The short answer is “No.” The instructional design process brings important benefits to corporate training. An instructional designer knows many ways of promoting knowledge, skill, or behavior acquisition. Moreover, they know how to choose the best way—strategies, methods, and technologies—for each project. Instructional designers rely on instructional design models to create engaging and effective training solutions. The learning content, activities, assessments, and overall learning experiences that they design also increase knowledge retention and recall. Oh! At the same time, an instructional designer keeps client needs and learner profiles top of mind.

Big “No.” Our instructional designers take the original learning material to pieces and dive into its details. Then, they identify key information that your employees must learn. Finally, they gather all the pieces they reworked or created from scratch and put them together. The look and feel of learning material is a subsequent concern that sits on top of a good information foundation. And that’s an instructional developer’s concern. An instructional developer is a professional who actually builds the course using authoring software. They work on the aesthetics and interactivity of the course designed by the instructional designer. Instructional developers combine content with multimedia elements to deliver effective learning experiences. And the effectiveness of these experiences depends not only but also on visually appealing and intuitive user interfaces.

Not necessarily. Well, first of all, it depends on the size and complexity of your project. Then, there’s an agile take to instructional design that’s growing in the training industry. Recently, instructional designers are using iterative and faster approaches to their processes. They design in (short) sprints and implement prototypes that stakeholders evaluate. This early validation is what speeds up the process and sets agile models apart from more traditional ones.