Some multimedia teams borrow their job titles fairly directly from the film and theater industries -- producer, director, designer, production manager. Some borrow instead from graphic design -- creative director, art director, designer, illustrator. Others mix traditional titles and new ones together to describe the unique roles called for on multimedia productions -- information architect, animation engineer, interaction designer.

In any case, it is probably more instructive for students approaching the field of multimedia to think in terms of "roles" and "skills" than in terms of job titles. In fact, you would be hard pressed to create a list of job titles for multimedia development in which each titles refered to a single, unique, stable set of requirements for which a student could get ready ... and we haven't been able to do it either. That's one reason we're asking unique individuals to contribute descriptions of their jobs to these pages -- your skills define the kinds of tasks you can do on a project team, and usually what role you will play.

The following pages are divided by clusters of skills that are often found grouped under one job title. In exploring these pages, keep several caveats in mind: - they are written primarily for the benefit of graduate students in instructional design; anyone is welcome to look them over, but the viewpoint will be most familiar to instructional designers - they are evolving; as we discover job postings relevant to each skill cluster, we will add excerpts to these pages -- your skills define the kinds of tasks you can do on a project team, and usually what role you will play.

The items on this list will be linked to pages showing sample job descriptions as we collect them.