What Is an Instructional Designer? Role, Skills, Pay and Career Path

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A manager sends a 60-slide deck with a note: "Can you turn this into a course by Friday?" That request is the job. A good instructional designer doesn't open the authoring tool next. They ask what is going wrong at work that made someone want a course in the first place.

I spent a year as a learning designer on edX courses at the University of Adelaide. Today I'm cofounder of Coursebox, which makes instructional design software for training teams, and I still design courses on customer calls.

An instructional designer is the person who works out what people need to be able to do, then designs the lessons, practice and assessments that get them there, and checks afterwards whether it worked. Below is what the job involves day to day, the skills it needs, what it pays and how people get into it.

What is an instructional designer?

The designer connects a learning need with suitable explanations, practice and assessment, then helps check the result. Depending on the team, they may also build accessible content, manage reviews and support implementation; the job is broader than producing course screens.

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They work in schools, universities, companies, government departments, nonprofits and training providers such as registered training organisations (RTOs). The setting changes the vocabulary; the core work stays the same. Cathy Moore, a consultant who trains corporate designers, says the instructional designer "owns the what and the why": the analysis, the objectives, the activity design and the measurement plan. Someone else may build the screens.

Instructional designer, developer, trainer or learning experience designer?

Job ads use these titles loosely, and they overlap. This is how the work usually divides when a team is big enough to split it:

The US government's occupation database, O*NET, lists Instructional Designer, Instructional Systems Specialist and Instructional Technologist among the reported job titles for one occupation. In a small team, one person designs, builds and delivers. If delivering is the part you enjoy most, see our guide on how to become a corporate trainer.

What does an instructional designer do?

Here is how I would handle one course request. The sequence is a practical example, not a compulsory workflow for every designer. The swim school and every number below are hypothetical. Its reporting rules are invented to illustrate content design, not clinical, safeguarding or incident-reporting guidance for a real school.

A swim school with several pools has a problem with its incident reports. The manager emails: "New instructors keep logging incidents late or not at all. Can you make a course on the incident reporting app?" The school calls its swim teachers instructors. The learners are new swim teachers, and the outcome the manager wants is reports that arrive on time with what the school needs in them.

Here is what I'd do with that email, in five steps.

1. Find out what goes wrong on the job

• The question: What actually happens at the pool, and how do we know?
• What I do: Read a month of reports and talk to two or three teachers and a pool supervisor. This is instructional analysis, and a training needs analysis questionnaire helps structure it.
• What it produces: A plain statement of the problem: reports arrive two or three days late, and half leave out what first aid was given.

2. Decide whether training is the fix at all

• The question: Is any of this a tool, process or information problem rather than a skill?
• What I do: Watch the job. At this school the poolside tablet logs teachers out, so they wait until they reach a desk.
• What it produces: two non-course fixes, agreed with the responsible staff: reliable authorised access to the app at the pool, and a current job aid beside it. That does not mean leaving an unattended shared session signed in. The remaining learning need is how to apply the school's approved reporting rules and complete the required fields.

3. Write what people must be able to do

• The question: What does a teacher need to do differently at the pool?
• What I do: Write one objective in terms of the job, not the app. Our guide to Bloom's taxonomy in course design helps pitch the level.
• What it produces: "Given an incident at the pool, the teacher decides whether it is reportable and completes the four required fields: Time, Child's name, What happened and First aid given."

4. Design the lesson, practice and assessment

• The question: What does a teacher need to read, and what do they need to try?
• What I do: Every course I design comes down to three kinds of page: a lesson, a practice activity and an assessment. Most courses have far too much of the first.
• What it produces: One lesson on what counts as reportable, with three short cases. One practice activity of five scenario cards, where the teacher decides "report or not" and fills in the four fields. One assessment: a new scenario, with the completed report checked against a rubric, where a wrong report-or-not decision fails the item.

The practice should distinguish cases using a precise, approved reporting policy, with an escalation route when the information is unclear. For a real school, a designer works with the responsible safety and safeguarding staff; they do not invent a medical threshold to make a question harder.

5. Check that it worked on the job

• The question: Are reports better at the pool, as well as in the quiz?
• What I do: Agree the measure with the manager before launch, and look again four weeks after it.
• What it produces: One number to watch: the share of reports logged the same day with first aid recorded.

Here is what that step 5 check looks like in a real training programme.

Case study: Newborn resuscitation training in Tanzania

Tanzania's rate of newborn deaths in the first day of life was high. Helping Babies Breathe is a short course built around basic actions at the delivery bed: drying and stimulating the baby, clearing the airway and ventilating with a bag and mask.

• What they did: Master trainers from eight hospitals (three referral, four regional and one district) were trained to teach the course to others. Researchers compared 8,124 births before the training with 78,500 after it.
• Evidence and result: In the study led by Georgina Msemo and published in Pediatrics in 2013, deaths within 24 hours of birth fell to about half the earlier rate (relative risk 0.53), and fresh stillbirths fell by about a quarter (relative risk 0.76). Staff used stimulation in 88% of births, up from 47%.
• Limitation: This was a before-and-after study without a control group, so it establishes an association rather than isolating the training effect. Mask ventilation also fell from 8.2% to 5.2%; that change alone does not show whether care was better or worse. This describes a historical study, not a neonatal-care procedure.
• Lesson: The researchers collected care-process and patient-outcome measures, not only learner knowledge. Those measures helped them examine how practice changed alongside outcomes.

The process behind it: ADDIE and its cousins

The example covers work found within ADDIE: analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation. Teams can revisit those functions throughout a project. Our ADDIE guide explains them, the successive approximation model describes iterative build-and-test cycles, and the models overview compares other approaches.

The approach is older than e-learning. It traces back to the Interservice Procedures for Instructional Systems Development, written in 1975 at Florida State University for the US military. It is where the "ISD" in some defence and government job ads comes from.

A week in the job

A typical week holds less building than people expect:

• interviews with subject matter experts (SMEs) about what experts actually do
• reviews of drafts with stakeholders
• writing practice scenarios and assessment questions
• building pages, or briefing a developer who builds them
• piloting a module with a few learners and fixing what the pilot exposed

On my edX courses the SMEs were academics, and much of the work was fitting their material to edX's technical requirements.

Skills an instructional designer needs

Design and analysis skills

• Needs analysis: finding the real problem behind a request.
• Writing objectives that describe something a person does.
• Writing practice activities and scenario questions with a real decision in them.
• Assessment design: matching the evidence to the objective, from knowledge checks to suitable performance tasks.
• Evaluation: choosing the measure that shows whether behaviour changed.
• Accessibility basics: captions, contrast, keyboard use and plain language.

Tools

You'll meet tool categories more than specific products:

• Authoring tools build interactive e-learning pages.
• A learning management system (LMS) hosts courses, enrols people and records results. SCORM and xAPI are the standards that let a course report completion and scores to an LMS or to a learning record store, a database that keeps a detailed log of learning activity.
• AI course builders draft outlines, pages and quizzes from a prompt or a document.

Our roundup of the best AI tools for instructional designers compares the AI category.

People skills

One difficult skill is getting a subject matter expert to explain the judgements behind the task, alongside what the manual says. Another is questioning a course request when the obstacle is access to a tool or unclear information. Project management also takes time: deadlines, reviews and keeping the scope workable.

How much do instructional designers make?

You can see the retired O*NET code for instructional designers for yourself. So there are two US groups to read.

One useful US pay proxy is Instructional Coordinators, a group centred on school curricula and teaching standards. Its BLS median was $77,440 in May 2025, with 2% projected employment growth from 2025 to 2035. BLS lists a master's degree and five or more years of related experience as typical entry characteristics for that occupation. Those are not universal requirements for every university or workplace instructional-design vacancy.

Workplace roles sit closer to Training and Development Specialists, the people who design and run training inside organisations.

The BLS training-and-development-specialist group typically requires a bachelor's degree and related experience, and has about 46,000 projected annual openings. Its 472,500 jobs in 2025 include training work beyond instructional design. The instructional-coordinator group had 248,700 jobs, so neither count should be read as the number of instructional-design vacancies.

In Australia, designers are usually counted as Training and Development Professionals (ANZSCO 2233).

The Jobs and Skills Australia profile notes that these ANZSCO-based pages will not be updated again, so treat the figures as a dated snapshot. Crowdsourced salary sites disagree with each other and with these numbers, so check the date on any figure you rely on.

How to become an instructional designer

1. Pick a setting and read current vacancies. BLS entry characteristics describe broad US occupations, while individual schools, universities and employers set their own requirements. In my experience, a portfolio helps show the design decisions a qualification alone cannot show.
2. Learn the core. Analysis, objectives, practice design and evaluation. Our guides to adult learning theory and action mapping are a good start.
3. Build three portfolio pieces. Each one should show a problem, your design decision and what happened. Our guide to the instructional design portfolio shows how to present them.
4. Get your first project from the job you have. Teachers, trainers, subject matter experts and support leads often move across this way. Offer to redesign one piece of training your team already runs.
5. Add a certificate or degree when the ads ask for one. Read ten job ads in your setting first, and let them decide.

What AI changes about the job

AI course builders now draft lesson, practice and assessment pages from one prompt. I wanted to see what that leaves for the designer, so I built the swim school course with our own course agent in a test workspace.

What I asked for. I asked for "a short course for new swim teachers at a swim school on reporting incidents in our incident app": one lesson with three short cases, a practice activity of five report-or-not scenarios that fill in the four required fields, and a final assessment on one new scenario marked with a rubric. Before planning, the agent asked for the school's rules and the app's four fields. I typed in a short list written for this test: report any injury, coughing or spluttering for more than a few seconds, any first aid, a child lost or unaccounted for even briefly, and any near miss. Upset without injury and a dropped kickboard are not reportable.

What it produced. A plan of one section with three pages, about 30 minutes: a lesson, "What Must Be Reported?", a practice page, "Practice: Report or Not?", and an assessment, "Final Assessment: Complete an Incident Report". That is the lesson, practice and assessment split. The lesson used my rules word for word, and I found no invented regulations or statistics. The assessment scenario was a clear near miss under my rules: a child slips from the pool step and goes briefly under before the teacher notices. The rubric checks all four fields, though Time and Child's name share one row.

What was wrong. Three of the five practice scenarios were obvious: a small cut from a lane rope, a child crying because he doesn't want to get in, and a kickboard falling on the deck. Each restates a rule from the lesson almost word for word, so a teacher could pass them on common sense. The rubric is weighted, so a learner who chooses "Do not report" for the near miss loses only 25% and can still score 75%. And nothing in the course checks reporting at the pool. A course page can't do that.

The fix, and how I checked it. I asked the AI editor to replace two practice scenarios while keeping five. After reloading, I played both new cards and checked their feedback against the fictional rules I had supplied. The two-second coughing card returned "Do not report", while the briefly out-of-sight card returned "Report". That verifies how the content responded to invented rules; it does not validate those rules for a real swim school or establish appropriate clinical care. The three easy scenarios remain.

The remaining design work includes reviewing the policy with its owner, improving the scenarios and making any essential reporting decision a separate required criterion. The practice also asks learners to fill every field for non-reportable events, using a Not applicable button; that interaction needs checking against the intended workflow. I did not submit the final assessment. The four-week workplace check must be arranged separately.

Where to start if you want the job

Instructional designers connect learning needs, suitable practice and evidence of the result. Building content is part of the job, but the analysis, collaboration, accessibility decisions and judgement remain important when an AI tool supplies a first draft.

If you want the job, start with one real request where you work. Fill in the intake sheet with the person who asked, fix whatever turns out not to be a training problem, and design the rest as one lesson, one practice activity and one assessment. Agree a four-week check before you launch. That project, written up honestly, is your first portfolio piece. For finished courses to learn from, see our annotated instructional design examples.