Personas

 

When you start your thinking around a digital learning solution there is one thing that you need to consider first. The Learner.

It doesn't matter whether your considering introducing digital learning to your company - or if you've been using it for a while and are thinking about implementing a new solution - the learner should be number 1.

Let's just clarify what I mean here - clearly there are activities you need to do before you get to this stage. I mean, if you haven't done your training needs analysis you don't even know who the learner is. But once you're clear about the requirement, why it's needed and what success looks like it's time to think about the learner.

But where do you start? In a large organisation one of the most effective ways of doing this is to create a number of personas for each 'typical' type of learner you have. This might be by job role, business area.... whatever works best for your company.

Consider things like: What technology do they have access to, how much time do they have to learn, are they used to managing their own learning, what motivates them, what engages them, when are they most likely to access learning and what does a typical day look like for them.

This list is far from exhaustive - you know your people and your company better than I do - just come up with the right headings for your situation.

Once you have your headings in place start to build your learner profile (persona). I'd recommend having at least 3 - you may need more depending on the size and complexity of your audience. For example, if you're rolling out to your customer service team you may just want 3 personas that cover 3 different job types. However, if your rolling out something to your entire company your personas may need to be relevant for back office, sales, customer service, accounts etc. etc.

If you do have a large audience don't overwhelm yourself with hundreds of personas - that rather defeats the object (which I'll come onto in a minute). For learning I find it best to keep personas to a maximum of 10.

So how does this help

If you try to create a stimulating learner experience that's suitable for 15,000 people you can end up second guessing yourself at ever turn. Your final solution may be confused or alternatively may be so watered down the learning experience feels relevant to nobody.

However, if you have created 7 personas - 7 learners that you are developing a solution for - the whole thing becomes far more simple.

Let's look at an example 

I would normally put these in a table, formatting and number of headings are just for brevity.

Persona 1: Margaret (Female), Age: 52, Role: Customer Service Representative, Working week: varies as is on rota system, Likes: She's a purple princess, really visual, creative, light hearted and fun, Dislikes: time wasters, detail, being forced to learn things that don't seem relevant.

Persona 2: Ronin (Male), Age: 27, Role: Sales Advisor, Working week: Monday-Friday 9.00-17.30 - has weekly sales targets to hit, Likes: social media, meeting friends, gym, Dislikes: spending a long time on one thing, having to do anything that makes hitting his targets harder.

Persona 3: Alfie (Male), Age 38, Role: Pensions Administrator, Working Week: Monday-Friday 9.00-17.30. Likes: organisation, process, detail, spending time with family, Dislikes: Forced fun, chaos, doing things that don't have a clear purpose, feeling unprepared.

You need to come up with a training solution that works for each of these individuals. Although our learners are quite different at first glance, there are a few things that are relevant to all of them. For example, this is not an audience who are likely to throw themselves into a new learning experience just for fun - there needs to be a clear purpose. 

This means that your solution needs to spell out to your learners why they are doing the training and how the outcome will be relevant to their role and make them more effective in the future. Clearly Margaret and Ronin would not thank you if your solution required them to wade through an e-book (or similar), although Alifie would probably appreciate the opportunity to delve into the detail.

Let's assume your solution was going to include something like a flipped classroom - where learners study core content before attending a virtual classroom to embed the learning and share their thoughts. So the solution works for all of your learners you might decide to be flexible about how the pre-learning is delivered. You might give learners the opportunity to read some documents - or you might give them the option to explore online content and videos. The important thing here is that however content is delivered the same learning outcome is achieved.

It's possible you'll not be able to please every learner all the time - but as you define your solution keep thinking back to Margaret, Ronin and Alfie - make sure that there is a good engagement balance for each of them.

This activity doesn't necessarily take a long time to achieve - especially as you can cheat by putting fake names against real people you know in the workplace (just don't tell anybody!). Not only does it mean that you are able to focus your thinking, but also you will usually find that you end up creating a much richer learning experience for all your learners.

Photo by Daniel Bernard on Unsplash

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