The Customer Education Playbook

5Step 3: Personalize Learning by Focusing on What Your Customers Need to Know

At this point, you should have a good understanding of what your customers' jobs are and, therefore, how they define success. Now, here you are, ready to determine what they need to know to make that success happen.

Creating Effective Learning Personas

Before you start creating your content, you may want to think about your customers' different learning personas. While we've already discussed customer profiles, which allow you to segment users by their roles or their industries, learning personas will help you to segment your customers by their learning needs, and target the gaps in their knowledge – the things they need to learn in order to achieve their goals.

A learning persona is essentially a fictional profile that you develop that captures any segment of your customer base for whom you're designing a learning program. These fictional profiles should capture common characteristics from varied types of learners and are a great tool for breaking out of your own way of thinking and considering the learning journey from your customer's point of view. They can also be easily shared across teams and departments to help explain education content strategy and the type of customer that you're talking to, which is useful when liaising with various stakeholders in the business.

The characteristics you profile for a learning persona could be the kind of job they're trying to do, their goals, their background ...