As a successful instructional designer for elearning solutions (or at least I think I am successful enough since I’ve already made a steady and fruitful living out of this career), this question has been asked of me many, many times before. This is of course because I was a former teacher myself. I loved teaching even before I went full time. But of course, teaching was not as lucrative as I would have hoped.
I got into instructional design completely by accident or completely by a twist of fate. It was back when I got a freelance teaching gig at a business seminar that got me some connections which referred me to freelance instructional design gigs. I was successful at it and I found it to be very lucrative, so I went full time.
So what are the characteristics of a former school teacher that is applicable to an instructional designer? Everything. Instructional design for elearning solutions is basically just creating a program course that will help teach a lesson or a field. Therefore, the rules that determine whether the training or teaching method is effective or not are the same and applicable to both. This is why a lot of instructional designers started out as teachers. But of course, this is not an iron clad law. However, it is a trend.
There are some skills for instructional design however that you can’t learn as a teacher. Translating the teaching method into software frames for example is quite a challenge on its own. However, learning that while being unfamiliar with the software itself makes it nearly impossible. Hence, one thing that a teacher must have in order to be able to cross into an electronic learning career is familiarity and adequate or relative mastery of the software tools for e learning design.
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