I recently shared a few thoughts about qualities that make for a great instructional designer, especially for technical subject matter.  Did you notice what I didn’t mention?  

Here’s one that might have been conspicuous in its absence. I don’t think you need a degree in the field.  There, I said it.  Believe me, I respect all of you with masters and doctorates.  It’s a great achievement and the academic context brings value in many ways.  But I don’t need to call you Doctor for you to create great curriculum.  And sometimes degrees that are not enriched by experience can even get in the way.  They can lead practitioners to over-intellectualize and over-theorize, instead of focusing on the practical, real-world needs of authentic learners and instructors in the modern workplace. 

I’m not even particularly interested in your academic credentials or professional experience, as long as you can show me you have that magic triad of writing ability, technical aptitude, and instructional instincts.  As a matter of fact, some of the best IDs I’ve known in my career have what some would call “non-traditional” backgrounds.  That is, they didn’t study education or human development or psychology.  They’ve been graphic designers and history majors and project managers and software engineers and marketers and aspiring novelists and starving artists and a host of other things.   

Take me -I have bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music, of all things.  (How an aspiring opera singer ended up creating technical curriculum for adult professionals is a subject for another day.) And when anyone asks my background, I totally own that non-traditional path.  As I like to say: “I’m not an academic.  I’m a practitioner.”

That doesn’t mean a person with an education degree or classroom teaching experience or, yes, even a doctorate in instructional design won’t be a great ID.  It just means that it’s a field where you can succeed based on interest, motivation, and aptitude, no matter what your entry point to the profession might be.