When you’re looking for an instructional design role, it’s important to find a good “fit.” A good fit means doing work you find satisfying, in an organization or with clients that value your contributions. While AI is changing roles and processes both within Learning and Development and across workplaces, we can use some frameworks for looking at ID roles broadly and beyond technology. The old lines between generalists and specialists don’t quite fit the reality of many ID roles. Instead, many people have a broad range of generalist skills plus multiple moderate and deep specializations.
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Generalist or specialist
Generalists do a little bit of everything. This is pretty common in instructional design and elearning roles, especially in smaller organizations. Generalists have a broad set of skills. You can have a lot of variety in your work when you’re a generalist.
True specialists have deep skills in one or two areas, but tend to have a weaker base of other related skills. Elearning developers are often specialists; they work best when someone else provides them with a storyboard or script that they can be creative in building and development. AI opens up the possibilities for new specialties in AI media creation or working with agents. Larger teams are more likely to hire specialists who focus on a particular skill or part of the process.
Unicorn or comb
What employers ask for in job openings is often unicorns: people who have deep skills in all the areas. In practice, real unicorns aren’t very common. The quote below is about UX design, but this framework applies to instructional design as well.
Aim towards unicorn, realistically end up as a beautifully misshapen comb
The reality is that to be a unicorn is a worthy goal, but most people won’t get there, and that’s fine! First, find something you’re good at and which contributes towards the field you’re interested in, then you have at least something to fall back on and can bring value to a broad range of teams.
Sophie O’Kelley in Generalist versus specialist? How about a misshapen comb?
Rather than being a unicorn, it’s more common to be a bit of a “misshapen comb.” That means you have the broad base of skills that give you a little knowledge about many topics and help you interact with other specialists. You also have a couple of deeper skills, maybe at different depths. An elearning developer might have deep skills in Storyline, plus moderate skills in AI media creation, UX, graphic design, and a little Javascript, along with a foundation of instructional design principles.
The idea of the comb is related to Cammy Bean’s explanation of broad and deep T-shaped skills in her book, The Accidental Instructional Designer.
It’s effectively a hybrid: you have that broad base of skills as a generalist that makes you an asset for working across teams. You also have some specializations of various depths. That combination of specialist skills are what set you apart from every other generalist out there.
Good organizational fit
Generalists
Generalists have traditionally lots of options for jobs in ID. They can contribute to a team or work as a department of one (fairly common in L&D). Being a generalist is how people often start out in the field of instructional design because you get experience across a broad range of skills.
But being a generalist also can be challenging because you don’t have as clear of a way to stand out in the job market. Your skills may need to look more like the “misshapen comb” from the article I quoted earlier; you have a broad base of generalist skills plus several moderate skills and one or two deep specialties.
Everything I hear from folks looking for jobs right now is that the market is rough, and the competition is hard. Even people with years of instructional design experience and credentials are having a hard time. Entry level generalist positions in ID were hard to come by even before AI, and it seems to be getting harder now as AI redefines roles and other pressures increase competition for jobs.
Specialists
The bad news is that means you may need some sort of specialization to stand out. The good news is that AI is so new that even if you don’t have a ton of experience in ID that almost nobody has more than a few years head start building their skills in AI. There are opportunities to create new specialties for yourself as differentiators.
For example, five years ago, AI image generation didn’t exist. But now I’m not only using AI images for my work, I’m getting paid to teach people about AI images too. It’s taken a lot of work and sharing my expertise for free to get to this point, but I created a specialty for myself. That specialty means I fit with some organizations better than others.
If you’re a true specialist who wants to work in only one area, you may need to be more discerning in searching for jobs or projects that align with your specialty. Larger companies are more likely to have larger teams where different members have different specialties. Elearning vendors, the companies that specialize in creating elearning for other organizations, are other good places to find more specialized roles.
In the past, elearning development specialists seemed to have an easier time finding work, especially as freelancers. Organizations were always looking for developers who can build elearning, even if they have an internal team of instructional designers. Development is the easiest part of the process to outsource to a freelancer or consultant. That might still be true today, but it’s unclear to me right now how that will shift as organizations move away from a short list of traditional authoring tools and into a wider range of authoring and AI tools. Developers with skills using AI tools may have an advantage, at least in the short run.
I know people who want to focus primarily on writing and stay away from development or technical work. Job searching can be a trickier if you want to focus primarily on strategy, analysis, design, and storyboarding. You have to look for those larger teams where roles are specialized, or at least organizations who regularly outsource development work. Those roles are increasingly challenging to find though. Jobs focused on a narrower range of tasks are more at risk from AI. Shifting yourself closer to the business problem and into more performance consulting may be one way to avoid working with development.
Hybrid generalist/specialist
A stronger position is that “misshapen comb” or hybrid generalist/specialist. Combining a broad range of generalist skills means you’re adaptable and can do a bit of everything. Generalists who do many different tasks are harder to replace with AI or automation, and they’re good at combining skills. But there are so many generalists out there that it’s hard to get a job if your differentiator is something like, “I used to be a teacher, and now I’m an ID.”
Pick one skill you’re interested in learning more about: learning science, some aspect of AI, video, UX, scenarios, games, customer enablement, onboarding, etc. You don’t have to learn everything and have deep skills in all of it, but growing your skills in specific areas makes it easier to find roles that use those skills.
Questions to ask
Many people treat job interviews as a one-sided evaluation of your skills, instead of a two-way review for good fit. When you interview, asking questions helps you figure out the role and the culture.
Ask questions like these to learn more about the position:
What does a typical day or week look like in this position?
Thinking about the people who have been really successful in this role in the past, what sets them apart from people who are “just OK” in this role? (If they say how pretty they make PowerPoint, but you know you want to focus on performance consulting, you know it’s not a good fit.)
What’s the most challenging part of this position?
Tell me about the roles in the rest of the team. Who else would I be working with?
How do you determine which projects get developed and what projects have priority?
How do you use AI in your instructional design processes?
If you ask those sorts of questions, you should get a better feel for the job and the organizational culture. Even interviewing with an elearning vendor as a subcontractor, you could ask some of these questions. The answers will help you figure out how much is just order taking from clients and how much is consulting.
More on Instructional Design Careers
Check out all of my posts on instructional design careers, including these:
Originally published 11/19/2019. Updated 6/18/2026.
