Learner Personas
The most successful advertising and marketing professionals all share a common secret to their success: They utilize personas to gain a deep understanding of their customers’ pain points and needs, and to tailor messaging that compels them to adopt or use their products.
The best training adopts this same solution to performance problems – they place the learner and their needs at the center of their training design – making training focused, impactful and desirable.
What Are Learner Personas?
Learner personas are comprehensive profiles that represent your target learners. They provide deep insight into who they are, what motivates them, what skills they need, and define a clear path to a customized training roadmap. Without learner personas, companies are making costly decisions about the training needed, with little or no results.
Why Create Learner Personas?
At Enable, we’ve shifted our training solutions focus to the learner. Why? It’s simple. The people taking your training will determine its success. How quickly they adopt your product or ramp up, how quickly they get onboarded and oriented, how quickly and effectively they learn a new skill or master existing ones, all depends on how focused your training is on their needs. This is woven into and plays a critical role in our learning design process (we follow a modified ADDIE model). We ensure it is kept central throughout each phase of design and development, so we can measure success and impact continuously.
In order to do so, we need to understand who the learners really are. We want to create training that meets their needs in a way that they understand, connect with, and can apply to their roles as they need it. And creating learner personas allows us to do that.
Armed with learner personas, learning experience designers have a clearer understanding of who they are designing for and how they might interact with the learning. It also ensures that everyone who is part of the team in various stages of the process has a clear and standardized understanding of the learners.
How We Create Learner Personas
As part of the Analysis phase in the modified ADDIE model we follow, our Learning Experience Designers (LXDs) work with you to create a clear picture of your learner audience. Collaboration at this point is critical because you know your business and your team best, and we know learning. So, through interviews and discussions with stakeholders and learners, we gather the information we need. This includes information on audience:
- Characteristics
- Attitudes, beliefs and opinions
- Learning preferences
- Prior knowledge and skills
- Cultural and accessibility considerations
- Availability of and comfort with technology
Once we’ve collected information from learners and other stakeholders, we have a unique method of collating data and tying it to adult learning models.
Then What?
Learner personas form an integral part of our Analysis, Design, and Development processes as we create learner-centered digital training that addresses gaps in learner’s knowledge, skills and behavior.
Following the creation of your learning personas, we build in mechanisms to evaluate our design process continuously. And we tie our recommendations into your business goals, ensuring that the solution can work for you, with your unique considerations in mind.
Now What?
As you look at your workforce, how prepared are they to navigate the ‘New Normal’? Much of what they need they already have, but may not be using effectively. And if it’s not being used, it’s wasted.
Are you ready to become a leader in training with real business results?
If YES, click here to schedule a call with our team.
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