As I do most nights after the family drifts off into slumber, I go to my ‘man cave’ and tinker. Yesterday was a taxing brain day, so instead of tackling my new interest in deciphering WordPress back-end coding, I thought I’d catch up on some of my favorite blogs and folks I follow on Twitter.

I launched Firefox and TweetDeck and after browsing a few blogs I landed on Clark Quinn’s Learnlets blog. Interesting project he describes on “Designing on Demand.”

All along TweeDeck is puttering along with updates when I notice the hashtag #lrnchat. Drats! Missed it again. From the lrnchat blog:

#lrnchat is a place for people interested in the topic of learning who use the social messaging service Twitter to learn from one another and discuss how to help other people learn. It’s Fast paced conversation, 140 characters or less at a time. Every 20 minutes or so a moderator will throw into the mix a new question.

My wife an I are teaching a small group at our church on Thursday nights (the #lrnchat time), so I’ll just have to anticipate joining the conversation in a few weeks.

The cool thing about Twitter is I can search a hashtag and read the previous chat…er, tweets. Somewhere toward the end, Marcia Conner said, “Just learned that Andragogy was a new term for many. Learn more here >> Andragogy + Pedagogy.”

OK, so I missed lrnchat, but at that moment I learned something…Andragogy. I knew that Pedagogy was the art and science of education, but didn’t realize it was the art and science of educating children, and that it was a synonym for teaching.

I kept reading and it was like an epiphony! Andragogy is the art and science of helping adults learn. Hey! That’s what I do! I help adults how to learn stuff. I’m an Andragogicalist! Since I’m in the mood to make up names, why not make up a new title…how about Andragogy Instructionalist. Or Instructional Andragogicalist.

This is by no means of any disrespect to the science of Andragogy or Pedagogy. I am passionate about both and study them every day.

In the world of Training & Development I have been called and referred to so many different ways that our industry still hasn’t nailed down any true hierarchical job titles. My current official title is a “Training Specialist II.” I was never a “Training Specialist I,” and I have come to learn there is a III and a IV, but that’s it.

I’m an Instructional Designer, an LMS Administrator (really a Super Admin managing 56k users), eLearning Developer, and Training Analyst. If that’s what a TSII does, what the heck does a TSIII do? And I can only imagine the stress a TSIV must have!

There are many folks who do what I do but if you ask, no two will give the same answer: Elearning Strategist; Instructional Consultant; Training Project Coordinator; Training Technologist; Learning Technologies. I bet if I met 100 people in this industry, 99 would say they are involved in as much if not more of what I do. It would be rare however that we would share the same title.

So, to have some fun, tilt some heads, and raise some eyebrows, why not give myself a title that makes ’em think?

I don’t think I’ll actually put it on my biz card or sign my email, but it is fun to say, “Andragogy Instructionalist.”