Do you find it beneficial to use personas during your training requirements research? Have you used personas to conduct audience interviews, or to present findings and solutions to management? Personally, I find personas to be one step too many in the research process; an application of story-telling where it is not required. I’ve also hardly ever seen actionable items come out of the creation of personas for training program analysis.
Let’s face it- personas are a presentation layer, and not the research data in itself. In today’s data driven world, do we really need to weave a story around the rich data collected from surveys and interviews? Why not be more direct and present the characteristics of the learning population, along with the learning interventions proposed to address and use these characteristics?
See the screenshot below for a better idea of what I’m talking about. In this case, we desisted from creating personas that map to each generation. We realized that creating personas for each generation would be exclusionary- there is considerable overlap between the generations. We also realized that we would spend precious money and time creating the personas when they were actually unnecessary. Instead, we dedicated time to interview a large sample of the learning audience and identified their social, economic, and personal characteristics. Then, we mapped learning interventions that are sympathetic to these characteristics and also use the characteristics as strengths. No personas required! Let data do its magic!
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What is your experience using personas? Let me know in the comments below!
