Career Diversity: Helping People Grow Through Instructional Design
“Instructional design,” says John Sullivan (PhD 1981), “is about helping people learn things that are going to be useful for their job—and to increase their performance and fulfillment.” Sullivan’s career in instructional design spans 40 years, from early years at Wilson Learning in Minneapolis to two decades with his own independent firm; from in-person training to online asynchronous. Now retired, he recommends the field to English PhD and BA alums because literary study hones empathy, analysis, and synthesis, essential skills for instructional design. Plus, he says, it’s fun! Sullivan graciously answered our questions via Zoom.
What is most energizing about a career in instructional design?
Every project is different. Every project. So it forces you to master, right, this whole branch of different topics. I’m teaching myself about business, leadership, sales. As opposed to, if you go into academia, your focus gets narrower and narrower. Rather than teaching the same subjects to the same students with the same colleagues for 40 years, I had a chance to teach all kinds of different things to all kinds of different audiences around the world. I got a chance to see London, Paris, Singapore, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, paid for.
The content that you're teaching them is fun to learn about. And this is important: it’s not just the technical content that you learn in a career in instructional design. You also learn a lot about what I call the technology of insight. For example, why win-win works, what it looks like. Things about role, how role and people's understanding of their own role is critical. You learn stuff about communication skills. What does “active listening” mean? It’s not pretending that that person has something interesting to say. It's about knowing that nobody's going to tell you right off the top of their head what’s on their mind. You need to dig for it. “Tell me more.” And then you go to the various levels of questioning.
One of the most important principles of instructional design is you never have the right to answer a question that you have not gotten them to ask. So one of the most fun things about design is getting them to ask that question. And then you provide enough of an answer that it leads to the next question that they want to have answered. It’s like you're a chef with a multi-course meal: with every question, you provide an answer which tees up the next question.
The most interesting audience that I tend to work with is people who say, "I can't do X, because I'm just a Y.” You know, I can't be a leader, because I'm just a chemist. I can't be a salesperson, because I'm just an engineer. With instructional design you help them do their job better at the same time that they see themselves in a different and more useful way, a way that helps them understand the real role that they're playing.
Describe your career path.
My dissertation was "Women, Wine, and Song: Three Minor Genres of Seventeenth-Century British Poetry." My advisor was the great Tom Clayton. A combination of two things led me toward the alt path. One was external: in 1981, the academic job market crashed, you know, and it's never recovered.
The internal part: I did English because I could do it well, but I didn't like to teach it very much. I love to read, but I hate grading papers. I decided I really did like to help people learn things, that really engaged me. I had developed in graduate school a portfolio of copyediting, of books and articles. I hated it. I absolutely hated it, but it helped: my first job after graduation was with a company that made training programs for stockbrokers, financial services people. I was hired as an assistant editor. So I'm looking around, looking for heavy editing opportunities. That one really needs a rewrite; let me take a shot at it. Then finally I just said, I can do better. Let me just take one and do it myself. I transferred my allegiance from editing to program development. Did that for about six months.
Then I got a job in a tech company in Minneapolis, CPT Corporation, as a program developer. It was a dedicated word processor company. Really interesting, really fun. In the first environment, I learned a whole lot about financial stuff that is still serving me well today. And in the second one I learned about tech. The reason why I did CPT was to learn what it looked like to be in the training department inside the corporation. And then I went to Wilson to see what it was like to be product development inside a product development corporation. I was in charge of their sales offering for a while.
Then a colleague of mine and I decided to leave Wilson. We started our own company and ran that for about five to seven years. Then I went completely on my own for another 15 years. If you have a direction you want to go, the strategy is to figure out where your strengths are. Figure out where you want to go, and then figure out what the steps are that are going to get you there.
What skills honed during your graduate studies have been helpful in instructional design?
The basic model that everybody uses in design is ADDIE: assessment, design, development, implementation, evaluation. What you learn in literary studies is, number one, empathy. If you're reading a novel or poem, you're trying to understand the world from the speaker's point of view (not the poet's necessarily). You get used to trying to get inside somebody else's head. So, in design, understanding your audience. What’s their question? And understanding the client’s business outcomes. What do they want to accomplish with all this?
Number two, analysis. And then synthesis: you put it back together again in a new way. You use all of those things when you're studying literature, when you're studying history, when you're studying almost any liberal arts discipline. Communications stuff too, writing. You learn how to give people an overview, how to make transitions, how to write expository prose.
What do you wish you had known as a graduate student?
I wish I knew about the job market, and I hope that that happens there now. Just to be upfront with people that there aren't many jobs. About two-thirds of the way through, I knew I wasn't going on to the academic route. And I decided that I was going to finish just because I wanted to finish. If somebody gets a PhD in the liberal arts, they can definitely say that they have sand, they've got grit. They can do something massive and complex without much support, without much supervision, with very little encouragement, and sometimes with no golden ring at the end of the merry-go-round. That's significant. You can sell that. “You're looking for somebody who's self-motivated, who can manage a complex, broad project? I'll show you: black cover, 300 pages long!"
