Top 5 Benefits of Using Learner Personas

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about learner personas and how they are instrumental to building a successful training program. And while that sounds great, you may need some more information before you go out and start creating them (building a learner persona will take time, effort, and money!), to ensure you’re making the best use of your time. 

To make it easier, we’ve compiled a list of some of the top benefits of using learner personas for your training. Could your training program benefit from one, or more, of these?

More Engaged Learners Online and Offline

Personalized learning and training content increases engagement among your learners. 

If you created broad training materials for associates, managers, and executives in a single program, it’s likely you’d have a bit of relevant content for everyone — but different audiences might zone out during segments that aren’t made for them, risking burnout, lack of engagement, and low retention rates. 

When remote or hybrid learners feel like a training session is made just for them, they are more likely to be engaged with the content and participate in discussions with trainers and their fellow learners.

By creating and utilizing learning personas, you can build those personalized pieces of content for each audience segment, backed by data.  

Make Better Learning and Development Decisions

By utilizing learner personas, you can avoid making assumptions and create better, more unique programs for your audience. Programs become more specific to people, what they need to know, and how they learn when you’ve integrated learning personas into your development strategy. 

Measurably Improved Outcomes 

Whether for corporate training, retail and hospitality training, or HR onboarding, more engagement leads to a better understanding of the content. And better understanding of the content leads to more productive employees, which should bring with it a more productive — and lucrative — business. 

Learners respond positively to well-constructed sessions given to them by trainers. So when training materials are built around a person’s skills, personality, and needs, learning and personal growth see a much better ROI than if a trainer threw a general training manual on their desk and instructed learners to read it. 

Examples included verified lower costs, higher employee productivity, and higher revenues.

Better, Targeted Instructional Design 

Speaking to your audience in the learning language they perform best in is good, but personalizing the type of content they respond better to is great. Instructional designers building in person learning and digital training content can both reap the benefits of using learner personas to personalize learning experiences for their audience. Videos, podcasts, powerpoints, one-pagers, and more can all be included or removed from a program based on how learner personas respond. 

Using a digital content distribution platform can make this easy for learning and development teams and their trainers to manipulate the content mediums available to their learners. Mimeo has a digital content delivery system that allows trainers to easily share their content digitally without sacrificing learner engagement. Plus, it keeps your IP secure and allows learners to access content anywhere there’s an internet connection. 

Provide Consistency When Creating the Program

Stakeholders, your learning and development team, and your designers need to fully understand your audience before building a consistent program. By referring back to the learner personas you created while building your program, you’ll create consistency across the entire training program, no matter who is building each piece.  

Once you’ve understood the benefits of using learner personas and built your user-centered training program, use Mimeo Print or Mimeo Digital to distribute your content.