Clark immediately loved the hands-on processes of instructional design, as well as the type of person who’d be on the receiving end of her materials. “By and large, the adult audience is much more amenable” to learning than kids, Clark says. They’re not a captive audience; they’re willing to learn knowledge and skills relevant to their roles.
That was the beginning of Clark’s long career in the training and consulting fields, which ranged from years as an IT training manager to holding the position of president of the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI). This year, she is the recipient of ATD’s Distinguished Contribution to Talent Development Award. By the time Clark had her eureka moment vis-à-vis instructional design, she was already designing K-6 curricula, a process that shares some of the same DNA. She moved out of education and found herself in a corporate environment, working for a utility company in Southern California tasked with building a training program to improve its customer service. That’s where I learned everything relevant to the corporate world,” Clark says.
The company had computers—a new, exciting boon—and Clark was soon introduced to emails and word processing (she had done her dissertation using punch cards). And while she learned the ins and outs of her new career, she also learned the ups and downs of corporate life. The management, control, and autonomy she had in public education was suddenly replaced with a “quasi-military” utility environment. Though she learned about corporate structure and protocol, it was not a good fit for her working style. She assumed all companies shared a similar corporate climate, so she left.
At the time, she was the Los Angeles chapter officer of what is now called ISPI. She realized its membership was about two-thirds filled with independent consultants, and decided to give that career path a go. Around 1988, Clark founded Clark Training & Consulting. “I did everything, it was just me,” she says. Early on, after she finished building her course, she went down to Staples and copied, stuffed, and shipped binders herself.
As the company grew, and Clark’s travel demands increased, she began to staff the company, which peaked with about seven instructors all concurrently teaching. Meanwhile, she began to write. She’s recently released the fourth edition of her 2001 book, E-Learning and the Science of Instruction, co-authored with Richard E. Mayer, which is one of seven books she’s written overall.
Following her presidency at ISPI, the association awarded Clark the Thomas F. Gilbert Distinguished Professional Achievement Award in 2006, for her contributions to the knowledge base of human performance technology. She has given various conference keynotes on e-learning in addition to publishing articles on learning, graphics, and evidence-based methods for various publications. From a career that spans decades, Clark is able to quickly name the thing that’s been the catalyst for the most change in the talent development field: technology. From the punch cards of years ago to the elaborate simulations used today, instructional design has seen enormous leaps forward.
“Technology in itself offers many opportunities— and also traps,” Clark says. “It can be used or abused.” She notes the ease with which people can design audiovisual animations, simulations, games, and more as positives, as well as the ability to compress time, which can build expertise more quickly. But problems arise when designers ignore human cognitive limits and go overboard, adding music, irrelevant games, and other elements that can depress learning. “The human brain has limits that technology can readily exceed,” Clark says, and too many media effects can overload a learner.
“As we are increasingly recognized as a profession, our challenge is to continue to build a combination of technology-based and face-to-face instructional environments in ways that incorporate evidence-based guidelines and focus on knowledge and skills linked to organizational objectives,” she adds.
Ruth Colvin Clark’s most recent book, Evidence-Based Training Methods, 2nd Edition, is available in the ATD Store.
