The people this is for

Written by a person. Last read by a person on 2026-09-07, 1 day ago. Its facts were checked by the eval suite on 2026-09-07.

You want to know who the program serves, or you are testing a design against the people it would reach.

Scenario-based sample. Halden Systems is invented, and so is every figure about it.

Bottom line. 6 learner personas and 1 sponsor, drawn from Halden Systems staff and derived from named survey themes. The 6 account for 93% of the population, not 100%, and the missing 7% is left visible. Every persona names what it rules out, because a persona that refutes nothing is decoration.

The six, and what each one refutes

The right-hand column is the working half. A design that survives all 6 of those constraints is narrower than the one anybody would have proposed, which is the point of building them first.

What each one needs

The reset expert, 19%. She was the person others asked. The documentation moved into the repository and her expertise did not move with it. She needs a model rather than a course, and she learns fast once something is explained instead of demonstrated. Any material that requires her to publicly identify as a beginner will not be opened. Themes: competence reset, fear of permanence.

The stranded newcomer, 18%. Her question is answered 18 hours later, by which time she has worked around it. She needs help that does not depend on somebody being awake, and written material good enough to answer the second question as well as the first. Themes: no local help, fear of permanence.

The workaround builder, 16%. He keeps a private file of exact commands and a standing favor with one engineer. He is productive and he is invisible to every measure we have. His private file is most of a good runbook already. Theme: coping machinery.

The quiet complier, 16%. She attends every session, completes every module, and uses none of it. She is the reason 78% can follow the steps and 31% understand them. She needs a specific answer about what the tool will and will not be used for, not another reassurance. Themes: the replacement bind, no time to absorb, competence reset.

Burned by the assistant, 14%. It gave him a process that did not exist, in confident prose, and he caught it barely. He is a rational non-user, and counting him as an adoption failure would push him back toward the behavior that nearly cost him. He needs the skill nobody taught: how to tell which answers need checking. Themes: burned once, competence reset.

Never knew different, 10%. She learned the repository in her first week alongside everything else and does not understand why her colleagues struggle. She should be recruited rather than trained. A tenth of the population is already the answer to the other nine tenths, and it is the cheapest capacity in the building. Themes: none, and that absence is the finding.

The seventh, who is not a learner

The regional sponsor. Site director, Asia-Pacific, 200 staff, 0% of the learner population and the person who decides whether any of this works.

He has bought training twice from his own budget, because waiting for a central answer cost more than paying for a local one. Both purchases overlap with what other sites bought. He is not the cause of the $410,000 of duplication; he is a rational response to having no shared owner.

What he needs is a reason to stop buying, which means something arriving faster than his own procurement does. Consolidation that reaches him a year from now will be ignored, correctly.

He rules out the plan whose first year is centralization, and that single constraint removed the most obvious saving from the strategy.

The 7% nobody speaks for

The 6 learner personas sum to 93%. The remaining 7% is not assigned, and the gap is left in rather than distributed.

Personas that sum to exactly 100% have been rounded until they did. The people in that 7% are mostly at the 2 smallest sites, where the response rate was lowest, and the honest statement is that we do not know enough about them to write one. That is a finding about our sampling, and it belongs in the numbers rather than in a footnote nobody reads.

How these were derived

Each persona names the survey themes it rests on, and every theme in the survey reaches at least one persona. Both directions matter. A persona with no theme behind it is a character somebody invented, and a theme with no persona in front of it is evidence the design has quietly dropped.

"Never knew different" carries no themes on purpose. She was built from the absence of complaint in a cohort that joined after the migration, which is a different kind of evidence and is labeled as such rather than dressed up as the same kind.