Developing Yourself

As a teacher or member of a corporate learning team, you spend plenty of time helping others develop.  Hopefully you also take the time to consider your own development.  If you have a company or leader that tells you what you should learn, the choice is easy.  If not, you need to figure out what you want to learn.

Should I learn Flash or HTML5?

Unfortunately, there are no clear-cut answers.  Instead, you should take a cue from the instructional design process and do a needs analysis.  Do you need all the formal rigor, data and time that you’d apply to an expensive project?  Absolutely not – your future isn’t worth taking the time to do it right! 

For argument’s sake, let’s assume you are worth the investment.  Rather than just diving deeper into the rapid authoring tool you know and love, you should take stock of yourself, your company, your industry, and your future.  No one of them holds all the answers.  However, taking a holistic look will allow you to figure out where you can go.

You are here

As someone who works with technology, there is a good chance you are worshiped by those with lesser technical skills.  There’s a problem with the projector in the conference room.  Have no fear – you’re here!  While it’s great to be able to help people (and you absolutely should), sometimes that can impact your perception of yourself. 

These people exist.  You know them.  You may even be one.  They show up to interviews and tell the “businessman” hiring manger that they are a Flash expert, dropping jargon and buzzwords like a preteen texter.  However, when someone asks them what types of interactions they have designed and what ActionScript they employed to make that happen, they go blank – then backpedal.

It’s important to look in a true mirror and be very honest with yourself.  Can you create stellar Captivate modules, but haven’t opened Flash?  No problem, that’s where you are, and there’s no shame in that.  Understanding what software you know, what skills you possess, what knowledge you have, and what experiences have shaped you will help you better understand where you are.  You can’t use a map unless you know where you are starting.

The buildings

After you understand where you are, it’s important to understand your company (assuming you aren’t completing your LinkedIn profile in the hopes of getting out in the next 3 weeks).  There are two important aspects to understand about your company: the strategy and the technology.

Understanding the strategic direction of your company helps point you down the right path.  You can use this to help determine if you are adding value to the corporation or merely spinning your wheels.  Additionally, you need to understand the direction of your department.  Hopefully, your departmental strategy helps support the corporate strategy – if not, there might be larger issues.  In addition to understanding if you are adding value, knowing the business will help you understand where the business is headed.  Knowing that, you can be a part of what helps them get there.  If you are a facilitator and your company is in tight financial times, stopping all non-essential travel, it is more valuable to develop your virtual facilitation skills than it is your library of face-to-face icebreakers. 

The second aspect to understanding your company is understanding the technology available.  While there are certainly plans to enhance this technology, if you are in a locked down company, locked into browser technology that is ten years old, there is no reason (at your current company) to learn to leverage the latest browser technology.  That isn’t to say that learning the latest and greatest isn’t valuable, it just won’t help you deploy anything at your current company anytime soon.

The roads

Similar to the IT analysis of your company, understanding the trend of the industry is also helpful to define where you are headed.  While there is value in differentiating, there is also value in being able to utilize the more popular toolset (especially if you are moving to a company that has specific tools approved for use). 

In the eLearning field, Flash is a great example of this.  While there is certainly a battle that has blazed for years (although seems to have died down a bit) about Flash vs HTML5, the learning technology field is firmly rooted in the Flash camp.  With rapid development tools outputting in Flash and allowing the import of phenomenal swf artifacts that interact with the module, it’s still a very viable technology.  However, if you are looking to become a San Francisco-based web designer, Flash may not be the tool for you.

Your destination

The final step to your personal needs analysis is taking stock of where you want to go.  If you are a highly skilled, technical eLearning developer who has identified JavaScript as a personal gap that is helpful in the industry and your company, but you want to become a leader in the organization, your time might be better spent developing those competencies.  This crystal ball exercise can be very difficult.  Looking three to five years out can be tough enough, but even more difficult is knowing that by making decisions that lead to a certain path, you are closing doors to alternatives that cannot easily be re-opened. 

Back to the lame map analogy, even if you know where you are (self, current state) and you know what the environment looks like (your company and industry), you need to know your destination in order to deliberatively move in that direction. 

So… I should learn Flash?

Yes.  You should learn Flash, HTML5, mobile development, Acrobat, Premiere, chroma-key, Screenr, audio editing, voiceover narration, iBooks Author, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, Excel, PowerPoint, Word, iOS app development and Emotional Intelligence.

Assuming you don’t have an unlimited mental capacity and an unlimited amount of time, you’ll want to narrow that list down to the gap between where you are and where you want to be that will help your company within the context of your industry.