How to land my first job as an eLearning Designer? All I get as feedback is lack of experience!

Hi Sarah - 

Thanks for sharing your story. I know how hard it can be to get that first opportunity to show what you know. The good news is there are many ways to begin showing your work while developing your skills.

Show your work and build your portfolio

One of the best ways to hit the ground running is with our weekly e-learning challenges. They're a fantastic way to take the concepts you've learned to show your work and begin building your e-learning portfolio.

What are the weekly e-learning challenges?

Every Friday, we post a new e-learning challenge. The topics cover common course-building topics ranging from technical to visual to conceptual. 

The following Thursday, I'll curate the examples into a recap post with links to each demo and the course designer who built it.

Where can I find a list of challenges?

You can find the E-Learning Challenges hub by hovering over the Learn drop-down menu on the E-Learning Heroes home page. You can always find the current challenge in the top left corner of the page.

How do I participate?

To participate, open the challenge post and drop a link to your project in the comments. If you have Articulate 360, the easiest way is to publish your project to Review 360 and share that link.

What else should I know?

The best way to hit the ground running is by doing. Here are a few ways to get started practicing and showing your work in the weekly challenges:

• The challenges are always open. You can join the current or any previous challenge. The current challenge will always have the most activity while the older challenges are a little quieter. Sometimes users feel more comfortable joining older challenges because it's a way to test the waters without drawing too much attention.
• Make it a goal to participate monthly. You don't need to join every challenge. Make a goal to participate once or twice a month.
• They don't need to be perfect. The main thing is to come up with an idea and see if you can make it work. Some people build simple prototypes, and some put more work into them. It doesn't matter. The main thing is you're playing around with some ideas and the software.
• Check out the recaps every week. Even if you don't do the challenge, look at the weekly recaps to see what others have done. You'll see a broad range of ideas, and many share their source files, so it's easy to deconstruct them and learn from what they did.

Here are a few suggested challenges to help you get started:

• Share Your E-Learning and Instructional Design Portfolios #333. Build a simple project in Rise 360 or Storyline 360 to showcase your education and experience.
• Combining Sliders for Interactive Infographics #260 and Using Dials for Interactive Infographics #261. Your resume would be a great project to convert into an interactive graphic. The dials and slider challenges are a good place to find infographic examples that could work for your resume.
• Converting Static Content Into Interactive E-Learning #299. This is one of my favorite challenges because it solves the problem every course designer faces: Converting slides full of text and information into digestible interactions. You could also use this challenge to convert your resume into an interactive resume or portfolio.

Those are just a few places to start. You can view the full list of challenges on the archive page. Most challenges are still open so you can jump into one or more that interest you.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions around the challenges.