The State of ID Work
Nobody publishes this. There is vendor market share, and there are opinion pieces, and between them no straight answer to what an instructional designer actually has open at four in the afternoon. So I am asking.
Twelve questions · About five minutes · Anonymous
Your answers are anonymous. No account, no name, and nothing that identifies you. If you leave an email address for the results, it is stored in a separate table with no link back to what you said, so nothing here can reconnect the two.
The results publish free, with the raw data. Every survey in this field sits behind a form. This one will not. Findings and the anonymized responses go up in November, for anyone to read, cite or argue with.
Skip anything you like. Nothing is required. A partial answer is far more useful than an abandoned one.
The work
Six questions about where the week actually goes.
Which authoring tool did you build in most this year?
Roughly what share of your working week is spent actually building?
What takes the most time that is not building?
One answer. Everything takes time; this asks which takes the most.
Name one task you still do by hand that you assume everyone else has automated.
In the past year, which of these has forced you to redo finished work?
Choose any that apply, or none.
Does your organization hold you to an accessibility standard, such as Section 508 or WCAG?
AI, in practice
What you actually did with it, rather than what you think of it.
What did you actually use AI for this year?
And what did you try and abandon?
How much has AI changed how long a build takes you?
Compared with what you expected, those gains have been:
Quality, cost and proof
How many rounds of stakeholder review does a typical course go through?
What do you pay for yourself, out of your own pocket, because your employer will not?
How is the success of what you build measured?
About you
Last, and deliberately. This is what turns opinions into findings.
Years working in learning and development
Team size
Sector
Region
Asked because accessibility law and localization both differ sharply by jurisdiction.
Want the results?
Optional, and stored separately from your answers. It is used once, to send you the findings, and for nothing else.
Why I am asking
I have been an instructional designer for twenty-eight years and have led a community of nearly 90,000 people in this field since 2008. In all that time I have never been able to point anybody at a straight answer about how this work actually gets done: how much of a week is really spent building, how many review rounds are normal, whether AI has delivered what it promised, and what people quietly still do by hand.
This runs annually. The first year gives a picture; the third gives a trend, which is the part worth having.
Built by Curt Zilbersher, an instructional designer with 28 years in the field and the founder of a 90,000-member L&D community.