For real? Crazy! It doesn’t make sense! These may be your thoughts if you hear an instructional designer complain they can’t talk to the target audience. That’s like asking someone to paint a canvas while wearing a blindfold.
During a typical audience analysis, getting to know the audience is a best practice. The initial steps might involve conducting interviews, sending out surveys, running focus groups, and observing the audience at work. The goal is to see the world from their perspective, identify their challenges at work, and develop empathy.
Why would anyone limit access to the target audience? Perhaps some decision-makers think they know best, or they don’t trust the intelligence of their front-line workers. Perhaps some fear that talking to the training audience will divulge what really goes on while on the job or that an audience analysis is an unnecessary cost. Whatever the cause, this is a difficult situation for an instructional designer. Here are a few approaches to try when you can’t talk to the audience.
Build a Persuasive Case for Talking to the Audience
Higher-ups may not understand that an audience analysis is likely to result in superior results compared to no analysis. Consider putting together a short and persuasive presentation to the decision-makers. Use visuals to show how getting to know the audience makes your training initiative more likely to be effective, which saves time and money and is the most efficient path.
Getting to know the target audience allows you to:
- Identify specific knowledge and skill gaps to target these needs, making training more efficient and effective.
- Determine the audience’s previous knowledge and experience, avoiding redundancy and boredom.
- Customize content for particular job roles, daily tasks, and challenges at work.
- Align training with the organization’s goals by making it relevant to participants.
- Increase awareness of the audience’s culture and language to make the training inclusive and effective.
- Continuous feedback and audience analysis foster ongoing improvement in training programs.
Gather Information from Government and Career Sites
If the presentation doesn’t happen or change your situation, here are other ways to learn about the audience. As you gather information, create a document describing all aspects of the target audience’s occupations.
Get a sense of what a job entails from government and career sites. Use this information to determine an occupation’s roles, responsibilities, and experiences. The sites below are in the US; job descriptions may vary in your country.
- Occupational Outlook Handbook: Provides career descriptions with information on pay, degrees required, work environment, job outlook, and links to related occupations.
- O*Net Online: Presents a detailed description of the tasks, skills, knowledge, technology, and trends of 900+ occupations.
- My Next Move: Analyzes occupations by knowledge, skills, abilities, personality, technology, education, etc.
- Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics: Presents wage information for hundreds of occupations. This data may be irrelevant to your analysis.
Read Job Postings
Explore many job postings to determine the most common tasks for the occupations and roles of your audience. The highly searched sites like Indeed, LinkedIn, Zip Recruiter, and Glassdoor should yield many results. Also, see if there are specialty job sites for the specific careers you’re looking for.
Use Search and AI for Deeper Insights
After identifying the nuts and bolts of a job, you’ll need to dig deeper to find the human element. Use standard search and AI tools for this. Below are examples of search terms likely to present results reflecting personal perspectives.
- Challenges of being a [insert occupation]
- News articles about [insert occupation]
- Stories about being a [insert occupation]
Sample Prompts for AI Tools:
The search terms above will work for AI prompts, but here are examples that may produce more insights when using an AI chatbot.
- Act like a [insert occupation]. Write a daily entry in your diary about your work for one week.
- Act like an instructional designer. Write a scenario demonstrating the issues and problems of being a [insert occupation].
- Act like a hiring manager. List ten questions you would ask someone interviewing for a [insert occupation] position.
- What are the challenges of a new [insert occupation] that an experienced person would not face?
- What changes have occurred in a [insert occupation] career over the past decade?
- What is a typical workday like for a [insert occupation]?
- What are the everyday tasks and responsibilities of a [insert occupation]?
- What are the best ways to stay informed about a [insert occupation] career?
- What professional associations are there for a career in [insert occupation]?
Explore Professional Associations and Forums
Most occupations have professional associations that provide advocacy and support to members. Although you don’t want to pay membership dues, associations often provide online articles that may give you a unique perspective on the career.
A second strategy is to read posts on related forums. You can uncover issues and topics that concern people in the careers you are researching. You may also find valuable discussions on Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn Groups, and similar sites.
Go Under the Radar
Please don’t lose your job using this suggestion; be sensitive to the situation. If people in the target audience are on site with you, consider going under the radar to invite one of these people to have coffee and conversation. Rather than an official interview, it is a way to get to know one person in the role. An alternative is to see if you know someone in a related role and get their help. For example, if you know a real estate agent, they may connect you with a real estate assessor.
Conclusion
Don’t give up hope if you can’t talk to the target audience. There are still many ways to research and understand the audience’s characteristics, though the alternatives are less than ideal. For more help developing empathy for your audience, see Learner Personas for Instructional Design and Empathy Maps: A Tool for Learning Experience Design.
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