Any educational technologists or anyone with career in e-learning here?

[Careerchangetime]

Hello, hoping for some advice. I’m working in a training role in e-learning at the moment. I kind of fell into this when wanting to leave labs.

I want to do a masters in learning and technology to gain more experience. I’ve been looking at courses available, but can anyone give me first hand advice? I’m really eager to build my career around this but I’m on the wrong side of 35, and worried it’s too late?

Anyone with any advice?! Thank you!

Well all I know is that e-learning technologists are extremely sought after currently. So I would imagine it to be a great career to get in to right now.

I don't think your age is a downside, if anything it's good that you bring your wider experience with you.

Given that you will probably have to work till you are 70 why would you think that 35 is too old to do anything? It sounds like a good career choice to me so go for it.

Thanks, I always look at other people my age and they’ve achieved so much already.. I need to stop thinking about my age!

I love my job and I can imagine doing this forever now. But having advice from anyone who’s career this is would be fantastic.

I've lead e-learning teams in the past. Tend to be made up of the people with teh technology skills, the arty types that can design templates and provide individual graphics when required, educational types who can develop a good course from learning objective to knowledge check. Some people span more than 1 type but few cover all 3 types.

Lots of e-learning is produced poorly and is little more than a click through presentation with or without a multiple choice questionnaire at the end. This is the starter pack and if you can develop these you'll get work. Bringing more educational course development skills to the table will take you above basic rungs.

Tech wises you can get open source elearning portals to practice integration between a course and a back-end learning management system using standards.

We tend to break our materials into really small chunks so that staff can go back to just the area they want to knowledge check on at a later date.

It'll be a good career as e-learning is only going to increase over time

Microsoft run a lot of training courses and you can become a MS fellow. I don't know much about it but a colleague did it and got a huge promotion into a senior role as a result.

What's your background? What kind of career path do you want? What qualifications do you have already? Do you want to work in education or corporate?

If you've got an education or training background then you may just need to spend some time learning how to use various tools.

If you want to go into the media production side, you may want to learn a bit about graphic design, storyboarding, cinematography, editing etc.

It really depends on what role you want and what you know already.