#eLAPC 🎙 | Ep. 30 | #WomenInLearning | 3 Steps to Create Learner Personas with DANIELLE WALLACE
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Enhanced Transcript
Clint Clarkson: Welcome to the eLearning Alchemist podcast. I'm your host, Clint Clarkson. Today, we have the great pleasure of talking with Danielle Wallace about learner personas. Learner personas aren't a new idea, but Danielle comes at this from a slightly different angle because her background isn't in L&D, but in marketing. She was a marketing executive at Procter & Gamble, as well as PepsiCo, so she's been around some of the best marketing teams in the world. Now, she brings those talents to the world of L&D.
Danielle, why don't you tell us a bit about your history in marketing, and how and why you transitioned into the corporate learning space.
Danielle Wallace: Thank you, Clint and it's great to be here today. My journey into marketing started because while I was involved in my regular job of getting people to buy more Swiffer. I really was fuelled by training and leading others, so I was part of the Procter & Gamble training team, where I had the privilege of facilitating, as well as creating various learning solutions that I also delivered. Likewise, at PepsiCo, I also made that part of my role, even though it wasn't supposed to be. I actually thought that the higher up I could get in the company, the more I could train people, but the reality was that I just had more Profit and Loss (P&L) pressure and I had very little time to actually do what I love best. What I thought was interesting during that time was that I was using all these cool techniques to get people to buy more Mr. Clean, Swiffer, Doritos, and Sunchips, but what was missing in my life was the ability to actually transform people and to actually help people realize their own dreams through up-skilling. So, I left the corporate world and went into my own venture Beyond the Sky, where I'm able to actually do the parts I love; create learning solutions to help people fulfill their own dreams and here I am today.
CC: That's a great little summary. We've run into each other at lots of different conferences over the past few years and that sounds really consistent with the type of delivery that you give at conferences and the type of sessions that you host, so it's interesting to hear that. It's true that as you move up in leadership roles, you become busier and you lose the opportunity to do some of the things that you really enjoy. Certainly, we've seen this from a leadership perspective, where leaders transition from being more resonant early in their career to really more dissonant because they just don't have the same amount of time to do these things, so I think that's a common story or a common theme in a lot of people's lives.
Today we're going to talk about learner personas, but let's stick with your marketing background here for a minute. How do marketers use personas? Tell us a little bit about that and then we'll transition into discussing it from a learning perspective.
Consumer Personas in Marketing
DW: When I was at Procter & Gamble, we created consumer personas. These are buyer personas that typify what your consumer may be. For example, our consumer Cindy that we created for Mr. Clean, we used her to help us better resonate with her. What that means is through our research and data, we were able to bring her to life through photos and as a mannequin and at every turn to look at the language we were using in our communications and think, "Well, hey, would Cindy understand this? Would this store execution actually resonate with Cindy?". Even from a top of mind standpoint, we though about if Cindy would actually care that this is an environmentally friendly product or would she care that it helps provide a cleaner home for her family. So, at every turn, the personas allowed us to get closer to the consumer and keep all the research that we had to keep it top of mind in a way that everybody could use and it wasn't simply tucked away in our research reports.
So, at every turn, the personas allowed us to get closer to the consumer and keep all the research that we had to keep it top of mind in a way that everybody could use and it wasn't simply tucked away in our research reports.
CC: Yeah. I think what you're saying is that it's easier for a person working in a marketing team to look at Cindy and consider Cindy as a person and make decisions about what should be done from a marketing perspective than to try and look at reports and data to try to understand what they need to do from a marketing perspective. Even though it's an imaginary person, having a person to look at gives the marketer an easier way to make decisions for marketing to that person.
DW: Exactly. One piece of learning, you designed for the learner, not the demographic, so while on paper our target was 25 to 54 year old women, who had 2+ kids and etc., it's black and white. But when you suddenly put colour to the demographic data, as well as attitudinal and psychographic data against a profile of a person, a persona, suddenly it comes to life and you're able to make better decisions.
Learner Personas
CC: So when we talk about learner personas, what is the same and what's different than when you're creating a persona for marketing.
DW: In general, the process that I follow is the same. The intended actions I have for my learner personas helped me shape the messages I use with my learner persona, just like I would with my consumer persona. They also help me shape what tactics or learning solutions I may use. It's very similar. What is different from my experience is the time and budget involved, quite frankly.
In the marketing world, we had a bigger budget at stake and our learner persona became part of that. So the rigor that we needed to gather data and create the persona was heightened. My budget was 150 million, and you don't want to deviate. I mean, you can have some pretty bad consequences if you deviate. I wish I had that as a budget for any possible learning solution. The level of data we have access to for creating personas from scratch is a lot less and the risks are a lot less, accordingly.
CC: For the L&D professionals listening to this episode, who are skeptical of this idea, I'm gonna ask another question afterwards about that skepticism, but let's start with the positives. What is the biggest benefit of using learner personas in your mind?
DW: For me, it's been beneficial to get all stakeholders involved, whether that's stakeholders in the business unit and L&D instructional designers, getting everybody on the same page quickly, to be able to either make the right decisions or better understand decisions. That's what I've seen as the biggest benefit.
CC: Right? So it gives you a flag in the sand or an anchor point to when perhaps there's conflict or disagreement, but also when you just need to pick a solution and to somewhere and say that's our target. If that's where we're going, how are we going to make this decision? Which decision takes us in that to that place?
DW: It's the understanding of what decisions need to be made, so in the case of jargon and language use, which is an example I frequently find personas are being helpful in. We take a step back and think, "Well would Eva understand this jargon? Oh, actually, no, she wouldn't. It's just us here in the room that actually understand it." We pause and take a look in order to keep the persona at the top of mind. It's much easier to do that in the setting of a persona than it is to go, "Okay, well does this jargon make sense?". If I look at the demographics and the attitudinal information I have on my 50 page report, it's a harder activity to get everybody on board.
CC: Sure and this isn't something that we discussed previously or prepared for, but it popped into my mind and so I want to throw this question out there. Is there a risk with learner personas? I'm thinking specifically about millennials and the way that imaginary group was vilified for a period of time and is there risk if we define a learner persona almost being inside a particular generation? Is there a risk of bringing unconscious bias into the persona and having that impact the learning in a negative way?
DW: Yes, there is, which is why the steps of gathering research and talking to people are important, but as I mentioned, it also comes with balances at play and just the realities of how much time and rigor is needed. So that is definitely something to be mindful of when creating a learner persona is firstly gathering the right data. What you are basing it upon is not amplified stereotypes, but it's instead actually grounded in data. Then, as you just create the persona itself, just ensuring that within that you're not making unintended assumptions.
CC: Sure. Okay. Many L&D professionals have a learner base with tremendous variation in demographic education, experience, and attitudes. Are learner personas still applicable in those types of situations like with a call centre, where you might have 1000 people ranging from 19 to 60 and every variation of person in between, are they still applicable in those types of scenarios?
DW: I would say yes. The challenge actually comes into play is to narrow down the personas. It's much easier Your task, if you look at your employee base and go, Well, there's 20 roles, okay? I'm going to have like 20 roles within this one department and say, Okay, I'm going to have 20 personas for this one department. But the reality is, is that gets overly complicated and your persona for learning purposes, creating learning solutions will not be useful. What is harder, but creates better learning solutions is to take a step back and aggregate your persona somewhat, and to use the data that you gather to be able to make higher level groups.
CC: Is there an element of trying to get away from the things that we traditionally think about when we're trying to analyze a group or a population and looking more at the similarities between the individuals that we're assessing here to build our persona?
DW: Basically, it would be ensuring that when there's distinctions, they are meaningful distinctions.
The 3 Steps to Create Learner Personas
CC: Yeah, excellent. Okay, this podcast is about the three steps to create powerful learner personas. There are three categories that we're going to cover:
- Research
- Analysis
- Creation
Research
Let's start with research. Let's talk about how to create learner personas because if we haven't done this before, we wouldn't know how to do it. Out of the 3 steps we just mentioned, it's really easy for L&D professionals to skip the research in the belief that we already understand our learners. Tell us a bit about the research step and why it really can't be missed.
DW: The research step is the solid foundation with which to have a persona. It is an extension of your audience analysis that hopefully everybody is doing already. Take a deeper look at the research, not just what you've been told about the target audiences, but to actually observe them, look at them, hear them, speak to them, speak to their managers and so forth, to really help the assumptions come to life. If you've ever taken a training course, where you think that the language isn't quite right and the images aren't quite that could be from not having that solid understanding and a learner persona is an easier way of helping that come to life. So research is a very important step that can't be missed.
CC: Yeah, that is a great example of the importance of getting into the process of doing the research and a lot of L&D team's skip the research when we're talking content and the challenge that are facing the learners. We just trust one or two people who have told us how it is, as opposed to going out and doing the research ourselves. It sounds like with learner personas, that's the same situation where we need to go and we need to do that work ourselves. We can't just trust what the manager and supervisor has said and go away off in our corner and build some learning. We actually need to get out there and connect with the people to understand the challenges that they're facing, to understand who they are, and ultimately to build that learner persona.
We actually need to get out there and connect with the people to understand the challenges that they're facing, to understand who they are, and ultimately to build that learner persona.
DW: Exactly and some ways to do that is firstly by looking at some of the quantitative, the numerical data that's available, whether that's from HR, LMS, or what data you have in hand. What's the gender representation and age representation, those demographics, salary, job roles and such.
The second element into that is the qualitative research. Qualitative data is about observing your audience, its data that you put in words and can't put numbers against. I personally really enjoy observing and doing more of an ethnographic observation and then going deeper and talking to the actual learners. I observe what they have around their cubicle, I speak to their managers, I notice what happens during lunch hour. These are all aspects of qualitative research and there's many ways of doing that which can really help round out who your persona is and provide you a nice foundation.
CC: Yeah, certainly. Thanks for that explanation because I think when people hear learner personas or learner data, what they think about are strictly those demographic measures. What do we have for our gender split? What do we have for age? What do we have for earnings? And we stop there, but that information is important. It's not nearly as rich as actually going to and sitting with and observing people and understanding how they behave in this role because teams will behave differently as well. You may have two groups that behave very differently and need something very different from a learning perspective. So that's excellent.
Analysis
After we've done our research, we need to take some time at step two, which is to analyze what does analyzing learner persona data look like and what are we looking for?
DW: So the analysis step is very important and somewhat an iterative, messy process. This is the stage where it is important to have the conversations internally with your team to take a step back and draw connections between the data, the data being either quantitative or qualitative. Some things that you uncover, through a series of meetings, are things that you may not have directly observed.
Now you need to draw inferences and draw connections on what the learner's attitude is on training, making inferences on where the gaps in understanding are. All these inferences occur best within a collaborative environment. This stage is drawing upon others who are hopefully, either observing with you, or maybe if you don't, if that's not the case, it's people's managers who might actually know the learners. Each of us has a different perspective and that messy process in these meetings. We end up filling out a template with all those inferences and they become very helpful in creating a persona.
Create
CC: All right, fantastic. We've got our research, we've spent some time analyzing the research. Now we want to create our learner persona.
DW: Yeah, this is where the the magic comes into play. What we end up doing in this stage is, depending on the circumstances, you know what school they came from, what program they're in, what their role is, how long they've been at the company, what they love to do in their free time, what's some of the challenges they have in their everyday life, what a typical day looks like, where are they waking up, what are they doing, where are they heading. All those we bring to life through a story. I like a very short, simple story that helps highlight our key points. Often, our key points may be what learners want to learn about and why they want to learn about. It may be for social reasons and that's why they may want training, which is very different from someone who wants training to advance their career. We bring these all to life through a story and we'll even gather stock photos to help amplify what the persona is.
CC: Are you familiar with the exercise of empathy mapping because what you're describing right now reminds me a lot of empathy mapping.
I had a really interesting experience, while working at WestJet with empathy mapping. In that situation, we had two different groups creating two different empathy maps in two different personas that they created. Then when we started to have a discussion afterwards and something pretty remarkable happened, where one group made an assumption about the persona that the other group had created. Immediately, the group started to defend their persona in such a way that it sounded like they were defending someone they knew. It's incredible how this simple exercise of simply drawing out and creating a story around a person and recognizing that we're creating learning for a person and what that does to the psyche of the people working on it. Have you experienced anything like that with learner personas?
DW: Definitely because suddenly the persona isn't just a demographic on paper or a psychographic statistic on a piece of paper that really nobody cares about. Suddenly, it's now brought to life. It's Ava that we're talking about. Okay, what are her needs? What are her wants? It's Cindy, that we're talking about? What's important to her? The persona activities allows you to fully experience and empathize with your learner audience.
CC: Yeah, that's fantastic. How do you verify that you have your learner persona? Is there a process to almost do a fact check and go back to your research to confirm that you've you've hit the right spot or is it more by feel?
DW: So it's all based on data, but as I mentioned, we do need to draw inferences, especially within L&D where we don't have the budgets to create and spend a year creating a persona. So what we tend to do for sense making is to bounce the personas back and we often use supervisors of our intended learners and we ensure that our stakeholders or somebody closer to the persona are able to make sense of it. That helps to verify the persona without comparing them to an actual employee because these are not real people. It's an archetype. It's purposely generalizing information.
Wrap Up
CC: Yeah, that's perfect. Okay so we've gone through the three steps, research, analyze and create, but this is a quick podcast and 20 minutes isn't enough for a person to really learn this skill. Can you recommend any resources or any steps a person can take if they want to learn how to create learner personas better?
DW: I have a template that actually goes through what you would need to fill out and I have an infographic that walks through how to create a persona and why to create a persona. It is available on beyondthesky.ca
Beyond the Sky's Learner Persona Template:
I have other published articles that are widely available on various online magazines on this topic.
Find more from Danielle Wallace here:
- Marketing Practices for Better Learning
- Creating Learner Personas for Learner Success
- Creating Learning Personas to Keep Learner Focus
CC: If we have any TD magazine readers, look at March 2019. Danielle has an article in there on learner personas, which is really nice. I used that to prepare for this podcast. Danielle, if anyone wants to reach you, or they want to find you on social media, how do they reach you?
DW: You can reach me by email at danielle.wallace@beyondthesky.ca or I'm available on LinkedIn. I am located in Canada, so I'm Danielle Wallace in Canada.
I'm active on various social media platforms and I welcome any questions about this topic. We're currently doing many different learner persona activities, so I'm always eager to share back what I'm learning through these as we continually iterate and refine even our own process.
CC: Excellent and is there any other parting thoughts around learner personas that you want to make sure our listeners are left with?
DW: Yes, I would say is to go ahead and do it. Don't be daunted by the fact that it's not a full marketing persona activity. This is a short, much smaller intervention, but nonetheless, even with limited time, data, and money, it will make a difference to be able to create a persona and help your learning come to life.
CC: I can absolutely picture an L&D team of five or three people sitting in a room and saying, "Okay, let's draw out our learner personas, what data do we have, what information do we have? Let's create one and see what it does for us."
Even if you don't follow the whole process of doing this. If you just test through that iterative sort of minimum viable product process, you'll find value in it and that will drive you to want to do it more. It feels like a commitment and that you're gonna have to do a lot of work to make this happen, but that's not true. Don't do a lot of work. Test it out and try it. That's not just for learning personas, but that's for a lot of the things that we do in L&D.
Thank you so much for being here today, Danielle. I really appreciate it. Great conversation. I hope that we can have you on again to talk more about the intersection between marketing and L&D.
DW: Wonderful. Thank you so much.
Clint Clarkson, CTDP is just another victim who accidentally stumbled down the rabbit hole of corporate learning and development. He is the Founder & Managing Partner of eLearning Alchemy, a custom eLearning development firm. While he’s known for being upbeat, positive, and enthusiastic, Clint is still easily offended by comic-sans, bullet points, and the excessive use of buzzwords. Connect with Clint on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.