Ashley Chiasson, M.Ed

Instructional Designer & Consultant

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3 Tips to Become a Successful E-Learning Freelancer

People are always asking me how to get their foot in the door of the e-learning freelance game, so it seemed only appropriate to put together some tips for becoming a successful e-learning freelancer.

1.  Build a Portfolio!

I’ve written and spoken about the importance of building a portfolio MANY times, but it still never ceases to amaze me how many people making these inquiries about freelancing do not have a portfolio. I understand the reasons why, but they’re just excuses. Get it done. Here are some of my previous posts on portfolio building:

2. Diversify, but also Align Yourself

Diversity is great, but if you aren’t aligning yourself to the work you want to receive, you’re going to get overwhelmed very quickly. The key here is to choose the types of work you want to do, and then include samples aligned to that work in your portfolio. Being diverse doesn’t mean you need to work across authoring tools – doing that is fine, but it can also hamper your workflow and be a bit more inefficient.

Maintain a portfolio of diverse pieces (e.g. different industries or subject matter), but be strategic.

For example, I do development almost exclusively in Articulate Storyline, and that’s because I know that in order to be my most efficient e-learning developing self, I need to stick to one tool that I know and love. Otherwise, I’m going to get cranky when things take too long to develop, and when my workflow has a wrench thrown into it. I’m capable of working in many other tools, but I often do it begrudgingly.

Find Your People!

And by that, I don’t necessarily mean ‘find your audience’. Your audience will likely be prospective clients. When I started this blog, it was more of a place to toss up and maintain a portfolio. I quickly found that my audience here is other Instructional Designers and E-Learning Developers. Not clients.  You need clients and colleagues. Clients will help you get paid (directly), colleagues will serve as an enormous resource, a social saviour, and may help you get paid (indirectly – through referrals). Don’t hang out in an e-learning silo. Even if you’re working independently, you can look for community. If you live in a climate that has terrible winters, you will understand the importance of this statement.

I’ve written some posts in the past about where to find freelance e-learning gigs:

Here’s a good one on where to find your community (or communities):

Terminology Tuesday: Just in Time Training (JTT)

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I’m not sure if anyone in the Learning and Development industry is really referring to Just in Time Training as JTT, but as a child of the 80s and 90s, I appreciate the reference (you know…to heart throb Jonathan Taylor Thomas of Home Improvement fame)…but I digress.

Just in Time Training (JTT)

JTT is just what it sounds like – training provided just in time. Or, training provided on an as-needed basis. Many employers view JTT as the key to their success – viewed as taking fewer resources than hiring and training someone new who may have the qualifications being trained. Often this is not so much a view as a means of convenience. In reality, it likely takes even more resources (human and monetary) to provide JTT as it takes 1 learner and a minimum of 1 trainer for however many hours required to complete the training. At a minimum, it takes 1 learner of the production floor (so to speak) to complete the required training. In the broader context, if self-paced training materials are available, it would have taken someone time and effort to create those materials.

So JTT is bad? 

No. No. I don’t think that’s the takeaway here. JTT has its time and place. I think JTT can be extremely effective for low-level training. For example, at the university, we teach one format that requires some equipment setup. It’s very basic plug-and-play style equipment, but it can be confusing for some academic types as the last thing they have on their mind when preparing for a lecture is setting up equipment. In this situation, a handy job aid posted on lectern provides enough JTT to be effective for most faculty members.

JTT is also better than no training at all. I used to joke that I once worked for a training company that provided no internal training. We were often awarded a new contract that used a new technology, and it wasn’t strange to just have the new technology installed on your computer, be given some deliverable dates, and be told to figure it out. I mean, we were all pretty intelligent people, so it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but some of us certainly struggled with some new products over others. This is a situation where spending the human resource hours to provide JTT would have been beneficial.

Where I think JTT does not have a place at the table is in any situation where it takes the learner more time and effort to receive the training than is necessary. For example, for a project that has a 4 week turnaround (or other short deadline), it seems unnecessary to spend 1 week receiving training. I experienced this once with a client who sent me to do data collection. Sure, the added context of sitting in on a week of training was great, but just having all of the client materials would have sufficed. I left the week of data collection feeling like I had received some JTT in an industry for which I would seldom use the information, and when I began working on the project, I found myself consulting the client materials more than I found myself consulting my own notes from that week of training.

With only 4 days left, make sure you enter to win the giveaway (click the banner below)!

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E-Learning Challenge #138 – Share Your Tips for Creating Effective E-Learning Portfolios

This week’s challenge was to do a podcast interview, sharing tips for creating effective e-learning portfolios. I love podcast challenges (because they’re a lot less time consuming to complete – thanks, David!), and I love talking about building e-learning portfolios!

To complete this challenge, I recorded all of my audio clips in Camtasia and then uploaded all files to SoundCloud.

Listen to my tips below:

Terminology Tuesday: Statement of Work (SOW)

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In the world of business, Statements of Work (SOWs) play a very important role in ensuring that you are doing the work you’ve been contracted to do. SOWs exist in most industries, and tend to kick off the project (unless preceded by a Request for Proposal or other similar preceding step).

What’s a SOW?

A SOW is a document that identifies the scope of work included in a particular contract, and typically includes the following elements:

  • Parties involved – The organization initiating the contract and the organization or individual(s) who will be completing the work
  • Details of work – A descriptive outline of all work involved within the contract, and in order to ‘complete’ the contract
  • Non-disclosure agreements – Acknowledgement that the contractor agrees to non-disclosure terms
  • Schedule – A schedule identifying delivery dates for the work contracted
  • Penalties – Penalties are outlined (e.g. for not completing the specified work within the specified timelines)
  • Signatures – Signatures of all parties involved

Why is a SOW Important?

A SOW is important because it can really save your butt as a contractor in terms of combatting scope creep. Signing a SOW protects you when it comes to additional project requests as you will have a signed document to reference when requests extend past the outlined scope of the project, and you can request additional compensation to complete such requests.

Don’t forget to enter the giveaway (click the banner below)! There’s less than two weeks left to enter to win some fantastic e-learning prizes.

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Screencast Monday: Personalization in Articulate Storyline – Part 2

Last week I showed you how to use button sets to select an avatar for your course, and this week I’m showing you how to carry the selected avatar throughout your course developed in Articulate Storyline.

There are different ways of doing this, but in this screencast, I show you how to use variables and states to achieve the desired effect.


Also – There’s less than two weeks left in the big giveaway, so don’t forget to enter to win this awesome Articulate Storyline package (click the banner below).

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How IKEA Manuals Inspired My Interest in Technical Writing

Yesterday, all around e-learning superstar Zsolt Olah posted an article on LinkedIn titled Read Only If You Know What’s In The Picture. This article sparked an interesting revelation (for me and others who know me) on Twitter, and I’m a lady of my words. This blog post will explain how IKEA manuals inspired my interest in technical writing.

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Well before I knew that Instructional Design was a role that existed, I was working through my undergraduate degree with a double major in Linguistics and Psychology. My end goal was to go to grad school and become a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP), but if that went south I had found an interest in technical writing…from my horrible experience with IKEA how-to manuals.

I joke that my husband and I never argue…unless we’re hanging something or putting together furniture, and it’s very true. When we bought our house, we had a friend come over for several weekends to mediate our furniture construction…or we probably would have killed each other.

In any event, my interest in technical writing came after a particularly trying IKEA order arrived. We ordered two desks, a coffee table, and two end tables. The tables were pretty straight forward, but the directions for the desks just didn’t make sense. In Zsolt’s post, I’m usually a C person. I’ll consider the A and B options, but typically I jump right to the manual and just get it done. Even if that means I have to take something apart and rebuild it.

The how-to manual for these particular desks was not accurate. No matter how closely we followed the manual, the desks were not coming together like they did in the images. The desks did not have all of the holes indicated in the images. The desks were the bane of my existence. I’m sure I cried. We somehow ended up getting them together (how, I don’t remember, because I’ve blocked out the trauma), and they were our desks from that point until we bought our house years later, when they were one of the first things we put out on the curb for garbage day.

Because of how awful and inaccurate the how-to manuals were for those desks, I vowed that I could write a better user manual, and began researching how one becomes the person to write such manuals. In my research, I discovered technical writing as a career path, and when I didn’t get in to grad school for SLP, I stumbled into my first Instructional Design gig. It was here that I discovered I didn’t necessarily want to write how-to manuals for the rest of my life, but I did occasionally get my taste of writing user guides and have since written two books that are essentially user guides.

In the end, I’m very happy that IKEA manuals prompted my interest in technical writing as I may never have found a passion for Instructional Design and E-Learning Development.