RKCS Learning Solutions

I am always on the prowl for new opportunities, contracts, call them what you may. One of the things I am learning is that keywords are extremely important. If you have the right keywords, you will come up with the just what you are looking for and even more. If not, you may come up with nothing, or the wrong thing. However, there are certain terms that seem to be intertwined or mean different things to different people. For instance, I am discovering that for some people, instructional designer and elearning designer are the same thing. But elearning designers and elearning developers are totally different. Yet, you can be an elearning designer and elearning developer all at once. It just depends on who is asking. There are some that are looking for training content developers, yet the job description is that of an instructional designer. In other situations, you may see a training content developer that only develops content that has already been fleshed out by an instructional designer.

Johnathan Atleson wrote something the other day about the different roles of an instructional designer. This is a great read and it is a great thing to understand these roles. However, in looking for opportunities, you can’t just type in ‘Instructional Designer’ and expect to be rewarded with all of the different roles to which he is referring. Here are some that I found that can refer to the same roles, are mixtures of roles and to some people are interchangeable. Because of that interchangeability, I will not attempt to define them.

1. Instructional Designer
2. Instructional Systems Designer
3. Instructional Content Developer
4. Courseware Developer
5. e-Learning Specialist
6. e-Learning Developer
7. e-Learning Designer
8. e-Learning Content Developer
9. Training Content Developer
10. Training Development Specialist
11. Training Course Designer
12. Instructional Design Specialist
13. Instructional Technology Consultant
14. ????

Are there others that you can think of to add to this list? I ask because if I had this list when I started searching, I could have taken advantage of a whole lot more opportunities. What have you seen?