4 Tips for Creating Learner Personas

Learning and development teams know that training content isn’t a one-size-fits-all experience. 

Different people absorb content differently, which is why the use of learner personas has taken off — creating learner personas help trainers and instructional designers build a learning platform that works for multiple audiences. 

Whether you’re conducting a virtual training, working with hybrid learners, or organizing a corporate learning environment, building learning personas helps you climb inside the mind of learners and make sure your training programs have user-centered designs.

Personalize learning techniques, modules, and documents by creating different learner personas. Here are 5 tips for L&D teams to create custom learner personas.

Research Your Audience Before Creating Learner Personas

One of the biggest mistakes learning & development teams can make when designing training materials is making assumptions about their learners. Often, corporate learning teams don’t know the benefits of creating learner personas and design programs based on their own preferences. 

But by personalizing training materials to different types of learners, L&D teams can increase learner engagement and information retention. That’s why they need to research different types of learners, just like sales teams do when creating marketing personas. 

You’ll need both qualitative and quantitative data to understand your audience. You can get this information from formal locations like intake forms, the LMS, or HR forms, or from conducting interviews with them.

When you’ve gathered as much research as you can, you’ll be able to move on to the next step and create detailed learner personas and understand the best way to facilitate in person training or digital content delivery to them.

Analyze the Information You Have

Once you’ve completed your research, you’re ready to analyze the data. Use the information you’ve gathered to group different types of learner personas based on their behaviors, needs, values, and even how your training program will fit into their lives. Now you’re ready to start creating learner personas!

Make Your Learner Personas as Detailed as Possible

Ensure you include the details when creating each learner persona. Mary, a 22 year old intern who lives in a mid-sized city, isn’t going to be enough to facilitate the building of instructional design that works for your trainees. 

The more information you have on your audience the better. How do they behave under pressure? Do they prefer collaboration or working solo? Even what they do during their lunch breaks can be helpful information! 

To help you build a successful training program, it can be helpful to take it a step further and visualize each of your personas. Give them names, photos, or even hobbies, so you remember what kind of person you’re building instruction for.

Use a Digital Content Distribution Platform

For digital training or hybrid learning environments, having a digital content distribution platform is important no matter how many or which learning personas you have. 

You might be wondering what a digital learning platform is — it’s a way for trainers and educators to stay organized while actively distributing digital content to digital learners. 

Mimeo is a great content distribution platform for L&D teams who are looking to conduct remote or hybrid learning sessions for one or more learner personas. Not only can it reduce overhead costs of conducting in person learning sessions with printed materials, you can also control who has access to your content, when, for how long, and what they are able to do with it.

Now that you’ve researched, built, and implemented your different learner personas, get started using Mimeo’s tools to help with collaboration, productivity, and accessibility for all of them.