Analytical skills - needs, tasks, processes, business requirements.
Knowledge of how people learn and the ability to apply it to design an effective solution.
Problem solving and lateral thinking abilities.
Being able to put yourself in the learners’ shoes.
Research skills - being able to get on top of a subject and its audience quickly.
Writing skills - ability to write and present in different styles for different audiences and applications.
Knowledge of and ability to use different instructional strategies to achieve objectives - tutorials, games, simulations, questions/tests (and feedback), situation simulation, mazes and so on.
Understanding of the opportunities and constraints presented by the technical specification - you can’t do ID without knowing this.

Nice to haves are these, but many IDs don’t have these skills:
Graphics
Video production/direction
Project management

What we have now is very similar to the mid 80s, when WYSIWYG authoring systems, like the rapid systems of today, were quite popular. IDs not only wrote scripts, but also developed them and did graphics. The packages then got more sophisticated in the 90s so coding was needed for systems like TenCORE, but very few IDs could do that elegantly). We’re now in the era of rapid solutions… a bit like the 80s.

Are you the owner of the company by any chance? Sound like the same old ‘more for less’ to me?!

We’ll try and take a bit more time to read over the blog posts in the future! I think learnt is more common in British English than American.

Good post and thanks.

‘over time the roles began to blur, the number of people required for each skill changed, programmers learnt photoshop and graphic designers learnt HTML and basic code and this led to much more flexibility, a good thing!’

While I agree that too much specialization is not healthy. I’m not sure that the divergence and dillution of the work team specialty has been a good thing for the industry.

News flash, most programmers that try to be graphic artists (visual designers) suck at it. This also goes for most, not all, visual designers that attempt to program and instructional designers that attempt to dabble in either direction. The result in larger shops are a top heavy number of generalists that aren’t good at any one thing but can meet mediocrity at just about any of the activities required to finish a product. Meanwhile all of the characteristics of the product that could have been great, weren’t. Affinities matter, talent is non-transferrable, and focus pays off in spades.

Somewhere along the way we lost our grasp on the concept of design. In a world of ‘activities’ and the false belief that anyone can do it well, the outputs have suffered horribly.

If ISD’s are to survive they must do two things:

1. Learn what design is, what it means, and how to do it. Design IS NOT about the designer, many (most) ISD’s i’ve worked with have a fairly me-centric view. Design IS problem solving for the end-goal and is USUALLY for real people.

2. Stop trying to do everything else. An ISD resource should be leveraged almost full time doing learning strategy, validation, evaluation. Not all of the other things that lie below that pay band.