A long time ago in a company far, far away I developed technical and customer service oriented training programs.  Had a nice spiffy title – Instructional Designer – and spent a lot of time doing on-site program analysis before settling down and scribbling planning like mad. My boss described me as a gut instinct developer.  From the beginning I could apply the theory without actually knowing the ins and outs of the language associated with the field.  Despite falling into ID after way too much time in the tech support/training worlds, I really enjoyed learning about the field and developing my skills.  I even suffered through completed years of classes at the local university to increase my knowledge of theory and learn the language.  I have a nice pretty certification to show for it.

My ego (and boss) liked to think I was good at what I did.  I built a reputation for delivering a solid product. It also didn’t hurt that I loved to travel.

Somewhere along the way, I discovered that I wasn’t getting all my needs met at zee giant corporation and accepted a position in a support role at a local college.  The downside of this was that, without significant formal education, I would need to complete a few degrees in order to return to the type of work I’d done – and loved – in the past.  Ergo, the return to university and constant whining that appears on my blog of late.  For now I help implement and support eLearning programs.  IDs do the heavy lifting and I help make their vision a reality.

Sometimes their visions appear as kaleidoscopes.  It can take weeks to put all the pieces together.

The bright side is that once completed we can replicate the original course (manually) in a matter of hours.  This turned out to be a good thing when late this afternoon we discovered that the LMS the course was developed in wasn’t compatible with the LMS the course was going to be delivered in.  EEP!  No quick replication through backup restores could save us.  Thankfully all the heavy lifting had been completed last week and the manual rebuild of the site in the new LMS was completed in 3 hours.  Yay!

Life, and work, is so much easier when you have a plan mapped out and can follow it.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.