Week13: More Career and PD Discussion

In this final week of learning, I went through the articles about our professional development, which help me reflect on my future career path in an overview perspective. Combining the recommended readings with my personal experience and thoughts, I become more clear about my personal professional development.

Firstly, what did I learn from the readings? Thanks to the Dr. Bonk, as well as my IST alumni Merve and Zulfukar, for their research of interpretations on the diverse field of “education technology” in social media job postings by “encoding and decoding approach”. This model is an original way to analyze the discourses of five different terms mostly used in our field. The findings showed me the specific boundaries of discourses between different categories including ability and skills, experience, preferences, qualifications, requirements and responsibilities. What I am mostly concerned is the category of ability and skills because I need to consider to plan for my future academic career. So the most impressive finding is about the educational technology having a dominant discourse over this category. The specific skills are learning skills, reasoning skills, organizational skills, business skills and language ability, based on the analysis of job postings in Twitter. Plus, the instructional Systems Technology (IST) also focuses on the learning skills as ET. As a Ph.D. student in IST currently, what I need to note is to promote the ability and skills especially learning skills as much as possible. Of course, all other skills are also my targeted goals for cultivation by myself.

As I learned the detailed distinctions between five definitions in this field, I should open my eyes to know more about the development of related definitions beyond the sole IST. From the summary of mutual codes of professions over five categories, Learning Experience Design (LXD) has the most mutual codes with other professions. As LXD has its completed definition emphasizing on subjective, holistic and situations, perceptions, motivations and emotions, it puts a higher requirement for professional quality of practitioners. Although I namely am not study in LXD, IST still has close relations with LXD. I need to strengthen my skills covering any specific ones required by industry.

Table: Mutual codes of the professions over the categories of ability and skills, experience, preferences, qualifications, requirements, and responsibilities

Secondly, the lessons from a personal history of Dr. Reiser told me lots of work to prepare before looking for a job. In terms of skills, to acquire a strong set of media production skills, design and analysis skills, management skills and communication skills are critical during the job search. They are stepping stones for entering the job market in this field. The earlier we acquire, the better we prepare for the career.

The topic this week reminds me of a previous panel of our IST alumni, which invited three former graduate students working in different kinds of position in industry. One of the seniors told us, our IST students have lots of options when choosing a job, but it means we need to be more professional in thinking and doing to make up the disadvantage of lacking enough experience. I totally agreed with that due to its obvious and realistic situation existing with the gap between the academism and the practice. We may have a solid academic foundation of IST, but we need to be more proficient in the related skills’ operations and understand of technology. We also need to jump out of our circle to see our field with a big picture, then we can adapt to the constantly changing world more quickly.

Reference:

1.Basdogan, M., Ozdogan, Z., & Bonk, C. J. (2020). Understanding the diverse field of “educational technology” as revealed in Twitter job postings: Encoding/decoding approach. The Qualitative Report, 25(8), 2044-2066.

2.Gabrielli, G. K., & Branson, R. K. (2012). Getting a job in business and industry. In R. A. Reiser & J. V. Dempsey (Eds.), Trends and issues in instructional design and technology (3rd ed.) (pp. 263-272). Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

3.Reiser, R. A. (2012). Getting an instructional design position: Lessons from a personal history. 23 In R. A. Reiser & J. V. Dempsey (Eds.), Trends and issues in instructional design and technology (3rd ed.) (pp. 256-262). Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.