I’ve always thought it was a risk to get too defensive about one’s stances and one’s work. After all, those who sort of hoard their digital work and try to make outsized claims about their achievements often remain static. They live off the past to their own detriment. In the same way, people who define their roles in very fixed ways and will not accept any other task outside their own sense of themselves (often self-importance) will not end up taking the risks that will make them stronger employees.

Letting the Needs of the Project Dictate

For me, there’s a kind of wisdom to letting the needs of the project dictate the work required. Why? In general, I’m very practical. There’s no point in doing extra work if it won’t benefit the project. However, if a project needs to abide by laws—even if it means chasing down copyright and transcribing audio and video, then that’s the work that needs to be done. Reality can be a harsh taskmaster; however, it’s even more useless to just sit and debate roles and try to shift work to others who will not take up the responsibilities. The core is getting the work done so that the principal investigators (PIs) of the project achieve the successes they need, and people can move on.

The problem with just shifting work is that if there is no receiving role, that work just won’t get done. And any high-value project that is grant-funded cannot just sort of stop. It has to move on and meet the requirements of the grant-funding agencies and other stakeholders.

There is a value to making sure that the position of instructional designer is protected and that the work stays challenging and interesting. Yet, there’s no denying that some of the work will be boring and methodical…but necessary. If one can’t get past that reality, one really can’t fulfill the duties as assigned.

Setting up Challenges

Of late, I have been assigned some off-path tasks, in addition to my usual roles, and I’m finding that sort of work very engaging. After all, it’s good to be challenged with various responsibilities. This helps one get more flexible. And if there’s risk in the role, so be it. There’s always risk. One has to do one’s best and move on.

Playing Secondary and Tertiary Positions

And finally, in a recent publishing project, I proposed (and achieved) a tertiary position in the authoring list… There were multiple reasons for this—to acknowledge those who’d taken a lot of risk and invested a lot of work in the project, to give us a better chance of landing multiple works in a publication (I’d already published in the prior issue), and to provide some steam where our funding fell short (in terms of motivations for the contributors).

It’s refreshing not having to be primary author. And it’s refreshing to use the small impact of byline credit on an evolving project to move it forward into stronger form. There is some impact to the byline credit even though my view of that impact is much lesser than what I would have assumed as a newly published author.

All to say, it’s totally fine to be flexible and risk-taking and sometimes engaging in the manual labor needed to actualize instructional design projects. Opportunities open up in unusual ways. And building a reputation for actually bringing projects to fruition is a great way to get on other paying projects.