Quick Summary:
Instructional design consultants support organizations across a wide range of learning initiatives, including onboarding, leadership development, technology implementations, sales enablement, compliance, and customer education. The key is matching the consultant’s experience to the specific initiative. An instructional designer who excels at systems training may bring very different expertise from one who specializes in leadership development or sales enablement.
Why Do Different Learning Initiatives Require
Different Instructional Design Expertise?
When an L&D team needs additional help, it can be tempting to start with a simple request: We need an instructional designer.
But what kind?
Instructional design is a broad profession. Different projects require different combinations of skills, industry knowledge, technology experience, and learning approaches.
An instructional designer developing systems training may need to be highly skilled at task analysis and performance support. Someone designing leadership development may need deeper experience with behavior change, facilitated learning, reflection, and practice.
That’s why organizations looking to hire an instructional designer should start with the initiative itself. What are you trying to accomplish, and what experience will help someone contribute quickly?
The expertise you need from an instructional design consultant often depends on the learning initiative. Here are some of the most common types of initiatives consultants support.
How Do Instructional Design Consultants
Support Employee Onboarding?
Onboarding is much more than an orientation course.
A strong onboarding experience helps employees understand the organization, learn their role, build critical relationships, and begin performing effectively as quickly as possible.
An instructional design consultant may help analyze what employees need during their first 30, 60, or 90 days and then design a learning journey that combines formal learning with resources, manager conversations, practice, and on-the-job experiences.
Consultants may also help organizations redesign onboarding that has grown over time. Instead of simply converting existing content into new courses, they can help determine what new employees actually need, when they need it, and how it should be delivered.
The business goal is ultimately not completion of onboarding. It is helping employees reach proficiency and contribute sooner.
7 Key Design Elements of Successful Onboarding Programs
What Role Do Instructional Designers
Play in Leadership Development?
Leadership development presents a different design challenge.
Knowing the theory behind how to coach an employee, delegate effectively, or have a difficult conversation is different from being able to apply it when the situation arises.
Instructional designers with leadership development experience can create programs that incorporate scenarios, discussion, practice, reflection, feedback, and application between formal learning experiences. They may also design facilitator guides, participant materials, manager reinforcement, assessments, and other components of a broader leadership journey.
For these initiatives, experience designing behavior change may be more valuable than advanced expertise with a particular authoring tool.
How Can Instructional Design Consultants
Help with Technology Implementations?
Major technology implementations often create exactly the kind of temporary workload increase that contract instructional designers can help address.
Whether an organization is implementing Workday, Salesforce, SAP, a new LMS, or an internal system, employees need to understand how the technology changes the way they perform their jobs.
Instructional designers can conduct task and role analysis, identify learning needs for different user groups, and develop instructor-led training, virtual learning, simulations, job aids, performance support, and train-the-trainer materials.
Experienced instructional design contractors can also be particularly valuable when timelines are aggressive. Rather than asking an internal team to absorb a large implementation on top of its existing responsibilities, an organization can temporarily add people with relevant systems-training experience.
Where Do Instructional Design Consultants
Fit into Compliance Training?
Compliance training requires a careful balance.
Legal, regulatory, risk, and subject matter experts need confidence that the content is accurate. Learners need information that is understandable and relevant to the decisions they make at work. The organization may also have specific requirements for completion, assessment, documentation, and reporting.
A skilled instructional designer can work with SMEs to distinguish between information employees need to know, information they need to reference, and behaviors they need to demonstrate.
That ability to manage SME input is important. Experienced consultants can ask targeted questions, organize complex information, and translate expertise into useful learning without requiring SMEs to become instructional designers themselves.
Can Instructional Designers Support
Customer and Product Education?
Instructional design isn’t limited to employee learning. Organizations increasingly use learning to help customers, partners, and other external audiences successfully use their products and services.
An instructional designer might develop customer onboarding, software training, certification programs, partner education, product academies, or resources that support adoption.
The measures of success can look different, too. Depending on the initiative, the organization might look at product adoption, customer proficiency, support requests, certification rates, renewals, or other business measures.
A learning and development consultant with customer education experience can help connect the learning experience to those broader goals.
How Can Instructional Design Consultants
Help with Large Learning Transformations?
Sometimes the challenge isn’t one course or program. An organization may be redesigning an entire curriculum, integrating teams after an acquisition, changing its operating model, adopting AI-enabled processes, or transforming how learning is delivered across the enterprise.
These initiatives can require significantly more resources than an internal L&D team has available.
Instructional design consulting services can provide additional expertise during the transformation without requiring the organization to permanently staff for a temporary surge in work.
Internal learning leaders can maintain ownership of the strategy and organizational relationships while consultants provide specialized expertise and the capacity needed to move the work forward.
When Does It Make Sense to
Hire an Instructional Design Consultant?
Organizations typically bring in consultants for one of two reasons: capacity or capability.
Sometimes the internal team simply has more projects than people. A major initiative creates a temporary spike in demand, deadlines overlap, or existing team members are already committed to other priorities.
In other cases, the organization needs a capability it doesn’t currently have. Perhaps the team hasn’t supported an ERP implementation before, needs someone experienced in sales enablement, or is building its first customer education program.
In either situation, a consultant allows the organization to add the right expertise for the period it is needed.
How Do You Choose the Right
Instructional Design Consultant for Your Initiative?
The best instructional design consultants aren’t necessarily the people with the longest list of software skills or the most years of experience.
They are the people whose experience fits the work you need done.
Before evaluating candidates, consider the initiative, audience, business goal, learning modalities, technology environment, timeline, and stakeholders involved. Then look for evidence that the consultant has successfully handled similar challenges.
If you’re implementing Workday, someone who has already designed learning for a Workday implementation may be able to anticipate challenges a generalist won’t. If you’re redesigning leadership development, experience creating leadership journeys and behavior-based practice may matter far more than systems-training experience.
The question isn’t simply, “Do we need an instructional designer?”
A better question is, “What kind of instructional designer will help make this initiative successful?”
Working Successfully with Contract L&D Professionals
What to Read Next::
Are you still evaluating how instructional design consultants can help you with your project?
These resources continue the conversation on determining if instructional design consultants are right for you:
Ready to Work with Us?
Does your L&D team have more projects than people?
Many organizations in this position turn to contract instructional designers to scale training without overloading internal teams. If you’re exploring options or comparing eLearning development companies, you should learn more about how organizations design and scale these solutions.
TrainingPros is a learning and development company that connects organizations with experienced instructional designers, eLearning developers, and performance consultants. We’ve been named a Top 20 Staffing Company by Training Industry and a Champion of Learning by the Association for Talent Development (ATD), recognition that reflects our commitment to delivering high-quality, tailored learning solutions. To hear ongoing conversations with senior learning leaders, listen to our Learning Leader Spotlight podcast: Apple | Spotify | YouTube
If your learning initiatives require additional support, whether for a single project or a large-scale rollout, our relationship managers can help you find the right expertise quickly and confidently.
When you have more projects than people™, let TrainingPros find the right consultant to start your project with confidence.
When you have more projects than people™, let TrainingPros find the right consultant to start your project with confidence.
Frequently Asked Questions About
Instructional Design Consultants
What types of projects do instructional design consultants work on?
Instructional design consultants can support onboarding, leadership development, technology implementations, sales enablement, compliance, customer education, curriculum redesign, and many other learning initiatives. Their responsibilities may include analysis, design, development, stakeholder collaboration, implementation support, and evaluation.
When should a company hire an instructional design consultant?
Organizations often hire consultants when their internal L&D team lacks the capacity to take on additional work or when an initiative requires specialized experience the team doesn’t currently have.
Can an instructional design consultant work with an internal L&D team?
Yes. Many instructional design consultants work as an extension of an existing L&D team. Internal employees maintain organizational knowledge and strategic ownership while consultants provide additional capacity or specialized expertise.
How long do instructional design consulting engagements typically last?
Engagement length depends on the initiative. A consultant may support a defined project for several months or remain engaged longer for a major implementation, curriculum transformation, or ongoing portfolio of learning projects.
What should you look for when hiring an instructional designer?
Look beyond the job title and general instructional design experience. Consider whether the consultant has experience with similar audiences, initiatives, technologies, modalities, stakeholders, and business challenges. The strongest match is usually the consultant whose experience most closely aligns with the work you need accomplished.
