Skills mapping is an important exercise to make sure your employees are prepared to do their current jobs — and that you are helping them grow within your organization.

In fact, business leaders tend to do skills mapping as part of one-on-one coaching. First, they scope out the skills necessary to hire someone into the job. Then, they work with that person to identify how they want to grow and what skills the employee needs to learn to get there.

Skills mapping at scale, however, can be more overwhelming. That’s why it is a good idea to look at what you already have, rather than starting from scratch.  In particular, it is a good time to revisit your learner personas.

What Is a Learner Persona?

In season two of Mimeo’s Secret Society of Success podcast, experts on learning, user design and marketing research shared their definitions of “persona.”

In the case of corporate learning and development (L&D), a learner persona is a research-based profile that captures the motivations, capabilities and obstacles of a population.

If you have gone through a formal learner persona exercise, you may have characters standing in as personas, such as “Wanda, the 52-year-old customer service representative.”

Even if you haven’t built a full portfolio of learner personas, you probably have an informal one in mind when you sit down to design your courses. At the end of the day, the learner persona is an amalgamation of a wide group of people into a single profile to help you make decisions empathetically.

How to Use Learner Personas in Skills Mapping

Learner personas capture a lot more information than skills mapping will. When you create learner personas, you are looking to create an overall picture of the people in your employee population. A typical learner persona captures:

• Demographic information.
• Education history.
• Employment level and context within the organization.
• Technological literacy.
• Fears and motivations.

Meanwhile, skills mapping seems more straightforward, since you only need to capture the skills required to fulfill job requirements.

However, as the experts on the podcast pointed out, learner persona research often uncovers skills you didn’t realize were necessary. For example, one learning professional noticed that any job that requires “project management skills” also requires strong communication skills, because project management usually means coordinating between multiple parties. Yet those communication skills are typically left out of the job description.

Similarly, when sales teams hire new reps, leaders typically assume some basic skills that they would never include in the job description, like a basic understanding of the Google suite.

By diving into persona research, you’re more likely to notice any gaps in these “hidden skills.” For example, you might discover that your population of field salespeople are expected to use tablets for customer notes, yet most of them are hired without any specific technical skills. Or, when observing them on the floor, you might discover that your insurance adjustment reps are expected to adjust claims using a custom computer program.

In sum, returning to your learner persona research will not only help you identify the skills necessary for any given job, but it will also help you understand the bigger picture of who your employees are and what motivates them. You’ll be more equipped than ever to grow them with the organization.

Tips for Persona Research

Since persona research can enrich your skills mapping exercise, it might be worth refreshing your personas as you go. Whether you’ve developed personas before or need to do it from scratch, the exercise of talking to people who consume your learning will help you return to your content with more empathy.

Here are a few tips for how to conduct successful persona interviews:

• Don’t get overwhelmed: Aim for 5-10 interviews.
• Don’t get in too deep: Keep it to 30 minutes.
• Don’t get too scripted: Let the conversation flow!
• Don’t get distracted: Focus on learning about what motivates them to show up, to do their job, to excel and, most of all, to learn.

Finally, don’t forget to use all tools at your disposal to distill your learner persona research. If you have a wide array of learner populations to personify and skills map, it could be worth turning to artificial intelligence (AI) for help. For example, you could load your research into a chatbot, then ask it to tell you the skills necessary to do a specific job. Just don’t forget to verify its outputs with your research (and common sense).

Most L&D teams don’t have the luxury of time, people or money to throw at a project like skills mapping. That is why it is important to be scrappy and make the most of research you already have. If you haven’t done learner persona or skills mapping before, then it is a great time to tackle two game-changing initiatives at once.