Marion taught for 16 years. The moment that broke it open for her wasn't in a classroom. It was at home, looking at her own kids.
She started a job search in April not even knowing what instructional design was, and found the Jumpstart workshop on Facebook.
The workshop named the thing she already knew she could do and would enjoy. She joined the April cohort and set one non-negotiable deadline: she was not going back for the next school year.
"I just kept telling myself, whatever it takes, I'm going to make this happen."
She has her dates memorized because she's proud of them: coursework started May 1, full AIDA credential earned July 3. Two months, at full sprint, bringing everything 16 years of teaching had built. And she networked from day one, telling everyone she met what she was building toward. It paid off in ways she couldn't have predicted: today, 12 of the 13 people on her team got their jobs through networking.
Six weeks, 150 applications, about 20 hours a week. Then a phone call about an application mix-up: the company thought she'd applied for a subject-matter-expert role. They interviewed her anyway, saw her portfolio, and took a chance on a teacher who knew nothing about aviation. She started as a 1099 contract instructional designer at CPaT Global, which builds eLearning for aviation personnel, that August.
Four months in, she was promoted to project manager over the curriculum for a brand-new aircraft. When two manager roles opened up, she went for it, and got it over two senior IDs. In May, thirteen months after her first AIDA login, Marion became CPaT Global's Instructional Systems Design Manager.
"My storyboards got complimented constantly. My team members asked how I got this good so quickly, and I said, it was AIDA. AIDA over-prepared me for that job."
Then the story flips, because Marion is now the hiring manager every career changer is trying to reach. She's hired five AIDA grads onto her team, three of them her own pod mates, not as favors but because she'd been in the trenches with them and seen their portfolios.
She hasn't posted a single job publicly. She doesn't need to.