This Is Your Moment

I really have no fear for my job with the advent of Frontline or Nova; my employer still finds that my work with SMEs and my contributions to our learners are still valuable, thank goodness.

But I do worry about novice instructional designers. The tasks that AI agents are completing are the ones we novice designers handled when we were first learning to sort content, understand how it contributed (or didn't contribute) to performance goals, and decide how to present it in a logical way a learner can absorb and apply. These are skills that novices need to grow into.

So I'm not worried that thousands of jobs will disappear in an instant; I'm more worried that we'll have developed cohorts of terrible designers who will forego the A of ADDIE, ignoring the critical thinking that goes into asking crucial questions and distilling heaps of information to bare essentials, all while keeping everything congruent.

In the advent of all of this automation, I feel it's more important than ever to provide mentorship opportunities to novice designers, to let them explore AI tools, but only as a comparison to what they've come up with in their own noggins. To be able to critique and redirect AI outputs requires experience that novices don't have. They need to put in the work to gain that experience.