eLearning Career Guide #1: Nailing the Interview
If you’ve decided that you want to make a career in corporate eLearning, good for you. The industry is poised for significant growth that shows no signs of letting up. I think it’s important for those contemplating the corporate eLearning career path to know a few things about what’s in store as you try to break into the field. In this article, I will focus on the kinds of questions that are likely to come up in eLearning job interviews. If you are prepared to answer these questions, you’ll have a much easier time nailing your dream job.
Companies who are out to hire eLearning professionals often ask the following questions:
- Do you have an eLearning portfolio? If you have any experience at all designing eLearning courses, then you need to have a portfolio to showcase your work. If you’re fresh out of college, this may have to consist of class assignments or any special internship projects you worked on. Like a graphic designer, you should come to an eLearning job interview with some kind of hard-copy version of your portfolio, but those materials should also point out where your online portfolio can be viewed as well. In a future article, I’ll highlight various things to keep in mind when creating this kind of online portfolio.
- Tell us about your software proficiencies. To gain an advantage over other candidates, you need to have a range of software exposure under your belt. And this goes not just for eLearning authoring software but also for different LMS packages. This is also a good place to be brutally honest with yourself. On your resumé you should rank your proficiency level on various packages as high, medium, or low. With any luck, you’ll at least have some exposure to some of the technologies and tools used at that particular company.
- Talk about your recent eLearning experiences. Be prepared to go in-depth about your most recent eLearning experiences, including what was challenging and how you handled it. Remember that beyond technical expertise, the hiring committee wants to get a picture of who you are as a person and employee who will be working with others in unique organizational culture. Because of this, you want to particularly pay attention to how your recent experiences display (or not) your ability to collaborate with others and work on a team, which is something most employers will be looking for in new hires.
- How would approach eLearning for this specific hypothetical situation. If your interviewers are savvy, they may present to you a hypothetical content area or subject and ask you to talk extemporaneously about how you would approach it from an eLearning perspective. Anything is fair game here, but in general you should always be thinking about how various things might work in an eLearning environment. You may even be asked as part of the overall hiring process to complete a short eLearning assignment – and you can bet that it won’t be something you’ve already had experience with on your resumé!
These are just a few of the questions specific to an eLearning interview that you can expect. Of course there will also be all the standard organizational questions as well in terms of how you work, do you work well with others, and so on. Stay tuned for future editions of this series that will help you launch your career as an eLearning professional. Read part 2 – eLearning Career Guide#2: The Portfolio
Parts 2 to 7 of this article: