Plenty of instructional design courses sound impressive on the sales page – but you need one that’ll hold up in the real world.
Trust us: it’s easy to get stuck in a loop of theory, tool tutorials, and discussion boards. But if you’re switching careers or levelling up your learning design skills, you need clarity. Here’s how to spot an instructional design course that’ll actually sharpen your skills, build your confidence, and show hiring managers you’re ready to roll.
Real projects
Learning is so much more than modules. Look for a course that gets you working on real projects from the beginning. This way, you’ll learn to ask the right questions, scope it properly, design for outcomes, test, iterate, and deliver something that works. You want to finish up with a fully built learning piece to add to your portfolio.
Feedback and coaching
Even in a self-paced course, you should expect support. Choose a course that includes regular check-ins with someone who knows the job. This kind of coaching is essential if you want to hone your ideas, sharpen your approach, and catch mistakes early. You’ll think more strategically, design with clarity, and communicate like you belong in the room.
Tools and templates
Strong design work starts with the right foundations. Look for a course that hands over the real stuff: project scoping tools, storyboarding templates, briefing frameworks, content models. These tools will help you plan faster, design smarter, and stay focused on the thinking that matters. It’s not about taking shortcuts – it’s about creating a smart toolkit that helps you get the job done.
Recognised credentials
A solid ID certification shows what you’ve learned and what you’ve done. This could be digital badges, stackable credentials, or a certificate that signals real capability. But more importantly: you’ll want a project you can share, talk about, and use as evidence of your skills.
A connected community
Many heads are better than one! Find a course that builds a proper community – a place where people share insights, give feedback, swap references, and collaborate after the course ends. These are your future collaborators, mentors, and maybe even clients.
You-shaped
You want to design learning that’s strategic, creative, and built for humans. So don’t settle for a course that feels corporate, clunky, or stuck in the past. Look closely at the examples. If they make you wince, move on. If they make you think, “I wish I made that” – you’re in the right place.
Learn from the best
We looked high and low – and still couldn’t find an ID certification course that combined strategy, creativity, and real capability-building. So we created our own.
The Hungry Minds Professional Certificate of Instructional Design isn’t like *other* courses. Here’s what we packed in:
- A real project based on real client work
- 3x one-to-one coaching with a senior ID
- Access to the tools and templates we use on the job
- Four stackable microcredentials
- An alumni network of clever, curious, generous humans
In short, it’s everything you need to brush up on your skills or launch a new career.
Hungry for more?
We love this so much, we wrote the full guide. Check out Instructional Design IRL: A guide for industry pros, BY industry pros. It’s packed with everything you need to know if you’re planning to make instructional design your bread and butter.
Get started today
Explore the Professional Certificate in Instructional Design to turn up the heat in your ID career.
FAQS
Most instructional designers come from education, comms, UX, or L&D backgrounds – but you don’t need a specific degree. The best way in is to learn the core skills. These include learning design, scoping, and stakeholder management. After that, build a solid portfolio and get to know the tools of the trade. A hands-on course with real projects and coaching can help you get there faster.
Definitely. And the demand’s growing. With more teams moving to digital learning and onboarding, good instructional designers are getting snapped up fast. Organisations want people who can think strategically, build creatively, and make learning people actually lean into. If you’ve got the skills (and the portfolio to match), there’s plenty of work to go around.