Your Chief Virtual Learning Architect

Learning to Performance

Read More
Custom Design & Delivery

Read More
Predictive Evaluation

Read More
Enterprise Learning Strategy

Read More

› ‹

1
2
3
4

Dave Basarab Consulting has elevated the training experience, offering an end-to-end comprehensive approach that includes training strategy, instructional design, development, delivery , post program training transfer, and evaluation (via the unique Predictive Evaluation methodology). Virtual Chief Architect Dave Basarab has combined all of these individual training elements with his user-friendly, comprehensive Learning to Performance approach, which significantly increases companies' training ROI.

Why we are different

Innovation: Our primary focus is creating learning programs using a Learning to Performance approach.
Expertise: Dave offers the depth and breadth of his experience, including working internally at prestigious companies (Motorola, Ingersoll Rand and Pitney Bowes) as well as his knowledge and expertise as a highly-respected, sought-after consultant.
Partnership: Basarab collaborates with companies, serving as their own Chief Learning Officer whenever they need to plan, strategize, or implement training initiatives.

Training Services

Enterprise Learning Strategy

Enterprise Learning Strategy

At Dave Basarab Consulting, we're experts in creating Enterprise Learning Plans. We work with you to develop your company's learning strategy and direction.

Custom Design, Development, & Delivery

Custom Design, Development, & Delivery

Custom training is an effective way of developing the capability required to execute your strategy. We are a custom design house that creates programs specific to your business.

Learning Burst Development

Learning Burst Development

We can create and deliver your courses via our unique Learning Burst Method - keeping your employees at their jobs while receiving world-class training.

Predictive Evaluation

Predictive Evaluation

We predict the ROI for your courses and establish success gates. We then evaluate the course against the success gates to show value realized and continually improve results.

Leadership Development

Leadership Development

Turn-key virtual custom leadership development program that combines world-class leadership speakers/educators with post-event personalized coaching to provide you with a cadre of highly skilled leaders.

Predictive Evaluation

Using Learner Personas To Design More Effective Custom Training

Custom training becomes more useful when it reflects the people expected to apply it. A generic course may explain the right concepts, yet still fail to change behavior because it overlooks employees’ responsibilities, confidence levels, work pressures, and reasons for engaging with the material.

Learner personas provide a practical way to bring those differences into instructional design. They turn audience research into realistic profiles that help learning teams make better decisions about content, examples, practice activities, technology, and follow-up support.

When personas are connected to business outcomes, they can also strengthen enterprise learning strategy. Designers can create experiences that address genuine performance needs and use evidence to evaluate whether training is adopted, applied, and producing measurable value.

Start With Performance And Audience Evidence

A learner persona should be based on evidence rather than assumptions. Useful inputs include interviews, focus groups, observation, help-desk data, performance reviews, employee surveys, manager feedback, and existing learning records. The goal is to identify patterns that affect how people perform, learn, and use new skills.

Capture details such as job responsibilities, workflow, prior knowledge, digital access, decision authority, common obstacles, and preferred support. Motivation matters as well. An employee may want career growth, faster task completion, greater confidence, or simply fewer errors during a demanding shift.

Personas should remain connected to a defined performance gap. If the desired outcome is stronger coaching, for example, the research should explore how managers currently give feedback, what prevents effective conversations, and which behaviors would demonstrate improvement.

Build Personas That Guide Design Decisions

A useful persona is concise enough to use during design meetings. Give each profile a name, role, context, goals, barriers, current behaviors, and likely response to training. Include a short scenario that shows how the person encounters the performance challenge in real work.

Avoid reducing personas to demographics or personality labels. Age, location, and job title may provide context, but they rarely explain learning needs by themselves. A frontline specialist with limited system access may require a very different experience from a regional manager, even if both attend the same program.

The persona should influence specific choices. A time-pressured employee may benefit from learning bursts and searchable job aids, while a new leader may need guided practice, reflection, peer discussion, and manager reinforcement. For perspectives on how identity shapes workplace behavior, corporate identity expertise can add useful depth to persona development.

Translate Persona Insights Into Learning Architecture

Personas become valuable when they shape the entire learning journey rather than a single course screen. Map each profile across preparation, instruction, practice, application, coaching, and measurement. This reveals where different learners need different levels of structure or support.

For example, a compliance program might use a short pre-assessment for experienced employees, foundational explanations for new hires, realistic decision scenarios for high-risk roles, and manager-led discussions for supervisors. The core message stays consistent while the pathway reflects job context.

Delivery format also deserves careful attention. A live workshop, virtual session, self-paced module, learning burst, or blended program creates different opportunities for practice and feedback. This analysis of training delivery format helps designers match the medium to the behavior, environment, and learner persona.

Persona signal	Design response	Evidence of progress
Limited time during shifts	Short modules, mobile access, job aids	Completion and on-the-job retrieval
Low confidence with a new process	Demonstration, guided practice, coaching	Fewer errors and higher task confidence
Experienced but inconsistent performance	Challenging scenarios and peer calibration	Greater process consistency
Manager responsible for reinforcement	Coaching tools, dashboards, discussion guides	Follow-up conversations and team application
Remote or distributed work	Virtual collaboration and searchable resources	Participation and use across locations

Design For Motivation And Real-World Application

A persona can reveal what makes training personally relevant. Connect activities to consequences employees recognize, such as saving time, reducing customer complaints, improving team coordination, or making decisions with less uncertainty. Relevance should appear early, before learners are asked to absorb extensive information.

Practice should resemble the choices employees make at work. Replace abstract quizzes with branching scenarios, role plays, simulations, demonstrations, and realistic cases. Let learners make mistakes safely, receive targeted feedback, and try again with increasing complexity.

Consider the surrounding work system as well. A well-designed course cannot compensate for unavailable tools, unclear policies, conflicting incentives, or managers who never reinforce the new behavior. Persona research can expose these barriers and prompt changes beyond the learning experience itself.

Validate Personas Before Scaling Custom Training

Personas are hypotheses that require validation. Share draft profiles with representative employees, subject matter experts, managers, and operational leaders. Ask whether the language, situations, obstacles, and motivations reflect actual work rather than an idealized version of it.

Pilot the training with a small group that represents the most important personas. Observe where learners hesitate, skip content, request clarification, or fail to transfer a skill into practice. Their behavior often reveals more than post-course satisfaction ratings.

Evaluation should track several levels of evidence: participation, knowledge or skill growth, workplace adoption, business outcomes, and durability over time. For programs involving new employees, research on onboarding retention impact illustrates why long-term measures matter beyond initial completion.

Keep Personas Current And Actionable

Workforces change as technology, policies, customer expectations, and organizational priorities shift. Review personas when roles are redesigned, systems are replaced, performance data changes, or a learning program produces weaker results than expected.

Store personas where instructional designers, facilitators, subject matter experts, and business sponsors can use them. Include them in design briefs, storyboards, pilot reviews, facilitator guides, and evaluation plans. A persona hidden in a research document will have little influence on the finished program.

Use these practices to keep the model focused:

Limit each persona to decisions that affect performance and learning design.
Support major claims with interviews, operational data, or direct observation.
Define the behaviors and business results each persona should influence.
Design flexible pathways without creating unnecessary complexity.
Revisit assumptions after pilot delivery and post-training evaluation.

When learner personas are treated as living design tools, custom training becomes more precise, relevant, and measurable. Begin with the roles that matter most to a strategic business outcome, validate their realities, and build a learning experience that supports both immediate application and lasting performance. Dave Basarab Consulting can help connect audience insight, instructional design, delivery, and Predictive Evaluation into a learning strategy built for results.

Learning to Performance

Learning to Performance, a complete training approach, gives companies world-class training to drive significant return. This approach includes upfront work (Impact Mapping, design), training (for staff and company executives), and post-training efforts to ensure training transfer. This unique recipe - the key for successful training and adoption - is changing the way companies implement training. This methodology could work with any content for organizations in any industry.