Harrison Hartley – Instructional Designer

My networking journey is sort of a weird one. I’ve been networking for decades, just not in a “Professional” sense. Since 2004 I’ve been networking with what was a very different goal and certainly not one that would be given “Professional” status. I would network for my band (Shameless Plug Hyperlink Alert!) to get gigs, starting with finding a bar that would let 3 college students and me, the one member still in High School, play their weird jazz-rock fusion on a Wednesday night. From there it progressed into finding clubs to play in Providence with like-minded bands that while sounding vastly different from one another carried the same ethos of “We want to make music that doesn’t sound like anyone else.” The proverbial snowball ran downhill and gathered enough momentum that starting around 2010 we were able to book shows regularly with a plethora of different bands we called friends up and down the Eastern Seaboard. However, there was absolutely no inkling of calling this a “Professional Network”, especially when you’re sleeping on peoples’ floors and ordering from every fast food restaurant’s Dollar Menu for sustenance.

One trope I hear again and again from my peers in this program is that they started in Instructional Design by accident. Much like how the majority of my life has been cobbled together through moments of random chance, the absence of any semblance of a plan and synchronicity (although I am embellishing for the sake of humor) having to sit down and actually think about what I want to do with my career would make 20 year old me absolutely terrified. I remember being pretty upset that after the better part of a decade resisting I found myself having to make a LinkedIn profile. The idea of setting up a “Professional Network” is much more intimidating to me than one where I’m cold approaching the same person I’ve seen at this venue over and over again for the last two months. At least I knew they wanted to see the same bands that I did. What would I have to talk about with an actual Instructional Designer? Imposter syndrome is easy to get caught up in, especially when I’m trying to fill in my knowledge gaps with the academia to support my on-the-job experience. There is a concern that one poorly constructed sentence will have The Professional see right through my charade of calling myself an Instructional Designer.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have decades of experience in a relatively niche field (audio in many of its forms and functions) and was able to leverage this in my first Real job as a Training Content Creator by creating a webinar on the basics of Audio Recording. It was aimed for people with absolutely no background in Audio Recording who need to record narration for a slide deck. Suddenly the nights spent in high school trying to get the highest quality recordings with the least amount of money and supplies I had literally lying around the house paid off in dividends. I also felt pretty good telling intimidated beginners that they do not, in fact, have to go out and purchase the $500 microphone every other streamer uses. A cheap USB mic in a closet full of clothes, or a heavy blanket pulled over their head in a makeshift fort can get you pretty good quality audio!

What I would really love is my blog could be a place for people to learn from my mistakes. I could share a post about a particular technique I used either in a recording Digital Audio Workstation, or in PowerPoint, or Adobe Premier with a story about how I lost my mind spending hours trying to do something only to find out days later that a certain HotKey combination or obscure menu selection would have saved me half the time while I used trial and error. Or sharing the tip that my friend taught me – you never stop at the first rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike, it’s going to be the most crowded. I learned it the hard way so you don’t have to.