How Uncovering Learner Personas Actually Reduce Design Time

Wouldn’t you love to learn more about your learners and make an even bigger impact with your learning initiatives? In an ever-changing, fast-paced world, L&D professionals are often asked to do a lot, with very little time.

For many learning and development models to actually transform on-the-job behavior, they require deep analysis, expert-level design and thoroughly planned implementation. While most L&D professionals would love to run through all of these steps each time they are asked to develop training, the timeframes of stakeholders and organizational leaders don’t allow for L&D professionals to truly follow any model to a T.

So what can we do so we can hit the ground running, and develop meaningful content that fits within the timeframe allotted?

Action of the Week: Learn Learner-to-Learner Differences

One of the most common mistakes L&D professionals make is focusing on being the sole developers of learning content rather than using their expertise to create access to the best content when, where, and how learners need and want it.

In the digital age, technology has empowered learners to have countless paths to a desired learning outcome, and many of these paths require construction over creation.

The Learn Action allows us to dig deeper to gather different data about learners and their moments of learning need so we can construct learning experiences that are formal, social, and immediate, versus spending precious time (that we really don’t have) creating broad learning assets from scratch.

Consider starting from a pool of content, both L&D developed and crowdsourced, then using personas to chunk and design experiences appropriately. Revisit your experiments in design over time – don’t let a learning initiative live as a static entity, but instead shape it as a dynamic experience.

Think of a learning experience you recently designed and/or delivered. Was it broad strokes and delivered to an entire audience? If so, how could you have leveraged your content pool and learner personas to construct a more personalized experience rather than create a broad learning event?

In our most recent ATD article, we share more about how learner personas help you make the move from creating “peanut butter” training. We’ve heard great comments from over 2,000 viewers and would love to hear yours!