Student Story: Cliona Olohan

I graduated from college two years ago, but it was during this time I decided to seek out a career in this field. I completed a work placement in an HR department where the company were just introducing eLearning, so I was lucky to have this experience of witnessing the early stages of incorporating eLearning into a business strategy. I went on to write a 13,000-word thesis focused on how eLearning influences performance and the impacts of reduced socialisation in training. So it really was early in my career I decided to dive into this niche field.

Post-study, I took up my first position as part of a small Learning and Development team. In this role, I helped design and introduce a brand new LMS. I was the sole administrator of this system and I continuously updated and maintained it for approx. 450 employees. As the role progressed, so did my eLearning skills and I started to develop material using the Articulate suite and PowToon. 

Following this role, I moved to my current role where I am doing less content creation and instead, I am highly involved in the learning design process to really upskill in this wider area that contributes to a successful learning output.

I completed the Instructional Design Certificate course with Digital Learning Institute (formerly Flex Labs) in 2019. This was an accredited course that covered a variety of different areas from learning theory to actually using some of the mainstream eLearning tools. Although I was working in L&D, the course really taught me a lot and helped me in my own professional development. I started to use Storyline immediately after the course and found myself moving quickly with it and that was thanks to DLI for having a real practical element to their courses.

In addition to helping me develop technically, the resources I walked away with were invaluable. In particular, the design handbook. I found myself referring to this, the screenplan template and storyboard template religiously for quite some time after the course. In fact, I still do. Overall, a course with accreditation, practical elements, excellent resources, and not to forget knowledgeable and enthusiastic facilitators, is definitely a course worth doing and I would recommend Digital Learning Institute to anyone.