3. Understanding Your Learners

🎯 Learning Outcomes

📍 Guiding Questions

Analyse the characteristics, needs, and realities of your primary and secondary audiences
Identify contextual factors (access, time, language, culture, power) that influence participation and learning
Conduct a simple, participatory needs assessment to inform training design
Recognise and incorporate learners' prior knowledge and lived experience
Identify potential barriers to participation and design strategies to reduce them

Who are your learners, and what distinguishes primary from secondary audiences?
What constraints shape their participation?
What do learners already know?
What barriers might affect participation and success?
How can you incorporate lived experience and local knowledge?

You now have a system map and a Theory of Change. Both are about the bigger picture — the structures, actors, and intended change that surround your training. But there is one part of the system that deserves far more attention than a box on a diagram: the people who will actually be in the room.

This lesson is about understanding your learners deeply enough to design training that fits their lives, not just your expertise.

Why this matters¶

It is tempting to jump from "I know what change I want" to "Here is what I will teach." That jump skips a question that determines whether your training will actually work: Who are these learners, and what is their reality?

Training is most effective when it aligns with how people actually live, work, and learn. A workshop designed around stable internet access fails when half your participants connect by phone. Content pitched at beginners wastes time when learners already have years of practice. Activities requiring individual reflection may not land in cultures where learning is deeply collaborative.

The shift

Not "What should I teach?" but "Who are my learners, and what is possible in their context?"

When you start with learners rather than content, your training becomes more relevant, easier to apply, and more likely to contribute to the change you articulated in your Theory of Change.

Who are your learners?¶

Primary and secondary audiences¶

Your primary audience is the people who will participate directly in your training. But in many programmes those participants will go on to support, train, or influence others. Those downstream groups are your secondary audience, and your design needs to account for both.

Think about what this means in practice. If you are training health workers who will later educate community members, your workshop needs to do two things at once: help the health workers learn the content and prepare them to teach it in contexts you may never see. That changes what you include, how you structure activities, and what outputs you ask participants to produce.

Understanding learner realities¶

The most important design information is rarely on a registration form. You need to understand the conditions that shape whether and how people can learn. Start with direct conversation — talk to a few potential participants, their managers, or colleagues who know the context. Even three or four conversations will reveal patterns that reshape your design.

What you are looking for falls into several areas. First, practical access: what devices, tools, connectivity, and physical spaces do learners have? Second, time and competing demands: are participants being released from other work, or fitting this around existing responsibilities? Third, language and communication: what languages do learners work in, and does the training match? Fourth, social and cultural context: are there expectations around hierarchy, gender, age, or formality that will shape how people participate? And fifth, what success looks like from the learners' perspective — which may be quite different from what success looks like to you or your funder.

Don't assume the gap

It is easy to frame a needs assessment as "finding out what learners don't know." But learners always bring something: professional experience, local knowledge, informal skills, community relationships. A needs assessment that only maps deficits misses the assets your training can build on.

Conducting a simple needs assessment¶

A needs assessment does not need to be a formal research project. Short conversations, a quick survey, informal interviews, or a co-mapping exercise where potential participants sketch their own context — any of these can give you what you need. The goal is to understand three things: what learners already know, what they need to be able to do, and what obstacles stand between those two points.

Focus your questions on practice, not theory. Instead of "How would you rate your knowledge of X?" ask "When was the last time you needed to do X, and what happened?" The first question gets you a self-assessment that may not be accurate. The second gets you a story that reveals real capability, real constraints, and real context.

Barriers and opportunities¶

Every group of learners faces barriers — some visible, some not. Access barriers (no internet, no quiet space, no childcare) are practical but solvable if you know about them. Knowledge barriers (unfamiliar terminology, assumed prerequisites) are design problems you can fix. But participation barriers — power dynamics that silence certain voices, cultural norms that discourage questioning, past negative experiences with training or education — are subtler and more consequential.

For each barrier you identify, ask whether your design can reduce it. Sometimes the answer is straightforward: provide materials in the learners' language, schedule sessions around harvest season, offer offline alternatives. Sometimes the answer requires rethinking your approach: if learners are unlikely to speak up in a large group, design for pair work and small-group discussion instead.

At the same time, look for what you can build on. Prior knowledge and lived experience are not obstacles to learning — they are the foundation for it. When your training connects new ideas to what learners already know and do, learning is faster, deeper, and more likely to stick.

In practice, this means designing moments that surface and use what learners bring. Open a session with "What do you already do when you encounter this problem?" and use their answers as the starting point for new material. Have learners bring real examples from their work as case material rather than using generic scenarios. When introducing a new concept, ask learners to compare it with approaches they already use — the differences reveal exactly where the new idea adds value.

What drives your learners?¶

Understanding who your learners are and what barriers they face is necessary — but not sufficient. You also need to understand what motivates them. A learner who shows up because their manager told them to is in a fundamentally different position from one who sought out the training to solve a problem they care about. Both might complete the same activities, but only one is likely to apply what they learn afterwards.

This matters especially when your training depends on secondary effects — when participants need to take what they have learned back to their teams, communities, or classrooms. That transfer requires effort, initiative, and persistence after the workshop ends. Without motivation, even well-designed training stops at the door.

Why are your learners in the room?

Think about the people who will attend your training. Are they there by choice or by assignment? What problem are they trying to solve? What would "success" look like from their perspective — not yours, not the funder's? If you don't know, that is your first needs assessment question.

Motivation is not a fixed trait. It is shaped by context, and your design can strengthen or undermine it. Three things consistently help:

Relevance — learners engage when they can see how the content connects to problems they actually face. If that connection is not obvious, make it explicit — don't assume learners will figure out why something matters.
Agency — people are more motivated when they have some control over what and how they learn. Even small choices — which example to work on, which problem to tackle first — increase ownership.
Confidence — learners who believe they can succeed are more likely to try. This means pitching the difficulty right, building on what they already know, and creating early wins that build momentum. It also means helping them to see that they will be able to actually apply the skills they learn in real life.

Where might motivation break down?

Consider your learners' journey from the training room back to their own context. What might stop them from applying what they learn? Is it that they don't see the relevance? That they lack confidence? That their environment doesn't support the change? Your design can address some of these — but only if you anticipate them.

When you conduct your needs assessment, ask about motivation directly. Not "Are you motivated?" — that tells you nothing. Instead: "What made you sign up?" or "What would make this training worth your time?" The answers will tell you what your design needs to connect to.

A worked example: designing with, not just for¶

A team at an environmental research institute is designing training for early-career researchers who will later train community members on climate data tools. Their initial plan is a standard two-day workshop: presentations on data analysis methods, followed by hands-on exercises with the software they use in their own lab.

Before building the agenda, they talk to five potential participants and two of their supervisors. What they learn changes everything.

The researchers are comfortable with technical tools — more so than the team expected. But the community members they will later train have limited device access and prefer learning through practical, hands-on examples rather than screen-based tutorials. The researchers themselves are nervous about the facilitation part: they know the content, but they have never taught anyone and are not sure how to adapt technical material for non-technical audiences.

These conversations reveal that the real design challenge is not "teach climate data analysis" but "prepare researchers to teach climate data analysis in contexts very different from their own." The team restructures the workshop around this. Instead of presenting methods, they have researchers practise explaining concepts to each other using low-tech materials. Instead of lab exercises, they design activities where researchers adapt a data tool for a specific community scenario. And they build in time for researchers to develop their own simplified training plans — giving them a concrete output they can use when they return to their communities.

The result is a training programme shaped by learner realities rather than by the team's assumptions about what those realities were. The researchers leave with both the technical knowledge and the practical tools to teach it forward.

In practice¶

👉 Activity 3: Learner Reality Mapping — Map who your learners are, what shapes their participation, what they already know, and what barriers and opportunities your design needs to account for.

You will build on this learner map throughout the workbook — it directly informs how you define learning outcomes in Lesson 5, design activities in Lesson 7, and think about co-design in Lesson 6.

Before you move on¶

You should now have:

a clear picture of your primary and secondary audiences
a basic needs assessment based on real information (conversations, surveys, or existing knowledge)
a list of learner realities, barriers, strengths, and design implications