Who are Learning Professionals?

To design good learning experiences, it’s critical to know your audience, right?. YES OF COURSE you would say…. !!!!

And since we agree, our tool box includes a technique that many UXers, and Design Thinkers have been using to drill down who is their audience is: we use ‘Personas’.

To be able to walk the walk and speak from real data, we’ve conducted several interviews with Learning Professionals and questioned them about who they are, what they do, how they feel about their job, painpoints, etc….

In this blog, I’ll share with you the results of these interview via our Learning Professional Personas. What are personas ?

A persona is a fictional person that represents a group of users with the same goals, motivations and behaviours. A persona never represents a single person, but rather a group of users with shared characteristics.

It is helpful to think of personas as real people. Like the members who make up a team, personas must also be part of this team. From now on, instead of talking about “facilitators” we will be talking about “George.” We will be talking about “Alicia” instead of “learning managers.”

Ask yourself whether George or Alicia will be attending your upcoming meetings, especially if your project affects them directly.

Here’s how personas can help learning professionals

Personas are useful in the following ways:
· They help identify target users (or profiles) for a learning product.

· They are a summary tool (bringing together a large amount of information in a few well‑organized pages).

· They help keep the target users in mind over the course of a project. They can be used as a benchmark.

· They are tools for engaging and communicating with members and the parties involved in a project.

· They are used as a base for other types of design methods like scenarios, storyboards, user paths, etc.

Here’s how you can use our personas to help you!

Personas represent the users that are targeted by your project:

· Use personas during a conceptualization activity or a brainstorming session.

· Let your personas speak. Ask George and Alicia what they think of your ideas. Do they make sense for them?

· Develop scenarios that feature your personas and imagine how tasks will be carried out.

At the Canada School of Public Service, we have several Learning Professionals Personas and we wanted all of you (learning professionals) to have as little or as much information about our them. We created 3 versions of our personas which are available either in our Playbook (via learning platform for our employees) or here:

The first one is the very short version. It’s bilingual and accessible (WCAG compliant)It’s designed for any manager, director/executive or other employee, new to learning field. The document provide a quick overview and answers the basics questions.

The simplified version is separated in two documents to reflect a simplified French version and a simplified English version. It’s not accessible unfortunately. It’s designed as an introduction to the learning professional persona as it’s shorter/more condensed.

The detailed version is also separated in two documents: detailed French version and a detailed English version. It’s not accessible either. This is where you’ll get the comprehensive portrait along with the summary of our research.

We hope it resonates with you and we’re looking forward to reading your thoughts.

Last, thanks for the 50+ employees who were interviewed, who interviewed others, who compiled the info and others, we appreciate your work.