It’s been a slow start to the 2010 Unofficial Salary Survey of eLearning, Content Development and Training jobs. You can now view the responses by following the Responses link.
Some highlights so far:
Functions that have participated are Instructional Designers (33%) and Technology/Programmers (22%), followed by Project management (17%) and Graphics and Media (11%).
Most participants have 10 years work experience (28%) followed by 5 and 3 years (11% each).
So far the survey seems to be dominated by male responders (72%).
Only 28% people switched jobs last year.
Mostly people from elearning/training vendors have participated (72%).
City spread is fairly even with nearly equal participation from NCR, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Chennai. Surprisingly, Bangalore has had low participation so far.
Some changes I had introduced in this year’s survey were:
Number of years of experience is more specific rather than a range.
Salary details are now a number instead of a range. This will help get better inputs about salaries.
Gender info can help to see if there is any gender inequality in salaries.
Industry info can help identify salaries in different industries.
The survey can be useful only if more people participate. Do spread the word around.
There's nothing official about this survey. The survey is not based on responses by companies but based on responses provided by you, the employee. This survey is not associated with any organization. The survey is anonymous.
This survey is for you if you are an Instructional Designer, Content Developer, Technical Writer, Project Manager, Graphics designer, Flash Programmer, Content Integrator, Tester, Editor, Trainer, Training administrator, SME, or any other role involved in elearning, content development and training delivery.
Click Unofficial eLearning Salary Survey of India 2010 to participate in the survey. I will publish the findings on my blog here sometime in August/September 2010. This year’s questionnaire attempts to find out more about you and the industry to provide a more in-depth analysis.
Help derive maximum benefit from this survey: spread the word about this survey. Email, Tweet, Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn and Blog about this page for your friends and colleagues.
It’s time to launch the 2010 Unofficial Salary Survey for elearning, content development and training jobs in India. There's nothing official about this survey. The survey is not based on responses by companies but based on responses provided by you, the employee. This survey is not associated with any organization. The survey is anonymous.
This survey is for you if you are an Instructional Designer, Content Developer, Technical Writer, Project Manager, Graphics designer, Flash Programmer, Content Integrator, Tester, Editor, Trainer, Training administrator, SME, or any other role involved in elearning, content development and training delivery.
Click Unofficial eLearning Salary Survey of India 2010 to participate in the survey. I will publish the findings on my blog here sometime in August/September 2010. This year’s questionnaire attempts to find out more about you and the industry to provide a more in-depth analysis.
Help derive maximum benefit from this survey: spread the word about this survey. Email, Tweet, Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn and Blog about this page for your friends and colleagues.
I have been reading about agile development lately. One of the key components of agile development is team structuring. Typically in large organizations, content development teams are organized either as functional teams or as project teams with larger organizations typically having functional structures in place. Agile methodology suggests a more project structure. Teams work dedicatedly for the project, preferably located close to each other.
Having seen both functional team structures and project team structures, I believe both structures have their inherent strengths.
Advantage Project Teams
Projects can be completed faster. Decisions are taken faster since the complete team is working only on one project (or a few dedicated projects). There are fewer formal hand offs between functions and therefore fewer opportunities for communication gaps. There is lesser waiting time for functional resources to be available. There are fewer review/approval cycles for each function.
Project teams are generally more cohesive. There is better understanding between members of the project teams. The team is more aligned to the project. Functional teams are also cohesive but more towards the function than the project.
Advantage Functional Teams
Utilization is better in functional team structures. This is specially so in larger teams. Functional experts can move from project to project faster without having to wait for one project to complete. They don’t need to be idle while waiting for client feedback, SME inputs, or any anything like that. Number of people required in each function is better optimized and you have lesser redundancy in terms of people required.
Functional teams are more scalable. Critical skilled resources when available in a functional pool can be better utilized across the projects. Also training and development of new hires is probably easier in a functional team.
Provides individuals with growth opportunities in functional areas. This is more so in the Indian context. Typically growth is seen as change in designation, preferably when the designation has ‘Manager’ in it. Functional team structures provide more opportunities for individuals to be functional managers. Growth in project teams is fairly hierarchical. You need to become a project manager to ‘grow’.
Both team structures have their inherent strengths. The trick is to leverage the strengths of each team structure and see if best of both is possible. Which one you choose depends on many factors, like the size of the organization, skill level available, maturity of people, scalability required etc.
Whether you chose project team structure or functional team structure, in both cases there are some common things that are a must to have a successful team/project:
I recently came across a question posted on the eCube LinkedIn forum that I responded to. While the question was how a person in between jobs could keep their instructional design skills up to date, I think it is important even for those with the jobs to keep their skills up to date.
How can an experienced Instructional Designer with very limited experience in current instructional design software tools update their skills in order to be recognized and considered as a candidate for e-Learning positions? How does a person in transition keep their instructional design skills up to date in order to effectively compete for instructional design jobs in today's job market?
Start reading a lot of blogs by other experts and connect with other learning professionals through your comments. It is always hard to know which blogs to follow. Here are the blogs that I follow, or you could also browse through the blogroll on this site.
Twitter is another great tool for connecting with others. This will give you an insight into what's happening in the industry and help you stay up to date.
If you are up to it (and I strongly recommend that you do make an effort), my advice would be to start writing a blog to articulate your learning. Your blog will be a useful showcase in your job interviews (I am of course assuming that you will write about learning/instructional design).
I would also recommend that you learn various tools used in elearning. These tools are usually easy enough to get started and learn on your own. You could easily work with the demo versions of the latest tools and to get your hands dirty.
And if you are indeed in between jobs and want to stay up to date, I would advice you to start picking up small freelance assignments. No better way to stay in touch with what's happening in the industry by actually being hands on.
So far, Chennai and Pune are leading with most participants, with Bangalore and NCR following closely. Hyderabad and Mumbai are the other two cities that have participated.
Most participants are Instructional designers (55%), followed by Project management (19%) and Technology/programming (15%) functions.
This year 24% had no change in their fixed salary over last year, while 40% had an increase of less than 10%. Nearly 4% had a decrease in their fixed salary over last year.
Most (72%) instructional designers with 2-4 years experience have fixed salary in the wide range of 2.5 lac to 5 lac. Nearly 55% of IDs with 4-6 years experience are also paid in the same range. The salary range is quite wide for other roles too.
Almost everyone with more than 8 years work experience has variable compensation in addition to their fixed salary, while about a third of people with less than 6 years have a variable compensation component. Nearly 60% of project managers with less than 8 years experience have variable compensation component. Graphics/Media folks seem to be the only ones without any variable compensation so far (of the very small number that have participated). 67% of people in companies with more than 1000 people have variable compensation, while this is only 36% for companies with less than 1000 employees.
Watch this space for more detailed analysis sometime next month. Have a suggestion of what you want to see in the analysis? Leave a comment on this post.
There's nothing official about this survey. The survey is not based on responses by companies but based on responses provided by you, the employee. This survey is not associated with any organization. The survey is anonymous.
This survey is for you if you are an Instructional Designer, Project Manager, Graphics designer, Flash Programmer, Tester, Editor, Trainer, SME, or any other role involved in developing elearning or any other form of training content.
Update: Survey is closed for the year. You can view the elearning and content development salaries in India for 2009 here.
Launching the Unofficial Salary Survey for eLearning / Content Development Jobs in India for year 2009. There's nothing official about this survey. The survey is not based on responses by companies but based on responses provided by you, the employee. This survey is not associated with any organization. The survey is anonymous.
This survey is for you if you are an Instructional Designer, Content Developer, Tech Writer, Project Manager, Graphics designer, Flash Programmer, Tester, Editor, Trainer, SME, or any other role involved in developing elearning or any other form of training content. This year I also attempt to find out how the economic conditions have impacted the salary hikes this year.
I had an interesting chat conversation over the weekend with a budding instructional designer.
ID: I wanted to discuss about Instructional approaches
ID: Suppose there's a client who says " they have been using ILT that has not been successful, their mentors are not motivating enough& nw wants to change it to a WBT.......and target audience are senior &middle level managers well versed with sales, dealing with retailers etc.....
And I've to give them 2 approaches.....do u hv any ideas?
Me: why is their ILT not successful?
ID: their mentors are not motivating enough
Me: why do you believe wbt will be motivating?
ID: hmm.....It would give them the space of doing the training at their own pace and on their own
after all they are senior managers..who might not like to be trained
I mean not support trainings
Me: basically your instructional strategies need to remove the problems they are having with ILT
so if the mentors/trainers are boring, the WBT has to far far more interesting and interactive
ID: Yep.....
Me: so you have the answer...
unless i understood the question wrong
ID: and with just this information and the fact that I’ve to develop 2 approached based on level 2 interactivity.....
I needed some ideas
See.......ok, can you list down types of approaches......
one can be scenario based, case study based.....
dialogue based
Me: you should know more about the users, job profile is one, what about their other characteristics -- gender, age, race etc.
Me: also what kind of industry are they in?
ID: they are in sales industry
all senior and middle level managers
pharmaceuticals
Me: basically sales guys travel a lot, they don't like to attend training
do they have PDAs etc.?
which country are we talking about?
ID: India
Me: what access do they have to computers and Internet?
ID: broadband
Me: from home?
ID: yes
everywhere
Me: so the company is expecting the sales guys to take training from home?
ID: anytime they are free.......
Me: they are never going to be free
ID: they are senior level and middle level managers!
Me: are you expected to solve the business problem or just create a WBT?
my response will be different in each case
ID: just create a WBT
Me: :-)
Now I know this person is a budding, relatively junior instructional designer and probably is just doing what she has been asked to do. There was a sense of déjà vu for me. I know many a times, the client appears to be very clear about what they want and wants the vendor to “just create a WBT”. Not all clients want to have a business problem discussion with the vendor. And not all instructional designers want to solve business problems. They are happy with creating a WBT and getting on with their jobs. Unfortunately that’s a lose-lose situation for both clients and instructional designers.
My advice to instructional designers is to stay focussed on solving the business problems. Sometimes creating a WBT might not be the solution, even though that’s what your company may have been contracted to do. Focusing on solving the business problem will help you add value in your interaction with the client and that will in almost all cases eventually lead to more business.
And if you are a client outsourcing a learning content creation project, my suggestion would be that you work with the vendor and collaborate on solving the business problem. There is no harm in having raking up more brains to solve your business problem. And if you are sure that WBT is indeed the answer to your business problem, then provide that information to the vendor so they can do justice to your project.
Last year I wrote a brief post about tech support meme and posted a hilarious video. I recently came across a whole book about, well not exactly tech support memes though some of stories are about tech support, Indian BPO stories. BPO-Sutra is compiled and edited by Sudhindra Mokhasi and he is already calling for more stories for a volume II.
So do instructional designers have any stories to build the elearning or instructional design meme? Here are two to start with. Would love to hear more from you. Either leave your story as a comment or post a link to your blog post with the story.
ID Meme #1
This was way back sometime in the mid-nineties. We had received a huge contract to develop elearning courses from probably the largest catalog content provider at that time. So we ramped up quickly going from a team of 15 to 200 very quickly. Instructional Design was still new to India and getting good writers was hard. But we had a strong training program and very good reviewers to parse every document. During a team meeting, one of the senior reviewers very seriously suggested that we need to include geography lessons in our refresher course on writing scenarios for the American audience. Curious we asked what prompted her to suggest that. Seriously she took out a script and read out the scenario. I don’t remember the exact words but it went something like this. “You are working as a system administrator in an NGO dedicated to the cause of tiger preservation in Alaska.” We all cried laughing that day.
ID Meme #2
This is a more recent one. One of the courses was returned by an American trainer saying that he can’t teach the course as he feared he might get sued because of the examples used in the course. The course was on using SQL in relational databases. The much feared example was a SQL query to identify employees above the age or 60 years in the employee master table. Both the instructional designer and the subject matter expert were wondering what the fuss was all about. It is only an example to demonstrate conditions in an SQL query, not realizing that while in India we can get away with seeking almost any info about the employees, sensitivities in the USA is a lot different.
So what’s your elearning / instructional design meme? Share your story here.
Lately I’ve been asked by a few people on how to get started with a career in instructional design and elearning. Here are some of the questions I received:
Could someone suggest that how to start my career in Instructional Systems Design field?
I'm interested in joining the field of Instructional Design. I've done my MA in English and also a diploma course in multimedia. I would really appreciate it if you could guide me on which companies to approach and how, to secure an entry level position. I am looking for something in the NCR region.
Can u tell me how relevant is teaching exp to ID?.....If I've 4 yrs of teaching exp, what would be the starting salary in ID?
Lots of my friends want to know about some good courses they can take on ID - ISDT / Symbiosis ID are amongst courses they are considering. Any suggestions?
Well i wud lik to get som information of ID work. if u share some link and actual ID work for elearning.
Getting Started
So what does it really take to be an instructional designer? What is instructional design anyway? Christy Tucker has a great series of six posts that can help you get started. Start with her first post in the series – What does an Instructional Designer do? and follow her other posts. Closer home, Rupa Rajagopalan also provides practical tips about instructional design in her blog One-Stop Resource for Instructional Designing. Start with archives on her blog and read your way up chronological posts. I also found an interesting article by Shilpa Shet on instructional design as a career. I have also written in the past about competencies required for an instructional design role. That post also has links to other sources for the same.
You could start with the following sites to get more information about elearning, instructional design, course development, although some of these just might be too heavy for absolutely new users.
There are many elearning/content development companies in NCR region. NIIT, Genpact, IBM are the larger ones and Infopro, Liqvid, Servetium, G-Cube are some of the smaller companies in NCR region. I have compiled a small list of companies on eCube Directory listing. It is not comprehensive by any means, but a start nevertheless. I am told that there are more than 100 elearning/content development companies in India.
Instructional Design Courses
I am not sure how good the courses in India are. I recommend getting a job instead. Symbiosis is quoted more often in conversations and so must be gaining some popularity as an instructional design course. But honestly, as a manager who has had to recruit for ID, I look for prior experience, and if there is no prior experience, I look for their core writing skills and ability to learn. Having a diploma is good but not essential.
Having said that, here are some of the courses you could look at. I have not evaluated any of them and don’t necessarily endorse any of them.
Wavelength eLearning Consulting and Training in Noida provides ID & content writing, and Flash programming.
Vyaktitva in Delhi provides some advance courses on training design and facilitation skills.
Technopoint in Bangalore seems to be offering some courses on Instructional Design.
Career and Salaries in Instructional Design Jobs
Teaching experience helps but it actually depends on what you were teaching and what content you will be creating when you start with instructional design. If you were teaching in a school and you get a job to create K-12 (school) content, then your teaching experience will be relevant and may be considered when the company decides your starting salary. Most companies though will take your past work experience into consideration and give you some weightage for the same.
Basically you need to have good writing skills. This is most critical to get into instructional design job. Without good writing skills, it will be difficult to get into the role of ID. Writing skills is typically what is tested by companies for taking on new IDs.
Starting salary with 4 yrs exp but no exp in ID can vary from company to company. You can expect between 1.5 lac to 4 lac per annum CTC. The range is wide since the industry is relatively small. CTC will include PF, medical insurance etc. Refer to my unofficial salary survey of elearning and content development jobs for more inputs.
One could also try to land a job as technical writer to start with. Many technology companies hire tech writers, though it helps if you have a tech background to get started in a tech company. You will first probably start as content developer or tech writer, before moving to actual design. Good writing skills are essential for getting entry into the field.
Update: See 2009 elearning and content development salary data here.
Announcing the analysis of the Unofficial Salary Survey of elearning and content development jobs in India. This was a direct survey of individual respondents. No company response was sought. I used viral marketing to promote survey. This included an initial direct mailer and then posting on eCube Facebook and various Orkut groups. Orkut seems to have a larger Indian audience.
The survey received total 62 responses, including 8 incomplete responses. Most responses were from the NCR region, followed by Mumbai. Pune, Bangalore and Chennai had more than 4 responses, while Hyderabad, Kolkata, Coimbatore, and Cochin had 3 or less responses.
Instructional Design/Content Development had 24 responses and Project Management had 16 responses. The rest of the functions had less than 4 responses. I provide analysis of only ID and PM functions.
In case you are interested in the PPT or raw data to draw your own conclusions (the survey was anonymous), please contact me on email at manishmo2007[at]gmail[dot]com.
As part of judging entries for the Brandon Hall Awards this year, I encountered an elearning module that attempted to teach the company’s sales people its new service orientation and its service oriented products. The elearning module was very well made, full of videos (actually it was practically a ‘video-based-training’ disguised as elearning) with very well written script and extremely professional production quality. The script and production quality was so good that I would have been proud of the product if it had been made by my team.
I went through the modules as a learner, something I hadn’t done in a while. I was probably the right audience, not in terms of being part of that company, but perhaps with about the same experience as the intended audience. So after being impressed with the first few video clippings I got down to actually attempting learning from it. And man was I unhappy going through the training. The training included lots of case studies and ‘role plays’ (the wrong and right way to sell videos). As an intended audience, I felt bad and felt the training was demeaning my intelligence and showed what I might be doing right now (remember I was trying to be in the actual learner’s shoes) in very bad light. Something like this might work in a controlled classroom environment where a trained instructor would be able to provoke me and respond to my reactions to the content being taught, and I might also have a healthy debate with others in the class. However using the elearning module, I felt the module was preaching to the choir and insulting the learner’s intelligence. Since it had no facilitation of a trainer and there were no other peers to learn from or debate with, I felt very bad about the content.
Which makes me wonder – can self-paced asynchronous elearning be a good tool for attempting to change behaviour? Is elearning better suited for certain types of audiences when attempting to do this? Are there some content areas that should just be dealt with in a classroom? Or perhaps is there a better way to teach behaviour change using elearning?
Need I say more... although I have a feeling it's not just the clients, we probably do this to our process too... and perhaps this is what the developers feel about getting reviews from SMEs, reviewers and editors...
I came across this video of Thiagi speaking at UMBC Training Forum. This is a longish video, about an hour and 40 minutes, but thoroughly enjoyable. Thiagi is at is irreverent best as always. Definitely worth the time to go through the video fully.
Here’re some of the things he talks about in the video.
What is contextualized learning? Learning that takes place in the real world to achieve objectives with real world relevance. He gives the example of a course with a mid-term evaluation as a non-contextual learning example.
Content is irrelevant. People Google for content now and don’t go to training for content. Essential thing for Instructional Designers is to create ACTIVITIES and not content. An absolutely great example of leadership training. Must go through the video to enjoy the narration. Another great discussion on creating training on preventing sexual harassment courses in the later part of the video.
Consistency is bad. All adult learners have individual difference. So each learner has to be taught differently and to teach each learner consistently in the same manner is stupid. Each learner has to be taught differently. Trainers must be flexible (read inconsistent) while training.
Presentation skills are not the same as training skills. Presentation skills focus on the presenter. Focus should be on the audience.
Resistance is futile. What is “technology” (e.g. Second Life) to us is a way of life to the new generation. Participants today are free agent learners, they will learn on the job, on the go.
The whole baloney about need analysis and various other types of analysis in the ADDIE model is another dysfunctional area. By the time you finish analysis, content is obsolete.
Know your objective. Get your participants involved. Show respect towards your participants. Balance between content and audience.
Design training obsessively compulsively. Time to get ready for today’s session – my entire lifetime.
Tongue in cheek humour: Those who can, do it. Those who cannot, teach. Those who cannot even teach become instructional designers :-P
A four door model approach to elearning. Opening screen has four doors – Library, Playground, Café and Torture Chamber. Go through any door in any sequence and any number of times, except the Torture Chamber though which the learner can go through only twice. The Torture chamber has real life assignments, e.g. create a real proposal about a new client and get it evaluated by the sales manager. The Library is the content library that contains support articles, case studies, and job aids etc. for the course. Playground contains games that measure your mastery of technical terms and concepts learned in the Library. Cafe has open ended question, chat rooms, ask an expert, various other Web 2.0 tools to collaborate with others.
How does one do rapid elearning design for application training? Use inexpensive tools to take screen shots and add narration. Take a video of a SME coaching a learner on how to use the application. Final test is to ask the learners to use the application.
Most important leadership principle – people don’t what you ask you ask them to do, they do what you do!
Update: See 2009 elearning and content development salary data here.
Last year I initiated the unofficial salary survey for elearning and content development jobs in India on my blog. I invited responses as comments on my blog post. The post got 10 unique responses. While the number of responses were not enough to consolidate and provide any trends, what was apparent was that the elearning salary range in India is quite varied.
One year down the line, it will be interesting to know what’s the situation now. What are the salaries for Instructional Designers in India? What are the salaries for Project Managers, Graphics designers, Flash Programmers, Testers? How has the economic conditions impacted the salary hikes this year? Have the salary structures changed? What really is the average salary of a content developer in India?
Update 2: The RSS above just shows the number of responses to the survey. Sorry to disappoint... no live results (I am disappointed too). Watch my blog for results from time to time.
Clive Shepherd writes in defense of page turners and I agree. It is not that page turners as such are boring but the way content is written and presented makes it boring. And the same could well happen to content with high level of interactivity.
To me content in any form needs to be engaging. Engaging content is more important than interactive content. I tell my team Harry Potter book is engaging, and it doesn’t have an iota of interactivity. In my personal learning environment, I read many blogs. None of them are interactive yet all of them are very engaging. Does interactivity make the content engaging? Not necessarily. I have seen many courses with interactivity for the sake of interactivity. Even interactivity needs to work towards making the content more engaging.
I have always thought that as a method, the E looped back to A in ADDIE. Clive talks about how those who work in classroom could teach instructional designers a thing or two. But aren’t trainers implementing ADDIE model, except perhaps in quick succession? Isn’t putting together a quick and dirty design and then trying it out in the class to tweak it the next time and time after that ADDIE with E looping back to A each time?
Enough’s been writing about the evolution of the ADDIE model. With rapid prototyping, we are crunching the time it takes in each phase. And since the time is short, the phases overlap and are repeated, making the process more iterative (successive approximation?). As Geetha Krishnan puts it, ADDIE has been interpreted as a rigid non-iterative process. The problem is not so much with the model as with the way it has been used (or misused).
However, the issue I have with this completely iterative process is not whether ADDIE is dead or alive. It is how do we know a project has ended and a new one is required to begin? ADDIE can help define a “project” – with a definite start and a definite end. I am envious of Clive’s new project. Clive has…
“warned them not to expect voluminous design documents and specifications. We'll sit down and assess the situation; I'll create something rough but functional for us to look at; we'll show this to real users and see what they think; we'll tweak it based on the feedback we receive and test it out again. This process won't ever really come to an end; we'll continue to monitor and enhance the offering long after it's gone live. After all, unlike content that's distributed in print or on CD, online content doesn't have to be right first time. It's just work in progress.”
It would be interesting to know if Clive’s client is paying for the project a fixed amount or on hourly rate based on time spent. And how do they control their budget for the project? Is there even a budget for this? How do we finally measure success of a project? I am very sure clients are not expecting instructional design projects to be perpetual research projects.
I would like to thank Cathy Moore for making Dump the Drone available on Slideshare. Many of the concepts are drilled into training programs at our organization but I just love the way she presents these ideas. Absolutetly great!!!
Communications coach Carmine Gallo breaks down the ace presenter's latest Macworld keynote. The result? A 10-part framework you can use to wow your own audience. Many of these principles could actually apply in creating an elearning course :-).
Carmine Gallo, a business communications coach and Emmy-Award winning former TV journalist, is the author of Fire Them Up! and 10 Simple Secrets of the World's Greatest Business Communicators. He writes his communications column every week.
Welcome to Learn and Lead. I write about learning, leadership, performance, management, elearning, training, blogging, tools, trends. Looking forward to your valuable comments.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employers and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of my employers.
