How do you assess your learners' preferred learning styles and preferences?

One thing I've found helpful is to do a little bit of all, and to not over engineer the process. The purpose is to understand your target audience and really get to know their daily routines and the way they learn and work. All things described here can help paint a better picture and are valuable. And take the organization and industry into account already when talking to the audience or sending out a survey.

From my personal experience, catering to the needs of your learners and providing them with a comfortable learning environment can yield better outcomes and leave a lasting impression, ultimately leading to the desired transformation. This approach is highly beneficial for L&D professionals who aim to make a significant impact and deliver effective training programs.

In my experience it is al about finding themes and commonalities. I like to see where the trends are and also take an outside in perspective and see how others are doing it, so that this too serves as a data point. In that way segmentation becomes more rich and guided.

You will never fully get all the diversity and points of view in a solution, but hopefully, you will get it right for most of them.

I'll jump on this before the learning styles debate gets rolling. While the focus often jumps to the validity of learning styles, we miss the reality that people have preferences and their situations often determine what fits best in their workflow. The best way to approach this is to focus less on "styles" and more on getting to know your audience deeply. Understand what they're doing, where they are, what they need, and what is currently preventing them from doing what they need to do. When you do this, you can think about it less as addressing a learning style and instead consider yourself an experience designer focussing on creating a solution that uniquely meets the environment and needs of your audience.

While it is clear that many learners will self-report a preferred learning style there is little evidence that teaching to those styles has any impact on learning. "We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice." (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1539-6053.2009.01038.x) In fact, there is research to the contrary. Using difficult to read fonts for example, can improve retention, making learning more effective. (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wd1s7hj)