Instructional Design Manager

Slater Infrastructure Group•Jackson, MS

7d•Remote

About The Position

Slater Certified is an AI-powered workforce development platform for the water and wastewater sector. We have a live catalog of courses, a generative AI tutor sitting alongside them, and considerably more content to build than we currently have the capacity to build well. We are hiring an Instructional Design Manager to own how our content gets made. This is a craft role first: taking raw material - a technical manual, a regulation, an hour with a subject matter expert - and turning it into a course that a working adult will actually finish. It is also a build-from-requirements role: given what a course needs to cover, you scope it, design it, and produce it. It starts as a contract role and it starts hands-on, with no one reporting to you. As the content function grows, this is the role the other learning content creators report into. If it works on both sides there is a path to converting it to a full-time position.

Requirements

5+ years in instructional design, curriculum development or technical training development.
Genuine instructional design craft - can take raw source material and build a course from it, not just produce content someone else has structured.
Designs for multiple learning styles and modalities on the same material, and can explain why each choice was made.
Has built courses from a written requirement, including doing the scoping rather than waiting for a specification.
Fluent in adult-learning practice and competency-based design.
Hands-on with an LMS or LXP, and with SCORM / xAPI.
Can take a technical subject from a subject matter expert and turn it into something a non-academic adult learner will actually finish.
Excels working solo. This is a fully virtual role and long stretches of it are unsupervised.
Proactive about pulling work and direction - chases software engineers, product and SMEs for what is needed instead of waiting, and keeps their own queue full.
Ready to grow into leading a small content team, and wants to.

Nice To Haves

Construction-sector experience is a significant advantage, and wastewater or industrial wastewater experience is a very significant one.
Experience designing for a regulated or certification-bearing field, or with state licensure and continuing education approval processes.
Has built assessments validated against an external exam.
Has managed or mentored other instructional designers or content creators.
Has used generative AI as part of a content development workflow.
Accessibility standards (WCAG, Section 508) applied in practice.

Responsibilities

Design and build course modules, assessments and learning pathways.
Build for different learning styles on the same material - reading, video, worked example, practice, scenario, assessment - so learners are not forced through one format.
Apply adult-learning practice to an audience of working operators with limited study time.
Produce and direct supporting media: video, diagrams, scenario-based exercises.
Keep content SCORM and xAPI compliant and fit for delivery on our platform.
Take a requirement - from a customer, a regulator, or our own roadmap - and scope what the course has to cover.
Run the discovery yourself: what the learner already knows, what the job actually demands, what the assessment has to prove.
Turn raw source material into a teaching structure - a manual, a standard, a specification, or an hour with someone who has done the job for twenty years.
Estimate and schedule content work honestly, and hold the dates.
Work directly with our wastewater SMEs to get the technical content right.
Run the review process: SME validation, pilot testing, and a real feedback loop from learners.
Hold version control and change history on every course.
Keep content current as regulations, exam blueprints and industry practice change - our courses carry state approvals, and the documentation behind them has to hold up.
Work with product and engineering so content fits how the platform delivers and assesses it.
Work with G.A.I.L., our generative AI tutor, so the content and the tutor reinforce each other rather than duplicating.
Use learner analytics to find where people stall, and fix the content rather than explaining the number.
Set the content standards and templates the next hires will work to.
Review and raise the quality of other people's content as the team grows.
Help hire the content creators who will eventually report into this role.