've got many of the skills, now you're ready for this." Which was really encouraging. And I wanna say the same thing [00:02:00] to you, academics who are out there: you actually have the skillset or a lot of the skillset. But she also mentioned, she said, "well, you should look at program management, but you should also look at instructional design," and I said "instructional design?"
[00:02:13] So after I got off the call with her, I Google "instructional design." Oh, there's this Devlin Peck. Oh, okay. Click. And that was that. So I discovered, I'm trying to make this short. I still am a professor, so I have to practice going being short. I discovered Devlin's website and started following his how to become an instructional designer guidelines but also started listening to other people, connecting to other people in the field, and then put together a portfolio. Started applying for jobs and was completely shocked but delighted when it turned into a job.
[00:02:54] Devlin: Nice. Thank you for that, Joe. How did you get the attention of recruiters and hiring [00:03:00] managers without any formal instructional design experience?
[00:03:03] Because you've been a professor like for so long and now great instructional design job, so how did you, yeah, how did you get their attention?
[00:03:13] Joe: So that's a great question that I can guess at the answer, and this sort of connects maybe to one of the other questions, at least one or the other that I've seen in the queue about how many jobs I applied to. This conversation we're having today...
[00:03:27] I can't talk to you about the big picture view of having helped hundreds of people or seen lots of applicants. I'm just one data point, so this is my experience, so it's hard for me to know what the hiring managers saw. Afterwards they didn't say, "this is what it was, that got our attention."
[00:03:46] And so I can only know what I did. And I think the keys were a portfolio and I applied with a one page resume. The resume that got me the job was a [00:04:00] one pager that had my portfolio at the top and then, Talked about my academic background in terms that were speaking to the business world and to the instructional design world, showing that I was able to think about my past experiences and skillset in the context of solving business problems and with business outcomes and that I can think about those who were encountering my learning content as employees, as users, as learners and not just in the language of students.
[00:04:40] Was that what caught their attention or helped differentiate me? I don't know, but I do suspect it was my portfolio at the top that caused the second look, right? The closer look when going through resumes.
[00:04:57] Devlin: Nice. And, Joe and I have [00:05:00] become friends throughout this whole process. I mean, we skipped over that, but I think you joined one of my like early pilot programs for xAPI. You showed me like one of your first projects and it just really struck me and I was like, "Joe's gonna go far in this space."
[00:05:12] And I told you from the beginning. So I think what was really interesting with you is you were very in tune with the data. Like from day one, like you knew who was going on to your portfolio website, you knew which companies they were coming from, and because you added like xAPI tracking in your projects, you knew which projects they were going through and how much time they were spending on those projects.
[00:05:33] Joe: Well I actually think I was chatting with you and I happened to refresh my portfolio site and I saw that someone from a server that was clearly showing they were coming through Amazon had landed on my portfolio, and then I saw these xAPI statements start coming through on my portfolio piece.
[00:05:53] I was like, "oh." And then shortly thereafter, it must have been the recruiter. The recruiter reached out. [00:06:00] It was whatever it was about my resume that caused her to stop and take a further look. The next step was she went and looked at my portfolio and so that again, that, that was a different, the difference maker.
[00:06:15] Devlin: Yeah, I just think it's awesome that you like were able to follow the steps, like step-by-step. So you did have some sort of insight, like, , this recruiter from here, they didn't even look in my portfolio. Like this recruiter, they made it through this entire project. Like they, this must be a good sign.
[00:06:28] So you were using that data from the beginning.
[00:06:30] Joe: I mean, in most cases, I can't tell anything about the user other than maybe what state they're in. So I actually didn't catch where I knew specifically who it was looking at my portfolio, that was the only case where it was, I think something to do with the Amazon VPN that she is connecting through that, that gave it away.
[00:06:49] So normally, I don't actually know who you all are, so don't worry. You can browse.
[00:06:53] Devlin: Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. Just Google Analytics. It'll say like where your, like referral traffic comes from. So I think [00:07:00] that's how Joe was able to see that. Correct. But yeah, let's look at Joe. We're gonna look at your portfolio site together. Okay?
[00:07:08] Joe: Sure.
[00:07:08] Devlin: Let's do it. All right. So here is Joe's portfolio site. So Joe now has this title, curriculum developer, because I think that is his formal title who solves business problems. Nice, simple, minimal design here. And then we have three projects. So this is the very first project that I saw from Joe, and I want to show you this because your projects don't need to be super complex.
[00:07:30] So you see, this isn't any super big instructional design project where we're solving a business problem. This is just a visually appealing tab interaction, and I think Joe got inspiration for this from like another tab interaction that he saw online and he wanted to like modify it and recreate it. And this is what Joe showed me.
[00:07:46] And again, it's nothing crazy. It probably didn't take him very long to whip up, but I just noticed like the, the layout, the visual design skills, like this attention to detail with like the glow and stuff. Like, it just struck me where I'm like, "okay, he seems to have what it [00:08:00] takes with the technical skills, the visual design skills."
[00:08:03] I mean, he's a professor, so I know he has really good communication and writing skills. So this is the first thing I saw that made an impression on me. I think this is another like small interaction where Joe wanted to show what he could do with Articulate Storyline, and it's like a map quiz.
[00:08:19] Like first, we're identifying the different parts of Norway, right? Yep. That's click on a part of the map. Click on the right county, and then this is another piece showing off some JavaScript skills. He followed one of my tutorials and like modified it to show off that he has some of those more technical skills.
[00:08:36] And then this up here at the top, this is what I like to call the flagship project. Where Joe really dives into this like instructional design process. "Here's how I'm going to use my instructional design skillset to solve a real problem facing an organization." And in this case it's a branching scenario.
[00:08:53] So again, he is going above and beyond. He's making this more complex. He incorporated xAPI into this so [00:09:00] that this is how he was able to see which slides people are going to, which choices they're making, and get all of the good data out of this experience. And again, he frames it in the terms of the business.
[00:09:09] "Here's the problem they were facing. Here's the solution that I designed and developed." And it's really cool. I mean, you can all go through this on your own time, but it's this like scenario based experience where you are like this healthcare provider. You're navigating these conversations with this patient's family and you're trying to navigate it without offending them or upsetting them or being unprofessional.
[00:09:31] And he does a great job. I think he leans a lot on action mapping here and shows the consequences of what happens when you say the wrong thing.
[00:09:38] So again, you can go through this on your own time, but when we make the wrong choice, it actually dives into these consequences of that choice. And yeah, it carries a story right along. So I think this piece right here was really cool. And then these other supporting pieces, they show off these visual design skills, these more technical skills.
[00:09:55] It's how to build a custom interaction like this. He's using a variable here. [00:10:00] So I think these, these projects in combination were really effective. And I love how this one is like, incorporates everything, like storytelling scenarios, xAPI, branching.
[00:10:10] Joe: To chime in and answer to some of what I'm seeing in the chat.
[00:10:13] Yes, all of this was Storyline. I actually, it's embarrassing. I have yet to create a course in Rise. Every time I'd be like, "oh, I need to work on Rise." Devlin would say, "nah, it's so easy to learn, don't bother. " Which I dunno, I think having a rise course in your portfolio might be, might be a good idea to skip maybe some of the questions in the queue.
[00:10:33] But I, I've seen enough of this type of question that I think I should answer it now. If you want, say, a job in the tech space, I'm sure it doesn't hurt to have a demo showing a tech concept. But as you can see, nothing in my portfolio was about cloud computing. And in fact, my flagship was healthcare project.
[00:10:56] So I think showing good design skills that [00:11:00] you have a ID process that you can conceptualize a project... that is much more important than picking something for the exact industry that you are going to end up in.
[00:11:11] This was created with Webflow. I did know HTML and CSS at a basic level, and I thought about making a website by hand, but then I decided that what I really needed to focus on was spending time on building the content of the portfolio, not the framework for it.
[00:11:30] So I went with Webflow as a good compromise between being able to customize my website so that it looks like the way I wanted it to, but not having to spend a lot of time messing with, "okay, this looks good on this screen, but not on mobile." I let Webflow sort of take care of all that.
[00:11:49] Devlin: Good stuff. Yeah, Webflow is great.
[00:11:51] It is a little bit more of a learning curve compared to something like Squarespace or Wix, but it, you have way more, flexibility to make it look how you want. And since you already had that, that [00:12:00] little bit of background, it probably wasn't too difficult for you to pick up. Yeah. And the other thing I wanted to point out about this project is, yeah, this wasn't for like an actual client, right?
[00:12:08] Like you didn't design this for an actual healthcare agency. I think you had like a family member, right, who was a subject matter expert who deals with this kind of stuff on a regular basis. And you basically practiced doing these like SME interviews by, by, by going through this like action mapping type process with them to, to build out these scenarios, this scenario?
[00:12:28] Joe: That's correct.
[00:12:29] My brother is a physician's assistant in an ICU unit, and so I'd heard about some of the soft skills problems that can happen in ICU units with doctors simply bursting into a room and sort of saying, "Well, you have two days to live. Any questions?" Or coming in and sort of not being truthful or blunt enough.
[00:12:49] And so family members thinking like, "well, we've gotta do anything to save grandpa," when that grandpa doesn't wanna be on life support in the way that he's going to be if, [00:13:00] if the condition is properly communicated. So I'd heard enough of those stories from him that when I started thinking through what's a soft skills branching scenario, that just came to mind.
[00:13:11] So then I interviewed him about it. I ran the script by him. So he is not a, in a sense, a real subject matter expert like an, an instructional designer has to deal with when you don't have a personal connection with them. But it was kind of a good baby practice and it made the content fun to work on.
[00:13:30] Devlin: Nice. And yeah, I think that's why this project was so effective because it doesn't matter if it's for the healthcare industry or for another industry, but you're showing how you can use this skill set to solve an actual real problem that's out there in the world, and your solution like made sense to solve that problem.
[00:13:45] So I think that right there just shows that you're a competent instructional designer.
[00:13:49] Joe: So I will, I will say, beacuse I've received questions on this too, it can be tempting coming from education or from academia and I don't think it's necessarily the wrong thing to do, [00:14:00] to put up some eLearning that's directly related to your teaching or to your courses.
[00:14:06] But I think it's important to show that you can also think in another context and in a business context and solving the type of problems that businesses care about. And so it, this is my hunch again, this is just me as one data point. I think a hiring manager or recruiter is completely willing to accept that an academic or an educator has valuable skills and a valuable skill set.
[00:14:35] And I think sometimes, particularly in academia, we have this narrative of like, "what we do is so weird and special and both magical, but irrelevant that we could never do anything else and everybody will sort of see us as kind of arcane and useless."
[00:14:53] That's not true. But the other side of that is you can't just walk in and say, "well, I've got years of [00:15:00] teaching. Therefore, you, you, you're gonna immediately believe that I can operate in your context, right?" That's not true either. So I think it's important to both realize that the door is open, that you can step into these other roles because we as educators, we absolutely can.
[00:15:18] But at the same time, you have to show that you are making the effort to transition and transform yourself into that, into that context. So I think if you are doing something from your own teaching interest or personal interest, I have a random personal interest in Norwegian, the language, which is why I had that Norwegian map quiz.
[00:15:38] Probably not pulling in a huge audience there. But then I also had something more general, right? Soft skills healthcare. So I think making sure your portfolio is using the skills you have as an educator, but is showing your forward momentum and trajectory beyond academia or beyond education.[00:16:00]
[00:16:01] Devlin: Nice. Yeah, I think that's a great suggestion. Good stuff. Okay.
[00:16:05] What skills does an academic need to demonstrate in order to get hired as an instructional designer? This is cool. And you've, you've hinted at this, you've said, , we need to, we need to show how our skillset applies. So maybe you can talk a little bit about the skills that you already have as an academic or an educator, and the new ones that you had to learn.
[00:16:23] Joe: I mean, it is, it is a little almost funny to me, since we spent so much, we spent so much time in academia saying to our students, "look, a history degree doesn't mean you just have to be a historian. The skillset we are teaching you is useful in so many other areas. You're learning how to write, you're learning how to synthesize information.
[00:16:47] You're learning how to research, how to communicate, how to make an argument." And so I think academics and educators, we have those. Skills we're used to thinking about [00:17:00] questions. We're used to thinking about a learner's performance, even if it's not the exact same type of learner. So we have all of those skills, but then there's the one piece, which is the technical skillset.
[00:17:11] Like Storyline and I never had a really well developed technical skillset, but I always had a side interest. So I had taught myself HTML and CSS. I taught myself a little bit of JavaScript in the past, but it always hit sort of a wall where my brain didn't quite work well enough for me to think, oh, "I could become a programmer.
[00:17:32] I could really do high level programming," but I had that skillset there to then develop. And it's, it's maybe it's not easy to immediately step into, but if you are an academic or, or a teacher, you have done more challenging things already than learning Storyline. You've already done it. Like Storyline is not more challenging than what you do day in and day out.
[00:17:54] So there's the technical skillset and then the other, I think the challenge at [00:18:00] least, and again, right, my experience is very limited. The challenge in talking to Amazon. Thinking through how my academic experience was and was not like business problems.
[00:18:15] And one of the big problems with academia is that students are sort of becoming treated like customers by administrators. Anyway, that's a whole other issue. And so then thinking through "how do I, how do I talk about challenges that I had in the classroom and that I solved in the classroom and showing that those are the same types of things that would happen in a business setting?"
[00:18:37] So being able to say, "I have this learning objective. I noticed this was going well with it. I noticed this wasn't, this is the type of data that I found. This is what led me to the observation that this was not working. Here is what I did to now update my teaching, update the delivery, update the practice assignments, whatever it was.
[00:18:58] For the students, [00:19:00] here is the result." Right? And this is this classic STAR format. And so I think at least for academics, we're really not accustomed to talking about our process in that way. And so I think just practicing and looking at all the things you do as an educator and putting it into this format of: "I am seeing a problem.
[00:19:21] I'm addressing the problem and here are the results," right? And so some of us do that. But certainly in academia in, in a research university where, my duties as a professor we're partly teaching, but were lots of administration. And also I was writing articles and presenting at conferences and researching in archives.
[00:19:41] So really sort of narrowing in and thinking about that that way to sort of structure. my skills as problem solving was the key. So I've sort of gotten a little bit off from what skills did I need, but I don't think I actually needed any skills other than practicing [00:20:00] talking about myself and my competencies in a, a, a new context.
[00:20:05] Plus then the sort of, That sort of other pillar of the technical skills, right? Which in your ID article, you've got that sort of learn Storyline, know what Rise is, know, , know what this is, know what that is know what Cantasia is. And I think that goes, goes a long way.
[00:20:23] Devlin: Nice. Great points.
[00:20:24] I'm, I'm betting this is super valuable for all of the educators out here because, yeah, I mean, it sounds like they're using so many of these ID skillsets on a regular basis just with this, especially if you're doing this ongoing like analysis and evaluation and adjusting on the fly as you go based off of the data that's coming in, and not just like the quantitative data, like the test scores and stuff, but also the feedback you're getting from students and how they're responding to your lectures and what it is that you're.
[00:20:48] So yeah, like you said, the, the more comfortable you can get talking about that, and especially using like instructional design words, I think the better it will resonate when you're, when you're looking for those better opportunities.
[00:20:59] Joe: Yeah. And, in my [00:21:00] phone screen that I had there, I, I felt like I, I could have been perceiving this wrong, but I felt like there was this moment of, because I didn't begin actually the interview that well. I started kind of flubbing.
[00:21:12] But I got back on track when the person doing the phone screen sort of shifted to this question: "tell me about your instructional design process." And suddenly I was using the language of Cathy Moore and mapping it and needs analysis and what a kickoff session should look like.
[00:21:33] So like I had all of that in my head about how to begin a project. And as I started talking in that language, it was like, I just felt sort of the tension sort of go out of the conversation and like, "okay, we're we're talking to each other."
[00:21:48] And so I'd had this beginning part where I'd been talking about teaching in a university classroom and it had sort of been like, okay. And then suddenly I was moving into this direct business [00:22:00] context and what the phone screen, the person doing the phone screen, what she does day to day and suddenly. Now we have this common ground and it went a lot more smoothly from there.
[00:22:09] Devlin: I love it. I love it. Good tips. So speak the language of instructional design. Nice. Good stuff. Let's move on to the next question here. "What role did networking play in your journey to become an instructional designer?"
[00:22:25] Joe: Well, so this isn't gonna be reproducible but I would say networking, it was, was huge.
[00:22:32] And so academics, I'm, and I'm really, I know some of what I say is probably gonna be helpful to K12 educators, some less so. So I'm sorry for those moments because I imagine there's more people in K to 12 who will watch this than actual academics because there's just fewer academics overall.
[00:22:50] But in academia there's networking that happens through like this weird, your advisor and who the students of your advisor's best [00:23:00] friend are, and right. There's that kind of networking that's very feels very medieval actually. As far as like, it's like kinship ties and so the networking in the business world seems both sort of like icky and nobody knows how to do it.
[00:23:15] And so I think one of the best pieces of, of advice is to become a regular, right? You wanna become a sort of a known quantity who isn't just mooching off of other people but is contributing and participating with other people.
[00:23:30] And then you never know, like you're not doing that just selfishly. It is benefiting you, but you also know that this is going to be creating connections and possibilities. So for me, I hope you don't mind my telling this story. Devlin was working on this xAPI tutorial app and he's, I had like signed up to his emailing list.
[00:23:49] I'd found him like three or four days before. And so I signed up on the mailing list and then suddenly he sends out this email saying, "Hey, I'm looking for some people to test this [00:24:00] pilot of this xAPI tutorial app that I've put together." And I looked at that and I was like, "well, one, I find this interesting and I, I'd probably enjoy doing this anyway, but two, like this is a way for me to help someone who is already a known quantity.
[00:24:18] So I was like, "yes, I'm gonna do it." And suddenly I was in a Slack channel and there was like eight other people and you, it became eventually your huge Slack channel, but originally it was just like eight of us. And suddenly that turned into this opportunity for me, where we became friends and you gave me a lot of advice.
[00:24:33] And so I would say to other people to be looking for how you can contribute and help. It seems like, and I gotta be careful in how I say this, it, I think sometimes a, a natural inclination can be to get online on social media and like post things complaining how terrible job descriptions are or how awful recruiters are.
[00:24:54] And it's good to be able to vent and have sort of your people that you can vent to, but be looking for instead, [00:25:00] "how can I share an article that helps other people?" Or even, "this article's great. I'm not going to just click alike. I'm gonna comment and say what I liked about this piece." Right? And that will then begin to lead to other opportunities, other friendships.
[00:25:16] And so I just, it, to me, it was key. I would not have been able to find my way through this without people like you and the wider ID community, which is so friendly and so helpful. It's been central to me. So now networking on the other end, I didn't know anyone who worked at Amazon or Amazon Web Services.
[00:25:36] I had no personal connection to the job that I got. There was one other job that I applied to that I thought I had a personal connection to, and I didn't make it past like the first round. And that one and a job that I had zero connection with was the one I got. So I would say the networking really helped in professionalizing myself and transforming myself.
[00:25:57] And I'm sure other people would have stories about how network. [00:26:00] Led to the actual job, but for me it was the mentoring that I got from the ID community.
[00:26:08] Devlin: Nice, Joe, great answer. I think we can definitely see how networking helped you in this space.
[00:26:13] I mean, yeah, you and I clicked really well and I was like, happy to help you. Just because we had a lot of like very similar interests and yeah, what you were doing resonated with me. And you were helpful. Yeah. You gave great feedback. And there are other people too. I mean now it's like you said a great point about being like a regular and like showing up, showing up for events like this and just showing up in the community, like on LinkedIn and other events, like you definitely start seeing a lot of faces.
[00:26:33] I mean, I love that part about this community, how helpful people are and willing to share they are so...
[00:26:39] Joe: And I know you're a big proponent of content creation as a way to sort of build and professionalize yourself. I agree with that though, I will throw in one caveat, which is: there are so many sources. There is so much stuff out there that like when you're making the transition, at first you sign up to every single mailing list and you're [00:27:00] watching every single person and you just can't, like, I actually don't think I could watch Cath Ellis's content alone, even though I love everything she does.
[00:27:06] I just couldn't, like, there's too much of it. And so what I practiced is carving out a little bit of time every single day. That was going to be " what is the most important thing I can work on right now for my transition out of academia?" And that was the portfolio. So I made myself, I couldn't just get distracted watching videos.
[00:27:27] I couldn't just get distracted on LinkedIn. I had to sort of say, "this is the portfolio time and if something has to give, it's something other than the portfolio. I can't rest until the portfolio is done." And that was sort of the way I navigated.
[00:27:43] Devlin: That's good. That's a good caveat because yeah, there is so much out there, so much content, so much info, so much going on in the community that it can be easy to just... like I fall into that too.
[00:27:51] It's like, okay, it's, "I'm gonna get some work done today." And then there's stuff going on, on Slack, on LinkedIn, like all over the place. So it's like hours later and I'm like, "okay, I've had some good [00:28:00] conversations but I need to actually do my work now." So I can totally relate to that. Good. Okay, good conversation about networking.
[00:28:09] The next question is about how you positioned your academic background and job interviews. I think we, we touched on that. Is there, you, you think we touched on that well or did you wanna add anything to that?
[00:28:19] Joe: I'll just, more encouragement to people, but also warning, right? Like your academic and education background isn't this like, Sort of get outta jail card that everyone's gonna recognize is, oh, you've got the skills, but also don't buy into these harmful narratives that you're useless or that it won't translate outside.
[00:28:39] I think, I think you can just sort of confidently move forward and what they want to, well, I think anyway, interviewers and, and hiring managers want to see is, "okay, great.
[00:28:49] What is your trajectory from the skills you have and what you've accomplished to how you can help us with our challenges right now?"
[00:28:59] Devlin: Nice. [00:29:00] Good stuff. All right. This is a question I've seen coming up a lot: which credentials were most instrumental in landing your job?
[00:29:09] Joe: None. Okay, so I, let's see the credentials I had... I did, no, these aren't really credentials. But I did take some LinkedIn learning courses and I actually saw some questions about Illustrator and other tools, and I mostly was learning either through like YouTube tutorials, but often through LinkedIn Learning.
[00:29:32] I don't actually think hiring managers are impressed in the slightest by a LinkedIn Learning course. At best, it shows, "okay, this person is serious. They're not just like hate their job, so they're throwing applications out there. They're actually taking steps to learn new things." So that's good, but I don't think it, nobody cares.
[00:29:51] Do it for yourself. And I'm really glad I took all those LinkedIn Learning courses. Then I did purchase Camtasia for myself because I [00:30:00] was teaching online that semester at my university. And so I thought, "well, Camtasia's sort of this common software that IDs use, so I'm just gonna buy it."
[00:30:08] It comes with access to their certification program. So I became certified with Camtasia. That was the only cert that I had. Was it important? I don't know. I'm not using Camtasia in my current current job. Though everybody on my team is familiar with it. We aren't producing videos now.
[00:30:28] Otherwise, I was just learning from the community. I didn't do any formal courses or certifications.
[00:30:37] Devlin: Nice. So, yeah. So no formal instructional design masters? No formal instructional design education at all. Right. Only your history education. And yeah, just learning the practical skills and then reframing the skills you already had as an academic before this business instructional design world.
[00:30:55] Joe: Well, and what was really, I think the key was less going out and getting some formal [00:31:00] credentials from a program or paying for a certification. What was useful was taking my work and getting it in front of people who had sort of walked the path before me and getting their advice and feedback and learning the practical side of ":these are the skills you need.
[00:31:22] This is how you present your work. This design looks awful. This interaction is bad." I mean, I can remember early on you being like, "yeah, that, that, that looks good. But the music, Hmm. No, no on the music." And I was like, "really? I really like the music." Right? And I had to trust you and be like, no. So I think you've gotta find the mentors who can help you with the things that the hiring manager's actually going to look at and care about.
[00:31:48] And an MA from somewhere maybe helps, maybe gives you credibility. Ultimately they're far more important than some sort of degree is going to be. What does your portfolio look [00:32:00] like? And that may not be for all jobs. So this is my data point in my job. It required you that the job ad required you to have a portfolio, and I have a feeling that's what they looked at.
[00:32:10] Devlin: Yeah, that's a great point. And what I've heard from people before, , people before me when I'm breaking into the field and what works for me is, yeah, it's always that portfolio. Like that's what's going to get you credibility in this space is the actual work that you can do. Not so much to the certificates that you have or the credentials that you have, especially in the corporate space.
[00:32:27] It might be a little bit different in Higher Ed and the federal government level, but in the corporate space, they wanna see what you can do. What do your design skills look like? Do you write well? And that's gonna speak a thousand times louder than, "oh, he has a certificate from this program,"
[00:32:40] Joe: so, right.
[00:32:40] Yeah. And yeah, it totally is a different ballgame in higher ed. And I think that's, that's right. What I, what I've heard, I suspect it is right, that in higher ed they do wanna see degrees. So this is about high tech, this is about transferring to the tech world or to the business corporate world.
[00:32:56] I imagine healthcare is probably similar. Yeah. So what you need is what you [00:33:00] are all doing already, what you need is people like like our ID community, right? Devlin is sort of facilitating here and learning through this community. That's not to say that some other program wouldn't be great and give you what you need, but I didn't.
[00:33:17] Devlin: Nice. Good stuff. Alright, our next question is about resumes specifically. So how did you turn an academic CV, which I, from my experience, they're, they're very long, right? Like multiple pages. Especially for you, I know you're like winning awards and stuff, , and how do you convert that into a one page corporate friendly resume?
[00:33:37] Yeah,
[00:33:38] Joe: so my I think my academic CV was somewhere around 10 or 11 pages. Let's be transparent. Like what things did I spend money on? What things did I not spend money on? I spent money talking to a consultant, getting feedback. I spent money with actually that same consultant I talked about who works at Google where she helped me take my 10 page academic CV down to the two pager.
[00:33:59] So, to [00:34:00] me, that was something where I needed feedback from an expert and I could have learned on my own eventually, but that was a place where I wanted to take a shortcut. So it was worthwhile to me, cuz she's a hiring manager, she does hiring at Google, where I was like, "great, let, like you tell me. Here." And so for that, for that process, it was really boiling down what are the things I've done that show initiative? That show me creating something? That show me solving something that would be of interest to a hiring committee?
[00:34:41] So, for instance, I have a book. To get tenure, I had to publish a book. I published a book with Oxford University Press. It won a significant prize in my subfield.
[00:34:50] I did British history and also religious history. I don't mention that on my resume because nobody cares in the corporate world. I think I mentioned in passing[00:35:00] that, among my other duties was right, conducting research, publishing articles in a book, providing leadership on university committees.
[00:35:07] That's it, right? So, so much of what was my academic identity didn't matter, but in fact, being able to say, "I have taught courses using Camtasia. I have administered courses using an LMS. I created or participated in the creation of this digital humanities initiative." That was actually, I think the material that was interesting to AWS at least, right?
[00:35:30] They have these behavioral interview questions and a lot of them were along the lines of, "talk about something you started talk about when you stepped outside of your job duties because you saw a problem that needed to be solved. What did you solve? What did you do?" So looking through, and we all do this as academics and educators, but we don't like, we actually usually don't get praised for it or any sort of acknowledgement for it.
[00:35:53] It's the stuff that's happening on top of our, our main duties... look for those things and sort of think through what [00:36:00] you've done that's actually sort of changed processes, that's changed actual outcomes.
[00:36:05] So sort of transforming your CV to talk about collaboration management, creation of learning was the key and right. Sadly, for an academic who prides themselves on like your huge list of accomplishments that can actually be boiled down to something that's very, very succinct.
[00:36:26] Devlin: Nice. And so did you end up going with that two page version of that resume or, I remember because you showed it to me and I pushed you to go down to one, so I was wondering. Okay, nice. Then...
[00:36:34] Joe: I went to one, so again, my secret for your, for this job process was whatever Devlin tells me I do, which feels like sort of giving up a lot of my own personal agency, but I thought like, what's the worst that can happen?
[00:36:48] And of course right now it's really important to flag this. My job transition, coming from a place of real privilege, many people in academia have to make the jump because the job [00:37:00] market is awful. There's like, so I was a British historian and literally there's like one or two jobs in British history per year and far more PhDs are produced.
[00:37:09] And so it'll be at a moment of crisis where you've gotta change or it'll be someone on the tenure track who's not getting tenure. It's become clear that that's not going to happen and they have to make the jump. Whereas I was tenured, I had nothing to lose. And I had all the time in the world in, in a sense.
[00:37:25] That was really privileged. And it enabled me then to sort of say, "Devlin seems to know what he is doing. I can afford to spend half a year on the job market following his advice. And if it doesn't turn out, then I'll change my strategy."
[00:37:41] So you told me to do a one page version. So I did. So I, I came up with a two page version with the consultant at Google. And then, with your feedback? I reduced it to, to the one pager.
[00:37:54] Devlin: Nice. Okay. Yeah, I just wanted to clarify because that's still what I recommend to people is the one pager, but, so I wanted to, to [00:38:00] know for sure.
[00:38:00] Cool. Alright, I think we can get through a couple more questions here. What information or skills did you need to have already for the job?
[00:38:08] Joe: The skills that I think I needed... honestly, for the job I'm doing right now, what I really need are Storyline and Audacity. I will, I think at other times in my career, be using other tools.
[00:38:23] I think it's less important to focus on "oh, I've demonstrated I can use 12 tools or 14 tools," so it's like not a magic number, nor is there a magic one solution. I think Captivate or Storyline both are popular. Both are fine. I think Storyline's more common, so just run with that. I think being able to show your design abilities, your sort of layout and design abilities.
[00:38:54] That Design for Non-Designers book that you recommend was [00:39:00] so helpful. So I think that combined with showing that you can follow an instructional design process through to create a project that's addressing a business problem, that's what you need to do. And the tool to me, I'm assuming, is less critical.
[00:39:18] Some people would ask as I listed as one of my skills, Illustrator? Yeah. I took one of the LinkedIn Learning. They have those massive Illustrator courses. Ultimately what I really need to do is kind of what you demonstrate in your YouTube video of like, take a vector graphic and change the colors and get rid of this part.
[00:39:35] That's really all you need to do in Illustrator, mostly at least for my particular role, right?
[00:39:40] Devlin: Yeah. I'd say, yeah, for most roles on that. Cause I did the same thing. I spent like a summer going through like tons of Illustrator tutorials, and I used like maybe half of what I learned in like, the intro course.
[00:39:50] Joe: Yeah. Yeah. Now I do think that the fact that I messed around with xAPI and JavaScript was useful for my, I don't think [00:40:00] this would be the case for all roles, but just for... right. There's always gonna be the sort of the luck or the chance or that thing that helps you with one given job. I think this job at AWS is they, they need instructional designers who can stomach really technical content.
[00:40:15] And so I think the fact that I was able to talk about JavaScript, xAPI, I'm comfortable with the, at the Unix prompt. I'm know what version control is. I've done a little bit with Git before. I think just being able to say that sort of created some comfort around "Okay. Because what we do on my team, we often don't understand the content that we're creating learning for."
[00:40:39] Right. Beacuse it's super technical, high level stuff. And I think in the past some people have left the team because after a year they're just like, " I can't, this content is just too technical for me to enjoy working with." So I think that helped. But the actual tools, I just needed Storyline. [00:41:00]
[00:41:00] Devlin: Nice. Good answer.
[00:41:01] And this next question might be the last one we have time for, but it is very relevant and it's about how long it took you to learn these tools. So how long did it take you to like learn Storyline to a competent level and xAPI for example?
[00:41:15] Joe: I mean, a couple months.
[00:41:16] I am an academic, I can get obsessed with things, so I just worked on it in my spare time. I think my portfolio ultimately, like actually some of the user interface, like on my flagship, I wouldn't do now it's too complicated and fussy and actually distracts. But I was really trying to show, "oh, I can handle variables.
[00:41:35] I can track and do some of these more advanced features in Storyline." I just followed my curiosity. I just wanted projects that were satisfying to me and all told, yeah, cause my portfolio was pretty much in place by October. And I got in contact with you in June, so I'd never used Storyline before.
[00:41:54] I'd never done xAPI before, so June to October. That was the timeline. [00:42:00]
[00:42:00] Devlin: Nice. Okay, that's helpful.
[00:42:02] Joe: Can I throw up one more, one more thing to those of you in academia, academia, we're in a profession that, and this happens in education where we tend to have this narrative that to leave is a betrayal of students or a betrayal of who you are as a teacher and a researcher.
[00:42:18] And also that the world outside is somehow terrible compared to this privileged life in academia. And I wanna encourage you- granted I'm only five weeks into my new job - but I'm having so much fun and I'm in such a healthy mental place outside of academia. There is a better world out there. Or it could be, it might not be for you, but for some of us, it's a better world and a better fit.
[00:42:41] Go explore it. It's out there and you've got the skillsets. You just, you just need to sort of put together that portfolio and talk about what you're doing in a business context on your resume, and you're ready.
[00:42:54] Devlin: Great. I think that's a good parting word of advice and encouragement.
[00:42:58] So thank you Joe. [00:43:00] Thank you everyone for coming. This is a great convo and I had a lot of fun with it. So thanks everyone.