50 episodes listed below
Career moves for learning designers.
Become an IDOL is a career-focused instructional design show built around interviews with alumni, learning leaders, and people working in learning and development. Episodes move between job-search realities, course design methods, project constraints, and the personal work of changing professional identity.
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Become an IDOL sits at the intersection of instructional design practice and career change. The show is built around interviews with people who have entered, hired for, managed, or reshaped learning and development work. It has a practical rhythm. A guest usually explains where they came from, what pushed them toward instructional design, and which choices helped the transition become real. The strongest episodes stay close to lived details. Stacey Carter talks about moving from a long education career into an instructional design specialist role and the confidence work that came before the offer. Matthew Campbell connects teaching, ed tech work, and hiring judgment, especially around backwards design and the ability to start with objectives. Laurel Schulert gives English majors and transitioning teachers a credible path into learning experience work without pretending the early years were easy. Tamara McLemore brings project management into the learning world, reframing client tension as scope, budget, time, and relationship management. Dr. Natalie Berkman shows how corporate instructional design can add value inside higher education and professional training. Dr. Elena Schlachter’s episode turns measurement into a human, low-resource problem: find the bottleneck, talk to trusted people, and make the data usable. David James brings a corporate learning lens to digital learning impact and sustained engagement. Across episodes, the show returns to portfolios, interviews, client conversations, e-learning tools, course assets, and the emotional cost of professional reinvention. It is not abstract theory dressed up as advice. It is also not only success-story polish. Guests talk about low pay, health limits, imposter syndrome, stalled searches, messy systems, and the long preparation behind a visible breakthrough. The result is a show that treats instructional design as a real workplace discipline. It respects ambition, but it keeps asking what the work looks like on Monday morning. For listeners sorting out the move from teaching, higher education, training, or another adjacent role, it offers both vocabulary and proof points. For working designers, it supplies reminders about measurement, scope control, backwards planning, and business impact. The show’s editorial center is simple: build useful learning, show evidence of skill, and keep improving the professional story around both.
Made for: This show suits aspiring instructional designers, transitioning teachers, education professionals, and early-career learning designers who want concrete examples of how people enter and advance in the field.
What sets it apart: Become an IDOL blends career transition stories with working-level instructional design practice, so interviews cover both the job search and the job itself. Its episodes are strongest when guests connect portfolios, interviews, measurement, project scope, and course design to real career outcomes.
Are you interested in Instructional Design & Online Learning (IDOL) development? Would you like to change careers and become an IDOL? Join me, Dr. Robin Sargent, owner of IDOL courses, as I chat with other experts about everything course building and landing a job as an instructional designer.
Dr. Robin Sargent brings your career pivot down to one interview question: where would you start a course?
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded look at making learning measurement work when teams are already stretched.
Measurement and Evaluation on a Shoestring frames evaluation around a constraint many learning teams know well: the work still has to happen when time, staffing, and systems are already under pressure. Dr.
A grounded, candid look at an experienced educator rebuilding confidence on the path into instructional design.
Stacey Carter's shift from a 23-year education career into instructional design gives the episode a clean, useful arc. Her background as a teacher, building and district administrator, and professional development designer grounds the conversation in lived experience, while…
A grounded career-shift episode that makes backward design feel practical without overselling the profession.
Matthew Campbell's path gives the episode a clear spine. He went from teaching high school social studies to Pearson's higher-ed online program management work, then to chief product officer at the Hausman Institute and senior director of instructional design at McGraw-Hill.
A teacher-turned-learning leader argues that English majors belong in instructional design, with salary realities keeping the pivot grounded.
English majors get a practical career case in this conversation with Laurel Schulert, Senior Director of Learning Experience at SAP Concur. Schulert now leads a team of instructional designers after beginning as a high school English teacher, and she traces a transition she made…
A practical guide to scope, budgets, and difficult client conversations in course projects.
Project management for instructional design gets a grounded treatment through Tamara McLemore's winding path from mass communications into IT project management, telecom and wireless, federal government, Delta Airlines, and legal work.
Career power without apology.
Career confidence with a leadership edge.
Career clarity with backbone.
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Stacey Carter describes leaving a 23-year education career and becoming an instructional design specialist for the U.S.
Matthew Campbell says he went from high school social studies teaching to Pearson, then later led instructional design at McGraw Hill with a team that grew from 44 to 106 people.
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["Tamara McLemore says project management is mostly people work, and she repeats that 42% of the PMP exam is about people.", "She describes herself as a non-traditional accidental project manager with more than 20 years in IT, a mass communications degree, and roles at telecom, Delta Airlines, the federal government, and legal work.", "She tells Dr.
Kayvon Turan of Zol.ai says employees need chances to rehearse workplace skills before applying them on the job.
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Juliana Stancampiano bought Oxygen's US business out of the UK company's 2009 administration, seven months pregnant, and took on liability for former UK employees.
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