I have worked with instructional designers whose course architecture was flawless, whose scenario writing was brilliant, whose visual design was stunning. They did not get the contract renewed. I have worked with designers whose craft was competent rather than exceptional, whose Storyline builds were adequate rather than elegant. They became the client's trusted partner for three years running. The difference, in almost every case, was not the quality of the work. It was the quality of the communication.
This is uncomfortable to say in a field where we take design quality seriously. It implies that excellence is not enough — which feels unfair. But it is also, in my experience, reliably true. And understanding why it is true is the most valuable thing a developing instructional designer can do for their career.
What Stakeholders Actually Experience
Stakeholders — the L&D managers, HR directors, operations leaders, and project sponsors who commission training — experience the design process very differently from the designer. The designer sees the intellectual challenge, the craft, the architecture of a well-built learning experience. The stakeholder sees uncertainty, risk, and expense.
From the stakeholder's perspective, they have a problem. They have a budget. They have given that budget to someone whose expertise they cannot fully evaluate. They cannot tell whether the storyboard they are reviewing represents brilliant instructional design or mediocre work dressed in professional language. They can tell whether the designer makes them feel confident, heard, and informed — or anxious, confused, and out of control.
Communication is the designer's primary tool for managing stakeholder experience. Not the only tool — the work itself ultimately has to deliver — but the primary one. A designer who can clearly explain why they made a particular decision, who can translate learning science into business language, who can manage a revision cycle without the relationship deteriorating, who can say no to a bad brief in a way that the stakeholder experiences as helpfulness rather than obstruction — that designer creates confidence. Confidence leads to trust. Trust leads to continued engagement.
The Translation Problem
The central communication challenge for instructional designers is translation. You have been trained to think in Bloom's taxonomy, cognitive load theory, spaced retrieval, transfer-appropriate processing. Your stakeholder thinks in business outcomes, team productivity, budget cycles, and whether the CEO is going to ask about this at the next leadership meeting.
These are not incompatible frameworks. But they require active translation. Saying "I have applied dual coding theory to this screen to reduce cognitive load" is not useful stakeholder communication. It is accurate, but it answers a question the stakeholder was not asking and raises questions they should not have to ask. Saying "I have designed this screen so learners are not trying to read text and listen to narration at the same time — research consistently shows that combination hurts retention, so I've separated them" communicates the same decision in terms the stakeholder can evaluate and appreciate.
This translation is a skill. It requires you to understand what your stakeholder cares about — genuinely, not just at a surface level — and to frame every design decision in terms of why it serves those concerns. It is harder than it sounds, because it requires you to hold two frameworks simultaneously: your design rationale and your stakeholder's concerns. It gets easier with practice. And the return on that practice is enormous.
The Brief Challenge
One of the most commercially significant communication skills in instructional design is the ability to challenge a bad brief without losing the client. This is delicate because stakeholders often come with briefs that represent significant organisational investment — time spent in planning meetings, priorities surfaced in leadership conversations, expectations already communicated upward. Telling a stakeholder their brief is wrong triggers defensiveness.
The key is to challenge the brief by serving the stakeholder's deeper goal, not by disagreeing with their proposed solution. "You've asked for a course on data protection. Help me understand what you're seeing that makes you think this is needed — I want to make sure whatever we build actually solves the problem rather than just covering the topic." This reframes the conversation: you are not rejecting the brief, you are trying to make the brief more effective. That is something a good partner does.
Designers who can have this conversation consistently win trust. Designers who cannot — who either accept bad briefs uncritically or challenge them in ways that feel combative — either waste time building the wrong thing or damage relationships trying to build the right one.
Practical Development
Communication skills develop through practice and feedback in the same way that design skills do. Seek opportunities to present your design rationale to people outside the L&D function. Ask for feedback on whether your explanations make sense. Record yourself in a stakeholder conversation and listen back to how you sound. Find a mentor who is excellent at this and study how they navigate difficult conversations.
Most importantly: value the communication work as real work, not as overhead on the design work. The hour you spend preparing for a stakeholder review — thinking through how to frame your decisions, anticipating their concerns, preparing to handle revision requests constructively — is not less valuable than the hour you spent refining the branching logic. For your career, it may be considerably more so.