Instructional Design Is Bigger Than Course Creation: What Three Recent Learning Roles Reveal

Ask most people what an instructional designer does and you’ll get some version of “builds online courses.” That’s not wrong, but it’s small. It describes the output, not the job.

Three learning-related vacancies advertised recently in Kenya give a fuller picture. The main one, Strathmore University’s Instructional Designer, Academic Programmes role, is the clearest published statement we’ve seen locally of what the job actually requires. Two adjacent roles, Strathmore’s CBE Learner Experience position and Trainingcred Institute’s Quality & Learning Impact Specialist role, extend that picture into learner experience, assessment and evaluation.

The Instructional Designer role: five capabilities, not one job title

1. Grounded in learning science, not software

The listing asks for instructional design principles, learning theories, Universal Design for Learning and accessibility. That’s a statement about how decisions get made, not what gets built. A course built without a theory of how the learner will process it is a content dump with a play button.

2. Works through faculty, not around them

The role requires collaboration with academic staff who hold the subject expertise the designer doesn’t. Turning someone else’s expertise into a learning experience they didn’t design themselves, without flattening what made their teaching good, is a distinct skill of its own.

3. Technology is a means, not the design

Articulate, Captivate, Camtasia and e-learning systems all appear in the listing. Tool proficiency and instructional-design competence are different skills, and the second is what makes the first worth anything.

4. Quality assurance is part of design, not a separate department

Course review, learning-outcome alignment and continuous improvement sit inside this role, not downstream of it.

5. Evidence closes the loop

Learner and faculty feedback, data and instructional effectiveness all feature in the requirements. This is the bridge to the next two roles: an ID who only builds and never checks is doing half the job.

The CBE Learner Experience role: one step beyond course design

This role moves the lens from the course to the learner’s path through it. It explicitly names collaboration with faculty and instructional designers as part of the job — it isn’t a separate profession looking in from outside, it’s the same ecosystem, oriented around whether learners are actually progressing rather than whether a course exists.

Then comes the question most training providers eventually have to answer: did the learning actually work?

“Did people like the training” and “did the training work” are not the same question:

• Satisfaction — did participants enjoy it?
• Learning — did their knowledge or skills improve?
• Application — did they use it back at work?
• Impact — did that produce something the organisation cared about?

Most training gets measured on the first and almost nothing else. Kirkpatrick’s framework is one well-known lens here, not the only one. The listing itself carries an unresolved detail worth naming: it’s tagged as entry level in one place while the description asks for four to six years of experience. We won’t guess which is right — what matters is the capability the role is built around, not the seniority label.

What the three roles look like side by side

Editorial synthesis of what the three postings support, not a reproduction of any single job description.

What this means for a career in learning

This isn’t a fixed ladder. It’s a set of interconnected practice areas professionals move between: instructional design, learning experience design, curriculum and assessment, learning technology, faculty development, and learning evaluation and impact. Depth in only one, with no working knowledge of its neighbours, is an increasingly narrow position to argue from.

Building the foundation

The thread running through all three roles is the same: design learning intentionally, understand how people learn, use technology in service of that rather than instead of it, assess whether learning has actually happened, and keep improving the answer. That’s a learnable set of capabilities, not a trait some designers happen to have.

ElevateHub’s upcoming Instructional Design cohort is built around exactly that foundation. It won’t hand you every responsibility described in these three roles — no single programme could — but it gives you the grounded starting point the rest of this list is built on.

This article draws on publicly advertised vacancy content from Strathmore University and Trainingcred Institute, current as at the roles’ listing dates. It is offered as professional career intelligence and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a partnership with either organisation.