Write how? Do writers have the instructional design skills they need to develop effective corporate communications

Corporate writers, who function in an educational capacity, are often assigned to develop and write content specific to an area or topic without having any instructional design knowledge. The purpose of this qualitative, phenomenology study was to discover what instructional design competencies corporate writers needed to perform in their job and determine how they learned these instructional design competencies. The research study was a qualitative study and used in-depth interviews, a questionnaire, expert reviews, and field notes. The ten participants all had a minimum of five year's experience as corporate writers, who functioned as designers-by-assignment, and had written pieces meant to educate or inform adults in a corporate environment. A seven-step analysis framework was utilized to tease out all themes and findings from the research data. A conceptual framework was developed and revised to align with the findings after the completion of the interviews. The findings indicated that corporate writer are responsible for a number of instructional design competencies in their daily role and they primarily learn these competencies via on-the-job experience. Recommendations for further research include the need to develop a standardized set of core competencies for corporate writers, how the level education may play a role in competency development, and whether the type of writing alters necessary core competencies.