This week, what you actually build once you’re in.

Honestly though, most of you haven’t even opened the trial yet. You want to. You’ve been wanting to for a while now. But every time you sit down to start, something stops you.

Why most people don’t even get this far

It’s a capacity problem. You already have a full life. A job, a family, a house, kids, a calendar that’s already too full. And on top of all of that, you’re trying to figure out a brand new career, from scratch, with no map.

When you sit down at the end of a long day and try to look at this whole transition, all you see is a giant pile of things you’re supposed to do. You don’t even fully know what most of them are. You just know there’s a lot. And a lot is enough for your brain to say, not tonight.

So you close the laptop. Maybe you’ll get to it this weekend. Then the weekend comes and something else fills it. And it just keeps going.

You’re trying to build something new in the cracks of a life that’s already full. That’s what I call the messy middle, and I wrote an article on it a few weeks back. Worth reading if you haven’t.

The hard truth is that time doesn’t free up on its own. The space you wait for fills back up, because that’s what life does. The only way through the messy middle is through.

Here’s the part nobody tells you. You don’t need hours you don’t have to start this. You just need one finished thing.

The fix: build the first piece

You don’t have to figure out the whole transition. You just have to build one piece. Specifically, a Rise sample.

That’s it. That’s the assignment.

Once you build a Rise sample, you’ve crossed over. You’re the person doing this now. Everything that comes next gets easier from that side of the line.

The reason people stay stuck for months and years is they keep trying to plan the whole transition before they start any of it. You can’t plan your way out of this. You have to make a thing.

Not everything has to be super hard for it to be really good.

What happens after the first piece

Once you finish that Rise sample, a few things shift.

You stop feeling like an imposter when you say “I’m becoming an instructional designer” out loud, because now you have something to point to. A real piece of work, built in a real tool, that real hiring managers ask for.

You start trusting yourself again. The voice that’s been saying “I don’t know if I can actually do this” gets quieter. You did the thing. You can do more things.

And you have momentum. The hardest part of any career change is going from zero to one. After that, two and three come faster.

One of my students, Hannah, started in one of my programs while teaching full-time with two babies under two. She didn’t have hours, she had pockets. Twenty minutes in the shower with my videos playing on her iPad. An hour after bedtime. Nap times on the weekends. She told me later, “I had this vision after hearing other people’s stories, and I thought, why not me? I can do that.”

That’s the shift the first piece creates. You go from watching other people do this to believing you can too.

Hannah’s on the other side now. So are a lot of women who were exactly where you are.

Why Rise specifically

Rise is one of Articulate’s tools, and it’s on most ID job postings alongside Storyline. It also lives inside the same free trial as Storyline, so when you sign up, you get access to both.

Here’s the part most people don’t realize. You can actually finish a quality Rise sample inside the thirty-day free trial. You can’t finish a Storyline sample in that window. Storyline takes much longer to learn, which means you’d end up having to buy the software once your trial runs out just to keep working on it. That’s hundreds of dollars you don’t have to spend if you start with Rise.

The learning curve in Rise is smaller, so you spend your time building something good instead of fighting the interface. Just know this still takes real work. A hiring manager can tell the difference between a Rise sample that was phoned in and one that was taken seriously. But inside a thirty-day window, on the free trial, a strong sample is completely doable.

That’s the whole point. This is the one window where you can build a real portfolio piece without paying for software.

The 30-Day Rise Sprint

If cost and time have been the real reasons you haven’t started, I built something specifically for you.

It’s called the 30-Day Rise Sprint. Thirty days. One finished Rise sample for your portfolio that will impress a hiring manager and won’t look like a beginner made it.

Inside: three in-depth reviews on your work from me, weekly help calls, accountability, and AI built in to help you work smarter and finish faster. No software to buy. The Articulate free trial covers everything.

Plan on ten to fifteen hours a week. That’s the real time commitment, and it’s what it takes to actually finish a sample worth showing.

I know that sounds like a lot when your life is already full. But you’re not adding ten to fifteen hours to your week. You’re repurposing them. It’s bedtime hours, nap times, the early morning before everyone’s up, the time you spend scrolling at night. Hannah found it the same way. So have hundreds of other women who came through my programs with kids, full-time jobs, and packed calendars. A career transition is real work. There’s no version of this that happens in three or four hours a week. But there is a version that fits inside a real life, and this is it.

I built this on purpose for the person who has been ready to start this transition but kept hitting the same two walls. The cost of the software, and not having the time, because your summer is already packed with vacations, kids’ activities, and everything else that was already on your plate before you added a career change to it.

Cart closes Sunday, June 28. The 30 days start July 1.

If you’ve been waiting for the version that fits the life you actually have, this is it.

Join the Sprint

If you found this useful and you’re not already subscribed, now’s a good time. Every week there’s more practical guidance for the ID transition, all in one place.

Top reasons to listen to the entire episode:

• Discover why Rise is the budget-friendly, time-friendly alternative to Storyline that employers genuinely want to see

• Learn how to create a high-quality, professional sample within Rise’s 30-day free trial without falling into the “it’s easy so I’ll wing it” trap

Full Show Notes Here!

Resources and Links Mentioned:

• Sign up for the 30-Day Rise Sprint

• Read the Substack article on planning your Rise sample before your free trial starts

• Join the Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career Facebook Group

Connect with Jill

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Thanks for joining us on the Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career podcast! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review to help us reach even more freedom seekers and aspiring instructional designers.

They go to the Articulate website, click “start free trial,” and open Storyline for the first time. And then they sit there. Because they don’t actually know what they’re building yet. They don’t have a topic. They don’t have a plan. They just have a blank slide and a 30-day clock that started the second they clicked that button.

That’s not a great way to spend 30 days. So let’s do it differently.

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What the trial is actually for

Storyline is the industry-standard eLearning authoring tool. It’s what you use to build interactive, scenario-based samples for your portfolio. Rise is Articulate’s other tool, better for responsive, scrollable learning experiences. A strong portfolio usually includes at least one of each, and they’re what hiring managers look at when they decide whether to call you in.

The trial gives you access to both. Your goal is to build at least the start of a Storyline sample, ideally a full draft, so you walk away with real work to show.

Thirty days is not a lot of time to learn a brand new tool and build something portfolio-worthy in it, especially if you have a job, a family, and a life. It can be done, but only if you spend those 30 days building, not on the planning and prep you could have done before you ever opened Storyline.

So do the prep work first, on your own time, before the clock starts. Then every day of the trial goes toward building something real.

One thing worth knowing: Articulate does sometimes grant trial extensions if you reach out and ask. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s worth a quick message to their support team, especially if you explain that you’re actively building a portfolio sample.

The checklist: what to do before you start your trial

1. Choose your sample topic

This is the step most people underestimate. Pick the wrong topic, or pick one without thinking it through, and it can derail the whole project later.

You want a topic you already know well enough to write about without a ton of research. Your time in Storyline should go to developing, not becoming a subject matter expert on something brand new.

Good places to look: your current or former job, a professional skill you’ve already built, a process or system you know well, or a workplace skill that translates across industries.

Your topic also needs to connect to a real business problem, something a company would actually spend money training employees on. “Time management for new managers” is a business problem. “Things I find interesting about history” is not. If you’re not sure how to make that connection, ask yourself: what would go wrong in a workplace if people didn’t know this? That’s your business problem.

2. Look at what’s actually possible

Before you plan your sample, look at real examples of what a strong Storyline portfolio piece looks like. If you’ve never seen what’s possible, you’ll plan something either too simple to impress anyone or too complex to finish in 30 days.

Here are real portfolios from people who’ve transitioned into instructional design.

Look for samples with clear scenarios, real interactivity, and a cohesive visual style. You’re not copying anyone. You’re getting a feel for the target.

3. Build your content map

This is the most important thing on the list, and the one that’ll save you the most time once your trial starts.

A content map is your planning document. It answers everything you need to know before you open Storyline: what the training is for, who it’s for, what they’ll be able to do when it’s done, what you’ll cover, and how you’ll assess them. Once you have it, you know exactly what you’re building. No guessing, no spinning.

Here’s what to include:

Business purpose. What goes wrong in a real workplace when people don’t have this skill or knowledge?

Audience. Who is this for? What do they already know? What are they struggling with?

Learning objectives. What will learners be able to do by the end? Write these as specific, measurable actions. “Identify the three steps in the conflict resolution process” is a learning objective. “Understand conflict resolution” is not.

Content outline. What are the main sections, in what order, and roughly how much screen time does each get? Keep it tight. A focused, well-developed sample beats a sprawling one that tries to cover too much.

Assessment questions. Write 3 to 5 scenario-based questions that test whether the learner can apply what they learned. Not trivia. Each one should drop them into a realistic situation and ask them to make a decision.

If you came from teaching, you already know what a learning objective is. You wrote them for years. So here’s where people get tripped up: they assume corporate objectives are the same as classroom ones, skim this step, and move on.

They’re not the same. A corporate objective is about what someone does differently on the job, tied to a real business problem, not what a student understands by the end of a lesson. The format looks familiar, the target is different. So slow down here, even if this feels like old news.

4. Get feedback on your content map before you build

Finding out your objectives need work when your trial has 10 days left is a very different problem than finding out before you start.

So before you open Storyline, share your content map with someone already working in instructional design and ask for honest feedback. Are the learning objectives measurable? Does the outline make sense for the audience? Are the assessment questions at the right level?

If you don’t know any IDs personally, there are online communities of practice where working IDs give feedback to people transitioning in. Just make sure the person has real ID experience, not someone else still trying to break in.

5. Watch a few intro videos so the tools aren’t foreign on day one

Spend a couple of hours getting familiar with the basics of both Storyline and Rise before your trial starts. You don’t need anything advanced. You just don’t want them to feel completely alien when you sit down to build.

Articulate has free tutorial videos for both tools, and there are plenty of beginner walk-throughs on YouTube. For Storyline, focus on navigating the interface, adding and editing slides, and what layers and states are at a basic level. Rise is more intuitive, but a quick look at how blocks and lessons work will save you from fumbling on day one.

When you’re ready to start

Once you’ve done these five things, you’re in a completely different position than most people who click “start free trial.” You know your topic. You know your audience and your objectives. Your content’s planned, you’ve seen what a strong sample looks like, and the tool isn’t a mystery.

Now your 30 days go to building. Not figuring out what to build or how the interface works. Just building the thing.

That’s how you walk away from the trial with something real in your portfolio.

And the people whose portfolios are linked up above? They started exactly where you are. Career changers, first sample, no idea yet if they could pull it off. They did the prep, built the thing, and now they’re working IDs.

You’re not behind. You’re at the starting line, and that’s the only place anyone ever starts. Just know that you can absolutely do this.

If you found this useful and you’re not already subscribed to the Substack, now’s a good time. Every week there’s more practical guidance like this for the ID transition, all in one place.

Subscribe now

Top reasons to listen to the entire episode:

• Find out the five most common portfolio mistakes that send hiring managers running, including the Storyline newbie mistake that immediately signals you're new to the software

• Learn exactly which samples belong in a corporate ID portfolio and the five minimum pieces every portfolio needs

• Discover why your portfolio is marketing, not just a collection of your work, and how that one shift changes everything about how you build it

Full Show Notes Here!

Resources and Links Mentioned:

• Episode 27: What Needs to Be in Your ID Portfolio to Get Hired

• Subscribe to Jumpstart Your ID Career on Substack

• Join the Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career Facebook Group

Connect with Jill

Instagram

Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career Facebook Group

LinkedIn

Website

Thanks for joining us on the Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career podcast! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review to help us reach even more freedom seekers and aspiring instructional designers.

And you’re waiting.

Not procrastinating. Not ignoring it. You’re genuinely preparing. You just want to feel a little more ready first. A little more certain. A little less scared.

So here’s the thing. That feeling is probably not going to show up the way you’re hoping it will.

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The readiness trap

Here’s how the trap works. You set a bar for yourself, some internal sense of “ready” that you’re waiting to reach before you start. And every time you get close, the bar drifts a little further out. After the kids get a little older. After the vacation. After you get through the move, or the wedding, or the end of the school year. After things calm down. After you feel more confident.

There’s always something. Those things are real. But the bar keeps drifting because “ready” was never a real destination. It’s a feeling you’re waiting for that doesn’t come before you start. It comes after.

One of my students, Heather, spent 19 years teaching middle school band. When she finally walked away from teaching, she had no idea what to do next. She tried data analytics. She tried cybersecurity. Took courses, applied for jobs, did all the things on her own, and none of it stuck. Then she came across one of my free workshops. She had no idea what instructional design even was. She told me she figured, “what do I have to lose?” She showed up.

She wasn’t certain. She didn’t feel ready. She just decided not yet, not alone wasn’t going to be the answer anymore. A year later, she’s two months into a full-time hybrid ID role. And she told me that for the first time in her entire life, she has work-life balance. She can leave work, come home, and actually live the rest of her life.

That’s what waits on the other side of the step you’re nervous to take. Not certainty. Just the next right thing.

Readiness is built by doing the thing, not by preparing to do the thing. And the longer you wait for the feeling to arrive first, the longer you stay exactly where you are.

The intersection of excited and scared

I believe this: the intersection of excited and scared is the perfect place to be, because it’s where you grow.

Excited but not scared means it’s a fun next step, but probably not a big one. Scared but not excited means it might not be right. But both at once? That is the sign that something real is in front of you. Something that matters. Something that’s actually going to change things.

So if you’re sitting with that feeling right now, that mix of wanting this so much and also being terrified of what happens if you try and it doesn’t work, that is not a stop sign. That is exactly where you’re supposed to be.

When I wasn’t ready

I’ll tell you about the moment I made the biggest change in my own life, because I think you need to hear it.

I quit my corporate job ten years ago with about $3,000 in savings. I was a single mom with an eight-year-old and no other income coming in. The timing was not good. The bank account was not reassuring. And I did not feel ready. My mom told me it wasn’t a smart move.

I said: watch me.

I could have waited. Every reason to wait was right there in front of me. But I stepped out on faith and did it anyway, and it made room for everything that came next. The business. The students. The freedom I talk about when I tell you what’s possible on the other side of this transition.

The version of me who waited until she felt ready never would have jumped. She’d still be in that corporate job, telling herself she just needed another year.

The version of you that waits never starts

There are two versions of you right now.

One is waiting for the feeling. Waiting for certainty, waiting for the fear to quiet down, waiting until the timing is a little better. That version is still going to be sitting on the same tab next summer.

The other version picks a start date. Decides that the feeling isn’t a prerequisite. Shows up scared and excited, and figures it out as she goes. That’s the version that makes it.

So which version are you going to be this summer?

The next right thing

If you’re ready to stop waiting and start building, the Summer ID Studio is where it happens. You’ll have the structure, the feedback, and the people around you to actually move. You don’t have to feel ready. You just have to show up.

Heather didn’t feel ready when she opened her laptop for that first workshop. She showed up anyway. Once she was in, she got matched with a mentor who answered every question she had about the field, and her uncertainty finally went quiet. A year later, she was working a job she loves with the life she didn’t think she could have.

Just know that the version of you who waits will still be waiting next year. The version who starts this summer is the one who gets to write a different story.

Join us in the Summer ID Studio →

And nothing is happening the way you thought it would.

So let’s talk about why. I’ve watched so many people go through this exact thing, and I know how frustrating it is when you’ve done the work and the work isn’t landing. The reason is simpler than you probably think, and it’s fixable.

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The real reason

The eLearning sample most people send out is a first draft.

Not because they aren’t trying. Not because they don’t have what it takes. It’s just the natural stopping point when you’re building alone. You learned the tool, you planned the sample, you built as far as your current skills could take you, and then you hit your ceiling and stopped. Maybe you ran out of time, or momentum, or you just weren’t sure what to do next. So that’s where it lives. On your portfolio. Going out with applications.

One of my students, Laura, spent a year and a half applying for ID roles before she started working with me. Hundreds of applications. Two interviews. Neither went anywhere. She told me she was kind of getting desperate. She didn’t know what she was doing wrong. She had experience. She had skills. But she didn’t have a portfolio that landed, and she didn’t know how to translate herself into corporate language. Less than a year after working with me, she had a fully remote full-time ID role. The applications weren’t the problem. What she was sending with them was.

Now, think about anything you’ve ever written. An essay, a report, a cover letter. You know what a first draft looks like. It’s rough. It gets the ideas down, but it’s not polished and it’s not done. Nobody stops at the first draft and sends it in. They revise.

But with an eLearning sample, a lot of people do exactly that. They build the first draft and they publish it. Because they don’t know what the revision process even looks like. And because they’re doing it alone.

The problem with going it alone

Here’s the thing about a first draft. You can’t revise it all the way by yourself. That’s just how skill-building works.

You don’t know what you don’t know yet. You can look at your own sample and see what you made. You cannot see what’s missing. You can’t see it the way a hiring manager sees it, or the way a senior ID sees it, or the way someone who has reviewed hundreds of portfolios sees it. That gap is invisible to you until someone outside points at it.

I hear this story all the time. My student Melissa had been a high school teacher for sixteen years. She spent months trying to break in on her own. Updated her resume. Joined groups. Took a LinkedIn course. Even thought about going back for a master’s. She got a couple of interviews. None of them went anywhere. She told me she didn’t know how to market herself, couldn’t come across in a way that made sense to the people interviewing her. The problem was not her skills. It was that she had no feedback loop. Nobody was looking at her work and telling her what was missing. She couldn’t see the gap because she was inside it. Once she got real feedback, she said she was surprised at how good every step of the process was. The work didn’t change. She did. Because someone finally told her the truth about it.

So I will tell you, feedback is the thing that takes your skill from where it is now to where it needs to be. Not more tutorials. Not more watching other people’s samples on YouTube. Not more practicing on your own. Feedback from someone who knows what they’re looking at, who can tell you what’s working and what isn’t, and who can show you how to get it from a 3 to an 8.

And an 8 is what gets you hired.

What employers are actually looking at

Your portfolio is your storefront. It’s the first impression, and a lot of the time the only impression, before anyone has met you in person or read your full resume. It’s what a hiring manager is looking at while she decides whether you’re worth a phone screen.

And what is she looking for? Not a tools showcase. She’s looking for evidence that you can think like an instructional designer. That you understood a real business problem, designed a learning solution for it, and built something that shows you made deliberate choices at every step. The interactions serve that. They are not the point.

A first draft rarely shows any of that. So let’s talk about how you actually move past the first draft.

How to uplevel a first draft

There are three things that turn a first draft into a sample that wows. None of them you can do alone, and that is the whole reason most people are stuck.

1. Get a real ID to point out the newbie mistakes.

There are patterns. Things newer IDs do that scream “I’m new” to anyone who’s been in the field a while. Sometimes it’s how the objectives are written. Sometimes it’s how the feedback on a question is structured. Sometimes it’s the visual hierarchy of a slide, or the way you’ve used audio, or a navigation choice that makes the learner work harder than they should. You can’t see these because you don’t know they’re patterns yet. An experienced ID can see them in about ten minutes and tell you exactly what to fix.

2. Stress test it with a real learner’s eyes.

Hand your sample to someone who is not an ID. Watch them go through it. Or have someone go through it and tell you where they got confused, what felt boring, where they would have clicked away if they could. This is the piece people skip the most, and it is the one that exposes the most problems. Your sample isn’t for IDs. It’s for learners. So a learner has to test it.

3. Add the advanced interactions that aren’t there yet.

Your first draft is going to be missing the things you didn’t know how to build yet. You can’t learn everything before you create your first sample. You have to learn, create, learn, create. You build, you find out what you didn’t know, you learn that thing, you go back in and add it. The IDs who are getting hired are not the ones who waited to know everything. They’re the ones who kept layering in advanced interactions every time they learned a new one.

What this summer could look like

Summer is your window. If you’re a teacher, this is the time you actually have for this. And the sample we’re talking about, the polished Storyline sample, is the heaviest lift in your entire portfolio. It’s the one that takes the most hours, the most feedback, the most iteration. If you knock it out this summer, with support, you walk into fall hiring season with the one piece most career changers don’t have.

That is what the Summer ID Studio is built for. You get scaffolded learning in Storyline, the eLearning tool used most in the field, so you actually become expert at it instead of poking around on YouTube. You get extensive feedback on your sample at every stage, not just at the end. And you get accountability, so the work actually happens instead of getting pushed to “later,” which we both know never comes.

You’re going to build this sample one way or another. The question is whether you build it alone and end up sending out another first draft, or you build it with feedback and send out an 8.

Just know that the people getting hired this fall are the ones building it the second way right now.

Join us in the Summer ID Studio →

Top reasons to listen to the entire episode:

• Get the full nine-week breakdown for learning ID fundamentals, mastering Storyline basics and advanced features, and building a polished portfolio sample from scratch

• Learn why scaffolding your learning, and getting feedback at two key checkpoints, is what separates a portfolio that wows from one that falls flat

• Find out how to use AI as both a productivity tool and an accountability partner to stay on track all summer long

Full Show Notes Here!

Resources and Links Mentioned:

• Sign-up for the Summer ID Roadmap Masterclass

• Join the Articulate License Giveaway

• Subscribe to Jumpstart Your ID Career on Substack

• Join the Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career Facebook Group

Connect with Jill

Instagram

Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career Facebook Group

LinkedIn

Website

Thanks for joining us on the Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career podcast! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review to help us reach even more freedom seekers and aspiring instructional designers.

Not “Will I be good at instructional design?” Not “Can I actually land a job?” Those come later.

The first one is usually this: “But what about my summers?”

I get it. I really do. Summer is the thing that makes the rest of the year survivable for a lot of people. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel in October. It’s the reason you can say yes to another chaotic spring semester. The idea of giving that up feels huge.

So instead of guessing, I asked the women who’ve actually done it.

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First, let’s be real about what “summer off” actually looks like.

I asked Christina, one of our AIDA grads who transitioned into ID at a financial institution, if she missed having her summers off. Her answer stopped me.

“I don’t really,” she said. “I’m finding that because I’m not grading and lesson planning on my at-home hours, I’m getting to do a lot of the things that normally I would squeeze in during summer break.”

She has paid time off now. She has flexibility. And because she’s not spending her evenings and weekends catching up on school work, the regular calendar feels like what summer used to feel like.

Her family is even planning a trip to Hershey in October. “We never would have been able to do before,” she said. “But we have a toddler who doesn’t do well with the heat, so it’s nice we’ll be able to go in the off-season.”

October. Off-season. No fighting peak tourist prices. No scrambling to squeeze everything into June and July.

Then there’s Elyse, who was upfront about the trade-off.

Elyse taught for eight years. She took summers off, but here’s what she told me about what those summers actually looked like: “I did on average five weeks of professional development every summer. That’s not two months off. And we kept getting held later and going back earlier.”

When I asked her directly if she thought she’d miss summers, she said: “I think I’ll miss it, but at the same time, it’s okay. I’m okay not having it. Because the sacrifice, the trade-off, more than worth it.”

And then she said the part that gets me every time: “I don’t need the time off in the same way. I lived for every break and every day off as a teacher to sleep the day away. I was so exhausted. Because that’s what I needed more than anything. And I don’t live for the days off now because I’m not dead by the end of the week.”

Read that again. She doesn’t need the recovery time because she’s not spending the year being destroyed.

Kirah had a similar realization.

She’d been thinking about this one. She told me: “I think teachers, we tend to live for breaks. We do the countdown of so many days till Thanksgiving break, so many days till Christmas, so many days. And it’s like we live in that cycle.”

And then she said something that reframed the whole question for me.

“Whereas now it’s like I don’t live for breaks. I get to get off and enjoy my evening. I get to enjoy my weekends and I’m not thinking about work. I don’t get the Sunday scaries anymore.”

She also said something practical worth knowing: at her company, a lot of people take time off in the summer anyway. So if she wants a week off in July, she just takes it.

Taylor is the one who really drives this home for me.

She left teaching mid-year. One month after joining the job search, she had an offer. And now?

“I’m not waiting for spring break anymore,” she told me. “I’m not looking forward to, oh my gosh, how many more days. I just feel excited to go to work. I don’t experience the Sunday scaries anymore, which are just debilitating.”

She told me a story about going back to visit a teacher friend at her old school. That night, the friend called her. “Taylor, you’re glowing,” she said. “You look refreshed. You look like a new person.”

Taylor said she thought maybe she was just riding the high of something new. But then she looked around at her coworkers who had been there five, eight years. “Everyone is just so happy and excited and helpful,” she told me. “So I don’t think I’m riding a high. I don’t think it’s ever going to go away.”

And then there’s Leslie, who had a lightbulb moment I think about all the time.

Leslie had been in the classroom her whole adult life. She joined AIDA, landed her job, and was three months in when I talked to her. August came. School started for her kids.

She told me she was driving one day when she passed a local school. The sign out front said school starts in a week.

“I had this moment of panic,” she said. “And I’m like, oh my gosh, I’m not ready. And my mom looked at me and she goes, Leslie, you’re not teaching anymore.”

And she just took a breath.

“It was like, oh my gosh, it’s all going to be okay. I’m not in this cycle anymore.”

She said she didn’t realize until that moment that her entire adult life after college had been structured around the school year. August to May, over and over. “I didn’t realize that’s not how everybody else lives their lives,” she said.

So will you miss your summers?

Maybe a little. Probably for a season. The rhythm of it is built into you and that doesn’t disappear overnight.

But what I hear from every single woman who’s made this transition is the same thing: they didn’t know how much they needed the summer because they didn’t know how exhausted they actually were. Once they weren’t running on empty anymore, the need for three months of recovery just... went away.

And in its place? Evenings that belong to them. Weekends that feel like weekends. Paid time off they can take in October when the leaves are changing and the lines are short. No sub plans. No Sunday scaries. No countdown to Thanksgiving.

If you’ve been asking yourself “what about summers?” let me ask you this instead: what would it feel like to not need a summer to recover from your year?

If you’re ready to stop waiting for June and start building toward something different, my free Summer Roadmap workshop is for you.

On June 9th, we’re going to map out exactly what a real career change looks like over the next 9 weeks. No vague advice. A real, week-by-week plan built around your actual summer.

You can register at the link below. I’d love to see you there.

Join the Summer ID Roadmap Masterclass

And instead of making progress, you feel like you’re sinking.

Maybe you’ve been at this for a few months now. You’ve done the research. You’ve listened to the podcasts. You know what instructional design is. You even know what you need to build. And somehow it still feels harder than you thought it would be. Messier. More uncertain. Like it’s taking longer than it should and you’re not sure if you’re actually moving or just spinning.

I want to tell you something about that feeling.

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It’s supposed to feel this way.

Not because you can’t do this. Because you’re doing something real, and you’re doing it on top of everything else you’re already carrying.

Career change is hard. If it weren’t, everyone would do it. And I don’t mean “hard” in the motivational-poster sense, the way people say “anything worth doing takes effort.” I mean it in a specific, practical way. You are not a new graduate with no responsibilities and nothing to lose. You have a job. You have a family. You have a mortgage, or rent, or people who depend on you. You have a schedule that was already full before you added this to it.

You might have to coordinate childcare in a way you haven’t had to before. Stack activities on certain nights so you can protect a few hours. Work something out with your partner, or figure it out alone if you don’t have one. Maybe things get financially tight for a stretch while you’re investing in this. Maybe you’re staying up later than you should and running on a little less sleep than you’d like. Maybe you have to rearrange your whole routine for a season to make space for something that doesn’t pay off yet.

That’s the messy middle. And it is not a sign that something’s gone wrong. It’s the part nobody puts on the highlight reel, but everyone who’s made a real change has gone through it.

And here’s the thing I really want you to hold onto: it’s temporary. This is not your life forever. It’s a season. A hard one, yes, but a season.

Here’s the thing I see happen over and over.

Someone gets to the messy middle and starts waiting for life to calm down before they keep going. They figure if they just hold on a little longer, get through this busy stretch, get a little more settled, then there’ll be room to really push.

I get why that makes sense. But that calmer stretch doesn’t come, and not because you’re doing anything wrong. The space you’re waiting for just fills back up. Something always comes up, because something always does. There’s no season where nothing is pulling at you.

So waiting for it to get easier is really waiting forever. The messy middle doesn’t end before you push through it. It ends because you push through it, right in the middle of the full life you’ve already got. The only way out is forward.

I know that’s hard to hear when you’re already stretched thin. But the reason this feels hard usually isn’t that you’re not trying. It’s that you’re building something new in the cracks of a life that’s already full. That’s not a flaw. That’s just what this looks like when you’ve got real responsibilities.

What I can tell you, from working with hundreds of women who have made this transition, is what’s on the other side.

And the other side isn’t just getting back to where you started. It’s not “things go back to normal.” It’s better than normal. Better than what you had before any of this. Because what you had before is why you’re here in the first place.

The alternative to going through the messy middle is staying exactly where you are. Maybe it doesn’t get harder. But it also doesn’t get better. And that’s the whole reason you started looking for something different.

What’s on the other side is a completely different relationship with your work week. Not dreading Monday. Not counting down to the next break just to recover from the last one. Not running on empty by Wednesday. Feeling like what you’re doing is actually sustainable, and interesting, and yours.

One of the women I helped transition into instructional design told me she didn’t realize until she was out how much of her energy had gone just to surviving the week. She said she used to sleep entire Saturdays just to recover. Now she doesn’t need to. Because she’s not being depleted the same way.

That’s what’s waiting. Not a return to baseline. Something you haven’t experienced yet. And it is worth the messy middle to get there.

But here’s what actually helps you get through it, and it isn’t more willpower or more hours in the day.

It’s a plan. A real one. Not “I’ll work on it when I get a chance” but an actual week-by-week structure that tells you what you’re doing and when, so you’re not starting from scratch every time you sit down.

The messy middle gets a lot less messy when you know exactly what the next step is. When you don’t have to figure out where you are or what you should be doing next. When the decision has already been made and you just have to show up and do the thing.

That’s what I’m building with you at my free live masterclass on June 9. A complete, week-by-week summer roadmap built around what you actually need to do, in the right order, to walk into fall with a portfolio piece that gets hiring managers to pay attention.

If you’re in the messy middle right now, this is the thing that helps you move through it instead of spinning in it.

Register for the free June 9 ID Transition Summer Roadmap masterclass here.

The messy middle is not the end of the story. It’s just the middle. Keep going.

Top reasons to listen to the entire episode:

• Learn the simple AI prompting shift that helps you get unstuck and start your portfolio sample faster

• Discover how to turn your hobbies and everyday interests into a real corporate training topic

• Get the details on the Summer Instructional Design Roadmap masterclass and the Articulate Storyline license giveaway

Full Show Notes Here!

Resources and Links Mentioned:

• Sign-up for the Summer ID Roadmap Masterclass

• Join the Articulate License Giveaway

• Subscribe to Jumpstart Your ID Career on Substack

• Join the Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career Facebook Group

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Thanks for joining us on the Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career podcast! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review to help us reach even more freedom seekers and aspiring instructional designers.

This one is for the educators but more will be coming for you if you are not an educator. Don’t worry.

If you’ve been wondering whether your skills as a teacher actually translate to Instructional Design, and how to phrase them on your resume, I have something for you.

I built an Educator Skill to ID Skill Translator, and it’s free. You type in a skill you use all the time right now, and it shows you exactly how it maps to what ID professionals do. No guessing.

The link is right here: Educator Skills to ID Skills Translator

Now, here’s why I built it.

One of the biggest things holding career changers back isn’t a lack of skills. It’s not being able to SEE their skills clearly enough to talk about them with confidence. That gap is what this tool closes.
So use it. Play with it. Then keep reading, because this is just the start. The tools that are coming will allow you to plug in your own information, interact, and take things to the next level.

Starting June 1, I’m launching a paid tier on this Substack. $10 a month, or $80 a year for founder’s pricing. The price will be going up as more tools are added to the bank.

Every month has a theme. Every month you get two interactive tools built around that theme, four weekly prompts to help you actually take action, and one live Q&A call with me.

Here’s a taste of what’s coming:

• A resume-to-job-description matcher that tells you exactly what’s missing and how to fix it, specifically for new IDs entering the field.

• A cover letter generator that doesn’t sound like everyone else’s.

• A portfolio topic generator where you plug in a hobby and it finds a real business problem to connect it to, as well as a whole brief for how to structure your sample.

• A networking tool so you always know what to say and it stops feeling so awkward.

• A LinkedIn headline generator that actually sounds like you and speaks to hiring managers.

• A STAR question translator that takes your real examples and shapes them into interview-ready answers.

• An interview guide that gives you the real story behind what interviewers are actually looking for when they ask those questions.

• A Subject Matter Expert conversation simulator to practice working with SMEs before you’re in a real client meeting.

• A salary negotiation tool so you can be confident negotiating your salary.

• A mock interview coach so you can actually practice interviewing beforehand

And there’s more coming.

These aren’t generic tools. They’re built specifically for people either starting out or in the middle of this transition into Instructional Design.

Go use the free tool now. And watch this space for June 1.

I know that’s not the gentlest way to start. But I’ve watched too many smart, capable people spend a whole year being “kind of” in a career change, and then wonder why they’re in almost exactly the same place twelve months later. It’s not because they weren’t capable. It’s because casual effort was never going to get them there, and nobody had told them that.

So let me be the one who tells you, and then let me show you what to do instead.

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What “casual” actually looks like

First, let’s name it, because casual rarely feels casual from the inside. It feels like progress. It feels like you’re doing the thing.

Casual is watching a tutorial here and there when you happen to have a free evening. It’s bookmarking job posts you tell yourself you’ll come back to. It’s telling people, and telling yourself, that you’re “researching.” It’s opening a course, watching two lessons, and not coming back to it for three weeks. It’s waiting until you feel like it, until the house is quiet, until you’re a little less tired, until the timing is somehow better.

None of that is laziness. You’re a busy woman with a full life, and trying to fit a career change into the cracks of that life feels like the responsible, realistic way to do it.

But here’s the hard part. Fitting it into the cracks is exactly why it isn’t working.

Why casual effort fails

When you do something casually, a few things happen, and none of them are working in your favor.

You never build any momentum, because you’re always restarting. When there are three weeks between sessions, every session begins with “now where was I?” So you spend your limited energy reorienting yourself instead of actually moving forward.

You also don’t have a plan, which means every time you sit down, you first have to decide what to do, and that decision is exhausting on its own. More often than not, the decision quietly becomes “I’ll figure it out later.”

And you don’t have a deadline, so there’s no real edge to push against. Everything just stays “someday,” and someday is not a date on a calendar.

Underneath all of that, casual effort sends your own brain a quiet message that this isn’t really serious. That it’s more of a hobby. That it can keep getting bumped for everything that’s louder and more urgent. So it does keep getting bumped, week after week after week.

Casual effort gets you casual results. That’s not a motivational line, it’s just how this actually works. A career change is not a hobby you pick up when you feel like it. It’s a real project, and real projects need real, intentional space.

What intentional actually looks like

So here’s the other way to do it, and it’s honestly not as heavy as it might sound.

Intentional means you have dedicated time that’s actually protected. Not “whenever I can get to it,” but real, named blocks that you treat like an appointment you’d never cancel on someone else.

Intentional means you’re following a sequence, so when you sit down, the question isn’t “what should I work on today,” it’s simply “what’s next.” The thinking has already been done, so all you have to do is the doing.

Intentional means you have a deadline, a real one, so the work has somewhere to go and a reason to keep moving.

And intentional means you have some kind of accountability, someone or something outside your own head that is expecting you to show up. Because most of us will let ourselves off the hook long before we’ll let another person down.

That’s really the whole list. Protected time, a sequence, a deadline, and a little accountability. That is the entire difference between a summer that changes things and a summer that just quietly passes.

I had a student, Hannah, who was teaching full-time and had two babies eleven months apart when she went through the program. She blocked 7 to 9pm every single night after the kids went down. On weekends, nap times. And when she was in the car or in the shower, she had audio running in the background. She told me it’s not about saying you don’t have the time, it’s about finding the moments. Nine months later, she had a fully remote instructional design job plus a freelance contract on the side. Same life she’d always had. Completely different result, because she stopped waiting to fit it in and started treating it like something that mattered.

This summer is your chance to do it the intentional way

Here’s the good news, and there genuinely is good news.

Summer tends to crack open a window. If you’re a teacher, that’s obvious, you have a real, uninterrupted stretch of time in front of you right now, and once school starts back up it’s gone for a long while. But even if you’re not a teacher, summer usually loosens things up a little. The pace eases off, things get a bit quieter, vacations clear a little space on the calendar. Either way, this is the season to stop doing this casually and start doing it on purpose.

The piece most people are actually missing isn’t effort, and it isn’t ability. It’s the plan. The sequence. Knowing what to do first, what to do next, and what to leave for later so the whole thing doesn’t collapse under its own weight.

That’s exactly what I walk people through in the free Summer ID Roadmap Masterclass on June 9. It’s a two-hour live session where you walk away with a real week-by-week roadmap to build a polished Storyline sample and real AI skills before fall hiring season. I’m a 22-year veteran ID who has worked with Fortune 500 companies and helped over 1,200 career changers break into this field. I built the plan. Come get it.

Register for the Free Masterclass

And while you’re here, we’re also running a giveaway. The grand prize is a three-month Articulate license, the exact software you’ll be building your portfolio in. If you bought it directly from Articulate, you’d pay $1,447.

Enter the Giveaway Here

Mostly, no. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say about 90% of what employers want in a portfolio has not changed at all. There’s a 10% that’s new, and we’ll get to that, but I don’t want you to miss the big number here. The large majority of what gets you hired is the same as it was a few years ago.

I know that’s not what the internet is telling you. The internet is telling you everything has changed and you’re already behind. So let me walk you through what’s actually true.

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The 90% that has not changed

A strong ID portfolio is still built on the same core pieces it’s been built on for years, and there are five of them.

A Rise sample. A Storyline sample. A design document. A storyboard. And a job aid.

That’s the heart of it. Those five pieces show an employer that you understand the instructional design process, that you can use the industry-standard tools, and that you can take a real business problem and turn it into actual learning. None of that has gone out of style.

One of my students, Felicia, had an employer tell her after the portfolio review that they didn’t even need the third interview step, a meeting with the executive board. Her portfolio answered every question they had. That is what a strong portfolio can do. It skips steps in an interview process. These tools and these deliverables are still used heavily in day-to-day ID work, and employers are still very much looking for them.

So if you’re sitting there worried that the portfolio you’re trying to build is already outdated before you’ve even finished it, please hear me. It is not. The five core pieces are still the assignment. Build those, and build them well, and you have the thing that actually gets you interviews.

I hear some version of this from my students all the time. One of them, Jen, told me that in every single interview she had after graduating, the same comment came up: your portfolio really stood out to us. She wasn’t in the role six months before she was promoted to Director of Learning and Development. Not because she’d mastered AI tools, because she built a portfolio that showed she could think like an instructional designer. That’s what has not changed.

The 10% that has changed

Now let’s talk about the part that has shifted, because I’m not going to pretend nothing has.

Some employers, not most, but some, have started asking for AI skills in their job postings. And when they do, what they’re asking for tends to fall into four buckets. I want you to see all four, so the word “AI” stops feeling like one big scary blob.

Bucket one is prompt engineering with the chat tools. That’s ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, and the others like them. If “prompt engineering” is a new term for you, here’s all it means: it’s the skill of writing clear, specific instructions so the AI tool gives you genuinely useful output instead of generic mush. In ID work, that gets used for things like generating ideas, helping with writing, and building out scenarios.

Bucket two is specific AI tools beyond the chat tools. There are tools built for particular jobs now. HeyGen and Synthesia create avatars and video. ElevenLabs handles audio and voiceover. Nano Banana and ChatGPT images 2.0 generate images. You don’t need to go master all of these. It just helps to know they exist and roughly what each one does.

Bucket three is the tools you already need, with new AI features added on. This is the easiest bucket, honestly. Storyline, Rise, Camtasia, and Vyond Go are all tools the field already uses, and they’ve each added AI features. So as you learn the core tools anyway, you’ll naturally bump into their AI features along the way. There’s no separate mountain to climb here.

Bucket four is using AI for general productivity. This one has nothing to do with building learning and everything to do with how you manage your workday. Things like managing your inbox, organizing your calendar, drafting proposals, summarizing long Slack threads, scheduling recurring tasks, and searching for specific information across your communication channels. These are skills that make you more efficient at the job overall, not just the ID work specifically, and some employers are starting to factor that in.

Keep this in proportion

Now, here’s what I really want you to hear.

That 10% is real, but it is still only 10%. It is not the main event, and it is not the thing standing between you and a job.

I recently went through 100 real ID job postings and wrote up everything I found in another article here. Only 13 of them mentioned AI in any form. The core ID skills showed up on 95 of them. That gap is the whole story. The core skills are nonnegotiable. They are the baseline, the thing 95 out of 100 employers are screening for. AI skills are what you layer on top to become more competitive, and yes, they do make you more marketable when you have them. But one is the floor and the other raises the ceiling. You don’t skip the floor.

So when you see someone online insisting that ID is now an AI job and your portfolio needs to be all AI, all the time, you can go ahead and let that go. The data simply doesn’t back that up.

What this means if you’re starting now

So here’s what to actually do with all of this.

Build the five core pieces first. The Rise sample, the Storyline sample, the design document, the storyboard, and the job aid. That is your portfolio, and that is the 90% that gets you hired. So get those built, and built well.

Then, once that foundation is solid, layer in AI skills on top. A good bit of that will happen naturally anyway, because the core tools you’re already learning have AI features built right into them. And when you’re ready to go deeper, the four buckets above are exactly where to focus.

What you cannot afford to do is let the AI noise pull you off the core skills. That’s the real risk here. Not that you’ll fail to learn AI, but that you’ll spend your whole summer chasing the 10% while the 90% sits unfinished. Don’t do that. The foundation is the job. Build it first.

So just know this. The portfolio that gets you hired in 2026 looks a lot like the portfolio that got people hired three years ago, with a little AI layered on top when you’re ready. That’s it. That’s the whole answer.

I’ll be breaking down every piece of this all summer long. Subscribe so nothing lands without you.

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And while you’re here, we’re running a giveaway you’re going to want to know about. The grand prize is a three-month Articulate license, which is the software you’d use to build your Storyline and Rise samples, the two most important pieces of your portfolio. If you bought it directly from Articulate, you’d pay $1,447.

Enter the Giveaway Here

Top reasons to listen to the entire episode:

• Find out the real reasons experienced IDs are struggling — and the lesson it holds for you at any stage of your career

• Learn why a portfolio and up-to-date tech skills are non-negotiable in today's job market, no matter how long you've been in the field

• Discover why being new to the field might actually give you an unexpected advantage over seasoned IDs

Full Show Notes Here!

Resources and Links Mentioned:

• Sign up for the Summer ID Roadmap Masterclass

• Subscribe to Jumpstart Your ID Career on Substack

• Join the Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career Facebook Group

• Enter the Articulate Storyline License Giveaway Contest

Connect with Jill

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Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career Facebook Group

LinkedIn

Website

Thanks for joining us on the Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career podcast! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review to help us reach even more freedom seekers and aspiring instructional designers.

And if you’ve been anywhere near instructional design content lately, you’ve been hearing two specific things on repeat. AI is coming for ID jobs, and if you want to get hired, you’d better hurry up and become an AI expert.

It’s loud, and it’s making a lot of really capable people scared of the wrong thing.

So I did what I always try to do when the internet gets loud about something. I went and looked at the actual evidence.

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What I actually did

I pulled 100 real instructional design job postings. Not from one company, and not from one city, just a wide spread of real, current openings for IDs.

Then I read through all of them, and I tracked one pretty simple question the whole way through: what are these employers actually asking for? Here’s what I found.

The numbers

Out of those 100 postings, 13 of them mentioned AI in any form at all. That could be a specific tool, or just a general “familiarity with AI,” anything at all really. Only 13. Which means 87 of them didn’t mention AI even once.

And the core instructional design skills? Those showed up on 95 of the 100.

I want you to really sit with that for a second. AI showed up on 13 postings. The core skills showed up on 95. That is not a field where AI is the thing getting people hired. It’s a field where the core skills are still, overwhelmingly, the thing getting people hired.

What those 95 postings actually asked for

So if it’s not AI, then what is it?

Honestly, it’s the same things it’s been for years. They want the core ID skill set. They want someone who can run the instructional design process from start to finish. They want Storyline and Rise, they want you to be able to work with subject matter experts, and they want you building real learning, not just slides.

Storyline in particular came up again and again. It really is sitting right at the center of what employers are asking for. It’s not a nice-to-have, it’s a core expectation.

So that’s the signal, and the AI panic is the noise. And right now the noise is so loud that it’s drowning out the signal for the very people who can’t really afford to mishear it.

So where does AI actually fit?

Now, I’m not telling you that AI doesn’t matter, because it does. I’m just telling you to put it in the right place.

AI is a tool. It can help you work faster, it can help you draft a scenario, it can help you get unstuck when you’re staring at a blank page. It can generate images, create avatars, produce voiceover, and even build out video content. There are tools built specifically for each of those jobs, and they’re genuinely impressive.

And here’s what I actually believe about AI skills: they do make you more marketable. If you have the core skills as your foundation and AI skills layered on top, you are a stronger candidate than someone who has only the core skills. There are companies that want that, and it’s genuinely not a bad thing to have.

But there’s an order of operations here that matters. The core skills are nonnegotiable. They are the baseline, the thing you cannot skip, the thing that 95 out of 100 employers are screening for. AI skills are what you add on top of that foundation to become more competitive. One is the floor. The other raises the ceiling. And you really don’t want to skip the floor.

Let’s put the fear to rest

Here’s what I actually see happening, and I want to name it because I don’t think it gets talked about enough.

It’s not that people are abandoning the core skills to go chase AI. It’s that the noise around AI is so loud that people are genuinely scared the core skills won’t matter anymore. That employers have moved on. That if you don’t show up as an AI expert, you’re already behind.

And that fear is understandable, because the internet is really good at making everything feel urgent and everything feel like it’s changing faster than it actually is.

But here’s what the internet isn’t telling you. A huge number of companies haven’t adopted AI at all yet. Not because they don’t know it exists, but because they’re scared of it too. Data privacy concerns, compliance issues, slow internal approval processes, general resistance to new technology, all of it. Corporate moves slowly. It always has. So if you land a role at one of those companies, and there are a lot of them, the core skills are the entire job. AI doesn’t even come up.

The job postings back this up. 95 out of 100 are asking for the core skills. 13 are asking about AI. That gap is not closing as fast as social media wants you to believe.

What to do with this

So let’s put the AI panic to rest, at least enough that you can think clearly about this.

Build the core skills first. Learn the ID process, learn Storyline, and get genuinely good at the things that showed up on 95 out of those 100 postings. Then, once that foundation is solid, layer in AI skills on top. Not because you have to, but because they will make you more competitive with the companies that are looking for them. Foundation first, add-on second, in that order.

I know that’s not the exciting advice. The exciting advice is to go learn the futuristic thing. But the exciting advice isn’t what’s showing up on the job postings. The core skills are.

So just know this. The fear that you’re already behind because you haven’t mastered AI yet? That fear is not based on what employers are actually asking for. The data says otherwise. Build the foundation, add the AI skills when you’re ready, and let the noise be noise.

And if you want to know exactly how to build both into your portfolio this summer, join me on June 9 for the free Summer ID Roadmap Masterclass. I’m going to show you the core Storyline skills you need, the specific AI skills that actually make you more marketable, and the week-by-week plan to get it all done before fall hiring season. Two hours, completely free, and you leave with a real plan. Register here: https://learningstrategyanddesign.com/roadmap/

And while you’re here, we’re also running a giveaway. The grand prize is a three-month Articulate license, the software behind Storyline and Rise, the two tools at the center of every strong ID portfolio. If you bought it directly from Articulate, you’d pay $1,447. Enter HERE.

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You turn in the letter, or you tell your principal in person. You pack up your classroom, delete the school email app off your phone, and walk out of the building for the last time carrying a box of stuff you swore every single summer you’d finally organize and never did. And for a little while, it feels incredible. Truly incredible. You might feel lighter than you’ve felt in years. You might cry in your car, or celebrate with your family, or just sit there thinking, “I finally chose myself. I finally got out.”

And then the next morning, a quiet little voice starts up. What did I just do? Did I just make a huge mistake?

If that’s where you are right now, I want you to read the rest of this slowly, because almost nobody talks about this part, and I think you really need to hear it.

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The panic doesn’t mean you were wrong.

So let me tell you what’s actually happening here.

You didn’t just leave a job. You left an identity. For years, “teacher” wasn’t only something you did, it was something you were. It’s how other people knew you, and honestly, it’s how you knew yourself.

And right now, you’ve set that down, and you haven’t picked up the next thing yet. You’re standing in the gap between who you used to be and who you’re becoming, and that gap is uncomfortable. It’s supposed to be. But uncomfortable is not the same thing as wrong.

So I’ll just say it plainly. The panic is not evidence that you made a mistake. It’s just the sound of that gap, and everyone who has ever made a real change in their life has had to stand in it for a while.

You just made room.

Here’s a reframe I really want you to sit with for a minute.

When you resigned, it can feel like you lost something, like you gave up your job, your routine, your title. And yes, you did let those things go. But letting go is not the same as losing. Letting go is actually how you make room.

When we keep gripping the things that aren’t working, whether that’s a draining job, a habit we can’t shake, or a relationship that ran its course, we don’t leave any space for something better to come in. So the thing that isn’t working just keeps on not working. The very thing we’re scared to release is often what’s blocking the better thing from showing up.

So you didn’t lose anything you actually needed this week. You made space. And now something better finally has room to come find you.

I know that because I did the exact same thing. Back in 2016, I decided I was never setting foot in an office again, so I quit and started my own instructional design business, fully remote. Back then that wasn’t something you could just do in a traditional job the way you can now. I didn’t have a safety net. What I had was a decision. So I took my son, we traveled for the summer, and I figured I’d sort out the rest in the fall.

And I did sort it out. The work I do now, the life I’ve built, the freedom I have, all of it traces straight back to that one scared, plan-less decision to step into the unknown anyway.

I’m not telling you that because it was easy, because it wasn’t. I’m telling you because the room you just made is real, and I’ve stood in that exact doorway and seen what can walk through it.

You don’t need the whole answer. You need the next move.

Now here’s the tough-love part, and I only say this because I want you free, not stuck.

The panic gets so loud because you’re trying to answer the wrong question. You’re sitting there at 11pm trying to figure out your entire future, your whole next career, the rest of your working life, all at once, tonight. Of course that feels overwhelming. Nobody can answer a question that big in one sitting, so I want you to stop asking it.

You do not need to know your whole future right now. You just need the next right move, and that’s really the only thing actually on your plate.

One of my students, Elyse, knew she wanted out of the classroom by year three. She stayed for eight years. Not because she didn’t want to leave, but because she kept waiting until she was sure, until the guilt lifted, until the timing was right. When she finally made the move, she told me there aren’t words to express how worth it it’s been. But those five years of waiting? She can’t get those back. The next move doesn’t have to be the whole plan. It just has to be real.

I’ve watched this play out the same way too many times. You open your laptop, and you just sit there opening random job boards, typing things like “remote jobs,” “HR,” “training,” scrolling for a while, closing the tab, and feeling worse than when you started. That’s not a plan. That’s panic with a search bar. A direction is what quiets all that noise, and you don’t need the whole map, you just need a direction.

You already have a direction.

So here’s something I really want you to take in.

You are not standing here with no idea what comes next. You’re reading this, and you’re on a Substack dedicated to instructional design, which tells me you’ve already been circling this for a while. You’ve watched the videos, you’ve read the posts, you’ve maybe lurked in a Facebook group or two. That counts, and that is a direction. You are further along than the panic is letting you feel.

What you don’t have yet is a decision and a starting point, and those two things are very different from “no idea what to do with my life.” You just haven’t made it official yet, and you don’t know which step is step one. That’s it. That’s the actual size of your problem, and it’s so much smaller than the one that 11pm voice is trying to sell you.

And here’s the good news underneath all of that. Instructional design is a field where your teaching skills genuinely transfer. You already know how people learn, and you already know how to take something complicated and make it land. You’re not starting from zero, you’re starting from teacher, and that is a real head start.

So the next move isn’t to “figure out my whole future.” It’s smaller and far more doable than that. It’s to stop circling the thing you already know you want, and take one real step toward it.

What this summer could actually be.

So picture the two different versions of your July.

In the first one, you spend it the way the panic wants you to. You refresh job boards, you watch another video and read another post and tell yourself you’re still researching, and you keep waiting to feel less scared before you do anything real.

In the second one, you spend it actually building toward something. You learn a real skill, you make something you can show, and you move forward a little bit every single week.

It’s the same summer, and it’s the same you. But it’s a completely different September. And that second version is genuinely available to you. It starts the moment you stop trying to figure out the whole thing and just take the next step.

I want to leave you with one moment that Leslie shared with me. A few months into her new ID job, she was driving somewhere with her mom when they passed a local school. A sign said school starts in a week. And she had this immediate rush of panic, I’m not ready, I haven’t planned anything. And her mom looked at her and said, “Leslie, you’re not teaching anymore.” And she said she took this big deep breath and thought: it’s all going to be okay. I’m not in this cycle anymore. That’s what’s on the other side of the move you’re afraid to make.

So, now what?

The panic is normal, and it is not a verdict on your decision. Let it be loud for a minute, and then let it pass.

You don’t owe yourself the whole answer this week. You just owe yourself one next move, so let me give you one. It’s small, it’s specific, and you can do it today.

Go look at some portfolios. Spend about twenty minutes with the AIDA portfolios on my website and really study the projects inside them. These were built by people who started right where you are, and this is what the work actually looks like. This is the kind of thing you’d be making.

That one small step does more than you’d think. It turns “instructional design” from an abstract idea into something real and visible and doable. And doable is exactly what you need right now.

I’ll be here all summer walking through every part of this transition. Subscribe so the next piece comes straight to you.

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And while you’re here, we’re running a giveaway you’re going to want to know about. The grand prize is a three-month Articulate license, which is the software behind Storyline and Rise, the two tools at the center of every strong ID portfolio. If you bought it directly from Articulate, you’d pay $1,447.

Enter the Giveaway Here

I’ve heard this story enough times that I can predict it in May. Because the people who end up in that September are almost always the ones who looked at the summer and thought, “I have plenty of time.” And then they tried to do all of it at once. Storyline, Rise, storyboards, AI tools, resume, portfolio, all of it, all summer, no real plan. Just summer chaos with a laptop.

That is not a transition strategy. That is just hoping something sticks.

So let me be real with you. That whole list probably isn’t going to happen this summer, and I’d rather tell you that now than have you find it out the hard way.

It’s not because you’re not smart or not capable. It’s because you’re trying to fit close to a year of work into a single summer. And when you try to do everything at once, you usually end up doing a little bit of all of it and finishing none of it.

So here’s what I’d actually do instead.

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First, the honest truth about twelve weeks

A solid ID portfolio has about five core pieces in it: a Rise sample, a Storyline sample, a design document, a storyboard, and a job aid. You are not going to learn the tools, learn the process, and build all five of those in twelve weeks, and I want to just say that out loud so the pressure comes off you right now.

But there’s some good news hiding inside that. You don’t need to do all five this summer.

The five pieces aren’t equal. Four of them are lighter lifts. The Storyline sample is the big one, because that’s where you’re learning a real piece of software from scratch, and software takes reps and time to get comfortable with. That’s the piece that really needs a long, uninterrupted stretch, and a summer is exactly that.

So the move isn’t to do a little of everything. It’s to spend your summer on the hardest thing, which is learning Storyline and building your first sample in it, and then save the four lighter pieces for the fall, when you’ll be working in shorter pockets of time anyway. One hard thing done well will always beat five things left half-finished.

Here’s the plan, week by week

This is what I'd do if I were starting over today, broken down into bite-size chunks.

Week 1: Pick your topic. Don’t agonize over this one. Choose something you already understand, so the content isn’t also a thing you have to learn while you’re learning everything else. Then spend some time looking at real Storyline samples for inspiration. The Articulate community has showcases full of them, and the AIDA portfolios on my website have plenty of Storyline samples you can study too. You’re just training your eye for what good looks like before you build anything.

Week 2: Plan the sample. This is the week a lot of new IDs want to skip, and skipping it is usually why a sample falls apart later on. You’re not opening Storyline yet. You’re building a content map first, which means your learning objectives, your audience, the business problem and the goal, your content outline, and your assessment. Plan it on paper, and build it second.

Weeks 3-4: Learn beginning Storyline. Now you can open the software. Spend these two weeks getting comfortable with the foundations, things like building slides, working with layers, triggers, buttons, and states, adding audio and video, and creating knowledge checks and quizzes. Customize the player while you’re in there too. Don’t worry about being fancy yet, just focus on getting comfortable with how it all works.

Week 5: Learn visual design principles. This is the part most people skip, and it really is the difference between a sample that looks amateur and one that looks like a working professional built it. Layout, contrast, white space, fonts, color. It all matters more than you’d think.

Weeks 6-7: Build your first draft. Take your Week 2 plan and your new Storyline skills, and actually build the thing. It will not be perfect, and it’s not supposed to be, so don’t let that stop you. Just get a rough, working draft done, and then get some eyes on it and collect feedback.

Weeks 8-9: Learn advanced Storyline. Now you get to level up. This is where you learn motion paths, branching scenarios, avatars, custom drag-and-drop interactions, accordion interactions, and variables. These are the skills that take a sample from looking amateur to looking genuinely professional.

Weeks 10-11: Rebuild with your new skills. Go back into your draft and make it better with what you just learned. Add a branching scenario, swap a clunky click-through for a real drag-and-drop, work in a variable. This is the stretch where your sample stops looking like practice and starts looking like an actual portfolio piece.

Week 12: Get professional feedback. Get your sample in front of someone who actually works in the field, not just a friend who’ll be kind about it. Take the notes, make the edits, and then you’re done.

What you’ve got in September

So think about where that leaves you.

By the time fall arrives, you have one strong Storyline sample. The hardest piece of your whole portfolio is finished, you’ve learned a real tool from scratch, and you’ve proven to yourself that you can still do hard things.

And those other four pieces, the Rise sample, the design doc, the storyboard, and the job aid? Those just become a fall project. They’re lighter lifts, and you can chip away at them in the smaller pockets of time you’ll have once your fall schedule fills back up. That’s not a summer panic anymore, it’s just a fall to-do list.

And that is a completely different September than the one where you tried to do everything at once, did a little of each, and finished none of it.

Your move this week

I know the full twelve weeks can look like a lot, and I get that it feels overwhelming when you see it all at once. But breaking it down into bite-size chunks is what creates momentum, and momentum really is the whole game here.

So don’t look at all twelve weeks right now. Just look at Week 1. And Week 1 is really just one thing: pick your topic. That’s something you can do today.

I’m going to be walking through every part of this transition right here, all summer long, so go ahead and subscribe and the next piece will land right in your inbox.

And while you’re here, we’re running a giveaway you’re going to want to know about. The grand prize is a three-month Articulate license, which is the exact software you’d be using to build that Storyline sample. If you bought it directly from Articulate, you’d pay $1,447. Enter here.

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Like many educators considering a transition, she knew she had valuable experience and a long list of transferable skills.

The challenge wasn’t whether she was capable of doing something else. The challenge was figuring out where those skills actually fit outside the classroom.

Three years ago, she decided it was time to leave education and started searching for what might come next.

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Trying everything and getting nowhere

For about a year and a half, Laura did what many teachers do at the beginning of a transition: she applied broadly. Instructional design. Project management. Customer success roles. Anything that felt connected to the skills she’d built over two decades in schools.

At first, she focused heavily on ed tech companies, assuming that would be the most natural fit. But after getting little traction, she started widening the search and noticed instructional design continuing to show up.

The more she learned about it, the more it made sense.

She could see the overlap. The problem-solving. The content creation. The training and communication skills she had spent years developing. She knew it was work she would enjoy and probably be good at.

But knowing that and getting employers to see it turned out to be two very different things.

The problem wasn’t experience

Laura knew she had gaps. She hadn’t worked with tools like Articulate or Camtasia, but she assumed employers would see her years of experience and understand that those technical skills could be learned.

Instead, she spent a year and a half applying.

Hundreds and hundreds of applications.

And only two interviews.

Neither moved forward.

At that point, frustration started turning into desperation. She couldn’t understand what she was doing wrong. She was presenting her teaching experience the way she always had, the way teachers are taught to, without realizing that corporate hiring worked differently.

Looking back, she wasn’t lacking experience.

She was missing translation.

Realizing instructional design needed more than interest

When Laura came across the Jumpstart workshop, it immediately brought her back to something she already knew: instructional design was where she wanted to go.

But this time she also recognized something else.

She needed structure.

After spending so long trying to figure things out alone, AIDA stood out because it wasn’t just teaching theory. The program included the tools she knew employers were asking for. It offered opportunities to practice, receive feedback, build skills, and understand how all the pieces fit together.

And after getting nowhere for so long, support mattered too.

Because at that point, Laura didn’t just need information.

She needed a roadmap.

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Less than a year later, everything looked different

Less than a year later, she had fully transitioned into a full-time, fully remote instructional design role in the insurance industry.

She designs training and content for end users of company products, work that immediately appealed to her because of the direct connection between what she builds and the people using it.

And beyond the work itself, she found something many former teachers hope for when they picture life after the classroom: a supportive team, a great manager, strong benefits, flexibility, and work she genuinely enjoys.

She describes herself as thriving.

What Laura discovered on the other side

Laura’s story isn’t one about instant success.

It’s a story about spending a year and a half believing effort alone would eventually be enough. Sending applications. Trying different paths. Hoping the right opportunity would appear.

And then realizing that sometimes the issue isn’t capability.

Sometimes it’s knowing how to package your experience, fill the right gaps, and understand the rules of a completely different world.

Because teachers already bring a lot with them.

Sometimes they just need help translating it.

You can also join the conversation inside our Facebook community, Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career, where aspiring and transitioning instructional designers connect, learn, and support each other along the journey.

Want to connect with me? You can find me here:

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or Book a Call Here

That’s exactly why we’re sharing this series.

J. Elaine Atherton is a senior instructional designer and a graduate of the Applied Instructional Design Academy. She agreed to give us something rare: a week’s worth of diary entries, one for each day, Monday through Friday, documenting exactly how her days unfold. The projects she’s juggling, the rhythms of her schedule, what she does before and after the kids get home from school.

If you’re wondering whether this career could give you more flexibility, more creative control, or just a different kind of impact, read on. Elaine’s words speak for themselves.

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Note: This is the first entry in a weekly series: A Day in the Life of an Instructional Designer. Each week, we’ll be posting one letter from her Monday–Friday diary so you can get a real, unfiltered look at what this career actually looks like, day by day.

Happy Monday,

Before I begin, let me tell you how happy I am that you are here to learn more about my day-to-day activities as an Instructional Designer. This profession changed my life, and I know it can do the same for you!

My day typically begins about 7:00 am when I wake up, stretch, and complete a daily devotional. At 7:45, it’s time to gather the kids and take them to school. Luckily for me, the school is just 5 minutes down the road! That means I am home by 8:05 (ish) to begin my work day.

From 8–9 am I check my calendar, read any emails that may have come in since I logged off on Friday, and set a To-Do list/agenda for the day. I love that I have so much control over what happens during my work day. I also make a 2nd list of things around the house that need to get done (dishes, laundry, crock pot dinner, etc.) This way I can check off house chores as I get them accomplished as well.

At 9 am I have a meeting with my boss, Shannon. I previously sent a message to Shannon with an idea of what I want to talk about during this meeting so that she also has a plan for the talk in mind. This meeting only lasts 30 minutes and we cover so much, including where I am on my current projects and any questions I may have. Shannon will offer me insight into my current projects and the direction I’m taking for each project. Right now I have 7 projects to complete.

From 9:30–10 I put dinner in the crockpot so that it will be ready for the family at dinner time. This also gives me a chance to stretch my legs from all the sitting.

When I finish in the kitchen, around 10 or so, I will begin working on one of my projects. Today, that project is a Virtual Instructor Led Training (VILT) on Coaching for the new Journey Into Leadership series that I am creating. I completed the design document and “Storyboard”/Outline, so now I am on to put a rough draft into PowerPoint.

From 12–1 pm I will take my lunch. I usually warm up left overs from the night before and sit at the table with a book. I am currently reading The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. With about 20 minutes left in my lunch time, I will take my dogs for a walk because it is such a beautiful day!

After lunch, I work for another hour. I am still working on the “Coaching class.” This class is the 2nd of 8 in the series that I designed and I am very proud of the progress.

At 2 pm I have a team meeting. Our “Project Tracker” meeting is 1 hour on the first Monday of the month, so this particular meeting is longer than others because we will go line by line through the spreadsheet so that everyone on the team can give a status update on everything we have on our plates.

I usually take a break after this meeting until I need to go pick up my kiddos from school, around 3:15. I sit in the carline and read my book some more because I am drawn into it. I am really learning so much. Once the kids are out of school and in the truck, we head back home to finish out our day.

After getting in the door, I make sure the kids have a snack and are either reading or getting started on homework while I finish out the final hour or so of my day. Today, I am going to answer a few emails that have come in and check a co-worker’s eLearning Module on Workplace Violence that she is finishing for Annual Compliance and Safety Training.

And then at 5pm, I will close all of the open programs on my computer and then power down.

My night will be filled with baseball practice, helping my children with homework, or veg’ing on the couch.

Time to sign off for the day! Catch you tomorrow friends!

— J. Elaine Atherton

If Elaine’s Monday sounds like the kind of workday you’ve been dreaming about: flexibility, meaningful projects, and still being home when the kids get off the bus, this is what life as an instructional designer can actually look like.

Next week, we’ll follow Elaine into Tuesday. Same career, new set of tasks.

Here at Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career, we share real stories, real career insights, and practical guidance for people who are thinking about making the transition. If you don’t want to miss what’s coming next, subscribe so each issue lands right in your inbox.

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If today’s entry resonated with you, share it with someone in your life who’s been wondering if there’s something else out there for them. And if Elaine’s day sparked any questions, drop them in the comments, we’d love to hear from you!

She enjoyed parts of the work and built meaningful relationships along the way, but like many educators, 2020 shifted things.

The stress grew heavier, and eventually she started asking the same question many teachers quietly ask themselves: What else is out there?

She explored online teaching and other possibilities before stumbling across instructional design. Reading through job descriptions felt oddly familiar.

As an English teacher, she looked at the responsibilities and thought, I can do that. So she started applying. And heard absolutely nothing back.

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The moment things clicked

Then one night she came across Jill and AIDA on Facebook. It was a free workshop, and she figured she had nothing to lose. By the end of it, though, she knew she had found something different.

“This is it. This is what I need to do.”

She enrolled in January 2023 while still teaching full-time. Over the next several months she completed the program, built her portfolio, and prepared for the transition while finishing out the school year.

When the job search moved faster than expected

Holly expected the job search to take a while. She had prepared herself for dozens, maybe hundreds, of applications.

Instead, she applied to fewer than thirty jobs.

Within weeks, she had an offer. Not only that, but it came in above what she had hoped for. She had planned to negotiate if needed, but the company offered the top of the salary range right away.

By September, she had started her full-time instructional design role with Sodexo, where she’s now been for nearly two years.

Life feels different now

Today Holly works fully remote creating training for North America as part of a global team. And for someone living in rural Kentucky, losing the commute alone changed her day-to-day life.

Now her mornings are slower. Coffee with her dog. Time before work. No rushing out the door.

But the biggest difference isn’t remote work. It’s flexibility.

Doctor’s appointments don’t become logistical nightmares. Family events don’t require elaborate planning. If she wants to flex hours and leave early on Friday, she can.

As someone managing chronic health conditions, that shift changed everything.

One thing she said stood out: “It’s just not that serious.”

For former teachers, that can take time to believe. Not every job operates in constant crisis mode.

The work itself surprised her

One concern Holly had was whether corporate life would mean endless meetings. Instead, most of her meetings have a clear purpose. Outside of regular team check-ins, much of her time is spent designing, creating, and building.

That’s become one of her favorite parts of the work.

Her team gives her space to take ownership of projects, offer ideas, and lean into creativity. Even with different titles across the team, she says it rarely feels hierarchical.

It just feels collaborative.

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Not every part is exciting

Of course, every job still comes with less glamorous work.

For Holly, that’s spreadsheets.

During a large LMS transition project, spreadsheet work seemed endless, and she openly admits Excel isn’t her favorite place to be. But she also pointed out that every role has administrative work. The difference is that it doesn’t take over everything else.

The creative work is still there.

The biggest learning curve wasn’t instructional design

Interestingly, the hardest adjustment wasn’t Storyline or course design.

It was Microsoft.

After years in a Google-based school district, learning Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive felt like starting over. Beyond that, she had to learn the business itself, something instructional designers do in nearly every role.

But that became part of the fun. Every project meant learning something new.

What Holly found after leaving teaching

The biggest thing Holly gained wasn’t the salary increase, though she got one.

It wasn’t even remote work.

It was realizing that work could finally fit around life instead of life revolving around work.

For teachers wondering if that kind of change is possible, Holly’s story offers a reminder:

Sometimes the thing that changes everything starts with a workshop you almost didn’t attend.

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You can also join the conversation inside our Facebook community, Jumpstart Your Instructional Design Career, where aspiring and transitioning instructional designers connect, learn, and support each other along the journey.

Want to connect with me? You can find me here:

Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Website

or Book a Call Here