Why, what and how
The second module of Day 1 shifts the spotlight from the trainer to the audience, and it opens with a deceptively simple worksheet: why, what and how? Why are these participants coming — were they sent, or did they choose to come? What problem is the training supposed to solve for them? What do they already know, and what do they expect to walk away with? And how will you find any of this out before the day starts? It sounds obvious written down. But run the test against real trainings and almost every failed session I have sat through failed here first: the content was fine, it was just aimed at the wrong audience — too basic for the experienced, too fast for the new, or answering a question nobody in the room had.
The six things to know — plus the ones that decide everything
The workbook's hub diagram puts participants' info at the centre with six spokes: demographics, background, level of expertise, attitudes, expected results, and special considerations. The first five are what you would guess: who they are, where they come from, what they can already do, how they feel about being there, and what they (and whoever sent them) expect to happen. Attitudes deserves special respect after this morning's KSA discussion — a room that was voluntold to attend learns very differently from a room that fought for a seat. My margin notes sit next to special considerations: culture, food, OKU (orang kurang upaya — persons with disabilities). In Malaysia this is not a footnote, it is session design: halal catering, prayer times in the schedule, language mix in the materials, physical access to the venue. Get the content right and the considerations wrong, and people spend the day distracted, excluded or simply absent — no learning theory survives an audience that cannot comfortably be in the room.
Eight places the information lives
The next page lists the sources: interviews, obtaining information from relevant parties (the boss who commissioned the training usually knows the real gap), tests, focus groups, performance data review, questionnaires, observation, and informal discussion. Two observations. First, half of these are free and fast — a questionnaire, three phone calls, ten minutes of informal chat before the session opens. There is no budget excuse for walking in blind. Second, they triangulate: what people say in a questionnaire, what their manager says, and what the performance data says are often three different stories, and the training that works is aimed at where those stories overlap.
Why it pays
The workbook's poster on this topic lists six returns on knowing your learners: you grab attention and persuade more easily, you improve engagement and decrease dropout, you enhance knowledge, you customise the learning experience, you save time — yours and theirs — and you save money. The economic frame is the one that convinces stakeholders: audience analysis looks like extra work, but it is the cheapest step in the whole ADDIE chain. An hour of interviews costs nothing next to a day of the wrong training delivered to twenty salaried people.
Case Study
profiling the room before my next AI course run
Applying the module to the next run of my DJC AI course, where the audience is deliberately mixed — agents, admins, managers — and that mix has burned me before: the same session that thrilled the tech-curious lost the spreadsheet-averse. What I'll gather, mapped to the six spokes. Demographics and background: a three-minute pre-course form — role, years in the job, one task they wish took less time. Level of expertise: not "rate yourself 1–5 with AI" (everyone answers 3) but three concrete questions — have you written a prompt, used a template, built anything repeatable? Attitudes: one form question — "in one word, how do you feel about AI?" — the excited/anxious split tells me how much of session one is confidence-building versus content. Expected results: what would make this course worth your Saturday? — their words become the mission list, per lean learning's right learning for the right person. Special considerations: schedule around prayer times, halal-only catering, bilingual slides for key terms, and a venue check for OKU access. Sources, triangulated: the questionnaire (what they say), a call with two team leads (what their managers see), and a skim of the tasks they actually do all day (what the work says). Ten total hours of profiling for a forty-hour course — and every hour of it makes the other forty land harder.
Reflections
The through-line from this morning: ADDIE's Analyse phase just got its checklist. Know the six spokes, pull from at least three sources, and treat special considerations as design constraints, not courtesies. The trainer who knows the room before entering it has already done half the engaging.