Training & Development
Instructional Design

Always Present & Always a Passion

Teaching and learning have been constant threads across every phase of my career—long before I held a title that said so. Whether standing in front of a class in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, leading onboarding sessions for field reps, or introducing a product team to a new design system, the core work has always been the same: figure out what people need to know, then build the clearest possible path to get them there.

Across more than 20 years in education, design, and organizational development, the role of "teacher" appeared in almost every engagement—even when the job description didn't mention it.

Steve Vest
Experience Teacher & Designer

Foundations

The formal background: a Master of School Administration from UNC Charlotte, earned as a Principal Fellows Scholar—a competitive, state-funded program for educators identified as future school leaders. Before that, years as a classroom teacher and wrestling coach in CMS, and eventually Assistant Principal—responsible for instructional supervision, faculty development, and the full scope of operational complexity that comes with running a school. Later, a SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager certification, and most recently, an Accredited Trust and Fiduciary Advisor (ATFA) credential through the Trust Advisors Institute at Campbell University.

Three distinct credential tracks, but a consistent pattern underneath all of them:

Learn something new, then teach it.

Learning Was Often the Work

Across more than 20 years in education, design, and organizational development, the role of translator and teacher appeared in almost every engagement—even when the job description didn't mention it.

At PAVE Creative Group, building a new service division meant selecting and training a team on process and workflow in parallel with doing the work itself. At Abiomed/J&J, prototyping a Salesforce interface for a clinical team that had never worked with a CRM required explaining not just how the tool worked, but how to think about the data it surfaced and where it fell short. In every product and UX role, onboarding colleagues to new tools, design systems, and research methods was a standing part of the engagement.

This kind of embedded, contextual teaching is central to how adults actually learn:

Instruction lands best when it’s tied to a real problem people need to be able to solve.

Approach and Philosophy

Adult learners are different from students in a traditional classroom, and the instructional design has to account for that. Malcolm Knowles' framework of andragogy—the principle that adults are self-directed, bring their own experience to learning, and are most engaged when content connects directly to something they need to do—shapes how I think about every training environment. Learning objectives built on Bloom's Taxonomy. Content sequenced to move from foundational to applied. Assessments built around scenarios and decisions, not recall.

My instructional process follows the ADDIE framework: analyze the actual learning need first, design with the specific audience in mind, develop content that can be iterated before full production, implement with feedback loops built in, and evaluate against the original objectives. This isn't a theoretical preference—it's how I've approached curriculum development, onboarding programs, and professional development sessions across K-12 education, healthcare, financial services, and corporate environments.

Presentations & Facilitation

I've presented at Wake Forest University, UNC Greensboro, and the Triad Conference on topics spanning instructional design, community engagement, and organizational development. Facilitation work has included faculty professional development, administrative leadership training, and cross-functional team workshops across both education and corporate settings.

AI in Instructional Design—Practical and Ethical

Artificial intelligence has changed what's possible in learning and development, and introduced a real set of questions about how to use it well. My position is straightforward: AI is a strong design partner during the drafting, iterating, and scaffolding phases of course development. It's also worth being direct about what it gets wrong, what it flattens, and where human judgment isn't optional.

In practice, I use AI to accelerate needs analysis, draft learning objectives and content outlines, develop scenario-based assessment items, and prototype quickly enough to gather real feedback before investing in full production. The pedagogical decisions stay with me. Adult learning design requires knowing your audience, diagnosing the actual performance gap, and making sequencing and interaction choices that a language model will approximate—not own.

I'm also building curriculum around AI literacy itself: helping teams understand what these tools can and can't do, and develop the judgment to use them responsibly. The sample module below reflects that work.

AI-Generated Modules for LMS

This BETA course introduces the fundamentals of Design Thinking in support the Novartis' goal to strengthen collaboration between UX professionals and developers. The module was — which includes inline knowledge checks — was designed to communicate key Design Thinking and Agile concepts in a practical, accessible way, using examples and scenarios grounded in Novartis’ market and product-development environment. The course itself was created using Rise360 through short, iterative cycles following the ADDIE instructional model, supporting an adult-learning approach that allowed the content to be refined as needs and feedback emerged.

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Training & DevelopmentInstructional Design