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If you are an aspiring instructional designer, start thinking about instructional designing right now. Times are changing. Just like how a 2 year old kid is expected to know alphabets, some words and quite a few rhymes before he or she joins school, an aspiring instructional designer must have some basic idea about instructional designing before getting into the role.

If you are a fresher and want to start your career in instructional designing, I recommend the 5 ways Tom Kulhmann suggests in his post – 5 Ways Web 2.0 Can Make You a Better E-Learning Designer. Additionally, I would like to refer to some interesting resources that will help any fresher get started easily, without any hassels.

Let me duplicate Tom’s suggested ways and add my two cents to it.

So here are the top 4 things that you can do to get started with instructional design:

1. Create a RSS reader account and bookmark top e-learning blogs

There are loads of information about e-learning and instructional designing on the web. Reading continuously about e-learning and instructional designing will help you gain a lot of breadth about the subject.

To keep track of useful information, the best thing to do is use Google Reader or Bloglines and add the best e-learning blogs to your list. This way you will be able to read all articles in one location.

Here is my blogroll in Bloglines – http://www.bloglines.com/public/ruparajgo

Also check eLearning Learning which has a good collection of e-learning blogs.

2. Start a professional blog

It does not matter if instructional designing is new to you. Create a blog in WordPress or Blogspot and write about your thoughts on instructional designing. It does not matter, if you make a mistake. It is important to keep thinking and keep writing. You will improve along the way.

Your blog will help you connect with other learning professionals. It will help you debate and discuss on the subject that you are interested in. When you look for a job, your blog will speak for you.

3. Join a Community of Learning Professionals

Today there is lot of scope for collaborative learning and social learning. Sumeet Moghe has written an interesting article on why synchronous learning makes sense today. Please read this article to learn about virtual classrooms. You have a lot of communities that faciliate free online learning sessions. So all that you need to do is join such a community.

When you join a community of learning professionals, you get to :

• Attend free learning sessions
• Share and discuss ideas
• Network with like-minded people

You get to gain a lot of knowledge which no training institute or certificate course can fetch you.

Here are some communities that faciliate free online learning sessions:

• Corporate Learning Trends and Innovation
• Instructional Designers Community of India

4. Follow Learning Professionals on Twitter

If you have no time to blog or attend sessions, you can choose to follow learning professionals on twitter. You get access to millions of useful articles on twitter which you might not find it yourself when you google or which might not be there in your RSS reader.

Jane Hart has a good list of 100 learning professionals who you can choose to follow. So create an account with Twitter and use TweetML where you can choose to add all the learning professionals to your list at once . Thank you Christy for reminding me about Tweet ML.

If you are a fresher and find this post useful, please leave your feedback. If you want to add more to this list, please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section