Apr 22 2022

L&D Target Audience Analysis & Safe Assumptions

Target Audience Analysis is one of my 4 standard types of ISD/LXD Analyses.

Target Audience Analysis
Performance & Gap Analysis
Enabling Knowledge/Skill Analysis
Assessment of Existing Content for ReUse

And when you are producing “performance-based” Instruction (Job Aids and/or Training – or – Performance Support and/or Learning Experiences – or – Resources and/or Courses) in an Enterprise Learning Context versus an Education Learning Content – your efforts are easier – as your Target Audience is much narrower in an Enterprise Learning Context.

Enterprise Learning Context Target Audiences

Target Audiences in an Enterprise Learning Context might include the current “performers” and/or those that will be recruited and selected for the job in the future (new hires/transferees from other jobs).

Safe Assumptions

I use my “Safe Assumptions” to inform my Design-Before-Development efforts. And those efforts include Mode and Media selection efforts. And other factors after that – language choices and alternatives, reading levels, imagery, font sizes, etc., etc., etc.

And etc.

But as an Analysts turned Designer for that next sequence of tasks and outputs – my preference is always to Design with a Design Team looking over my shoulder.

Leveraging Design Teams

As I’ve been telling Design Teams in the 80s and as I wrote in my 1999 book, lean-ISD, the purpose is:

“…not to be design by committee so much as a way to influence the MCD designer by
committee. The Design Team master performers and SMEs didn’t actually do the design; they
suggested content, examples, and resources.”

From “lean-ISD”…

So the selection of the initial Analysis Team members (from which the Design Team is sourced) is critically important – and THEY REPRESENT the Target Audience(s).

They respond to The Designer (me or you) and guide the Design by responding to thoughts and decisions in that workflow – which in my case is MCD – Modular Curriculum Design/Acquisition design process – a very mechanized approach to processing the Analysis data into the design.

Lesson Mapping is at the very “heart” of my Design efforts.

The Safe Assumptions – or the assumptions I might make as a Designer (and later as a Developer) are “guard-railed” by my Design Team members and later by the Development Team(s) and then finally tested by the Pilot Test Team(s).

Bob Mager taught me long ago to Test-Test-Test.

I even extracted Pilot Testing out of the Development Phase and made it its own Phase quite deliberately so that I could emphasize that to my Project Steering Team and in my detailed Project Planning.