Why SMEs and IDs Need Each Other
I’ve been seeing a trend around hiring in the Instructional Design space lately. If you’ve been watching employment trends, you’ve probably seen this, too. Hiring managers for Learning and Development (L&D) teams are increasingly prioritizing industry knowledge over Instructional Design skills–or at least, balancing the two.
Perhaps the most concerning part is that this trend is coming from within L&D itself, a sector that understands the importance of learning technology. Industry experience is not a problem–but I fear we are asking too much of our Instructional Designers (IDs). If you’re reading this as a hiring manager who has emphasized industry knowledge as a plus or a requirement in a job posting, don’t worry! This trend has been growing everywhere.
That said, let’s discuss why hiring strong Instructional Designers is more important than industry experience and what you should do instead. Let’s dive in!
SMEs Can’t Book Training–Generally
First, let’s explain what a Subject Matter Expert (SME) is and why it is important in the world of coaching. SMEs are employees with knowledge and experience in a specific business area. You can have effective SMEs–people who know the inner workings of a business and how its employees provide value. But you can also have financial SMEs, legal SMEs, HR SMEs, marketing SMEs, and any other professionals in any business subject you can think of. To be an SME, one must have extensive knowledge, usually through experience in a specific job and/or industry.
When a training request comes to the L&D team, it is not always from an SME. Often, it comes from the executive or team leader, or from discovering a gap in skills or knowledge. But an SME should it becomes part of the project team when the training is developed, as the Instructional Designers rely on the knowledge of SMEs in developing the training. We will discuss this further.
Right now, you might be thinking: Why not just cut out the middleman and send an SME to develop the training? This is a reasonable argument. Companies today are trying to increase productivity per job and reduce costs. Teams run thin, and many roles perform more than one, if not several, tasks.
That said, consider costs, not budgeting but efficiency and effectiveness. According to the American Psychological Association, even mental retardation caused by switching between jobs can cost about 40% of a person’s productivity. SMEs are your company’s experts, the best at what they do. Where they provide the most value to an organization is through execution theirs work, not another.
More importantly, many people who do not know their subject deeply and have years and years of experience make a mistake when it comes to practicing writing: they have been in the weeds of the profession for so long that they forget what it is like to be a beginner. They don’t think about breaking complex information into digestible chunks. They don’t think their audience doesn’t have the same level of knowledge as them. They write the training as they currently understand it rather than how their audience needs to receive it. Actually, knowing a topic and designing effective training on it are two completely different skills.
This, of course, is not true in all cases. There are times when an SME is also a good teacher. But I can say with confidence from my 12 years of corporate identity work that finding content for SMEs is often a waste of experience. We Instructional Designers spend much of the first part of a project sorting through stacks of notes, papers, SOPs, and other existing documents and presentations. In cases of really completed, developed training from SMEs, it is almost always far from growing and lacking any kind of communication or retention strategies used by IDs—that is, SMEs do not know how to keep students interested, how to reinforce learning, or how to make learning accessible. They simply do not understand the art of Instructional Design. And obviously, they don’t deserve it. That is not their role.
So, what’s wrong with hiring an ID with industry experience? Sounds like that would solve the problem, right? However, the goal should not be to eliminate SMEs. It should be to stop asking them to do two special tasks at the same time. Likewise with IDs.
Instructional Designers Learn Experts First
I think we all like to believe that we can do anything we put our minds to. Certainly, most of us have been taught that from a young age. And that doesn’t mean one can’t do it anything else. But one thing is true: no one can do it everything. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. We all have areas of expertise. And because expertise takes time and experience, we can only be skilled in so many fields.
Many IDs have worked in many industries and created all different types of training. That’s not a setback—it’s one of our greatest strengths. It teaches valuable skills that we would not learn if we worked in one industry or with one type of training. In my experience, moving out of my first industry, pharmaceuticals, into specialty food services forced me to think more deliberately about what I designed. The audience was different—that meant different constraints to consider. The technology was different—that meant sending training in a different way. The needs of the industry and the goals of the company were different—that meant deliberately ensuring that the needs and goals were met with each project.
In fact, entering new industries and working with different audiences forces us to think differently. Each time we think differently, we learn something new about our environment. This is the very core of how we gain expertise as IDs and become SMEs in our skill set. If you ask for an ID with industry experience, you are greatly limiting your available talent pool. You’re looking for a unicorn who can do it all: someone who specializes in reading again industry expert. He wants people who are not usually there.
Rather than industry professionals or practitioners, IDs are SMEs in adult learning. We understand how to find gaps in skills or knowledge and what will work best to fill those gaps. We understand how to determine whether training will help in any way to meet the company’s mission. We have the ability to use tools to design training. We are writers, storytellers, graphic designers, project managers, and change managers. A good ID can apply these same skills to every industry and type of training.
Instructional Design is a specialized field of study. Think of it this way: Can you hire an attorney to do your taxes? They may be able to handle it, but would it be worth it to hire a tax professional? Probably not. So, if you’re not an industry expert, who should you hire for your ID role?
How SMEs and IDs Need to Work Together for Better Results
The best thing you can do for your team is to hire the best learning specialist you can regardless of their industry experience. You are looking for someone who shows that he is able to teach adults, how to learn about the new business they are in, how to understand the goals of the company and the constraints of students to produce effective training. But this does not mean that IDs are better than SMEs for your business!
The idea is that IDs and SMEs should not try to exchange. Our work it’s perfect by others. In fact, we wouldn’t exist without the other. We IDs rely on SMEs for their expertise. Then, we take that expertise and put it into actionable training that really works for the industry and audience, guided by feedback and ideas from SMEs. IDs bring learning expertise, SMEs bring business and role expertise, and IDs bring the two together to bring training to life. In fact, research on Instructional Design has long emphasized the importance of collaboration between SMEs and IDs, noting that each role brings different but important expertise to the learning development process.
The result
At the end of the day, if you are committed to delivering the best quality training to your organization, stop trying to recruit for both roles in one place. Instructional Designers have a special skill set. Let the learning experts be first and foremost, and let them do what they do best: partner with SMEs in the industry to produce training that will really work for their audience.
