Forget worst-case, let’s talk about best-case scenarios

Choosing the right activity for a piece of training can make the difference between highly engaged, motivated learners and distracted daydreamers. And with so many options available this is no mean feat.  

We’ve got lots of ideas on best practice, which you can learn about here… But for this blog, we wanted to highlight the often-overlooked scenario-based learning. 

At some point or another, we will all have participated in scenario-based learning – whether that was sales, safeguarding or even first aid training. It’s basically a method of teaching that allows learners to explore and apply learning in a real-life (albeit virtual) situation.  

At Amphigean, we find ourselves migrating more and more towards scenario-based learning tasks. And for good reason. So why? 

Highly engaging 

At a basic level, scenario-based learning is just storytelling, and storytelling is an age-old means of effectively relating information and getting it to stick. Plus, the fact that they encourage learners to interact with the content means that we’re not expecting employees to sit and passively absorb information for hours on end.  

The outcome of all of that is highly engaging learning content. And bottom line, if you engage and motivate employees, they’ll retain and reuse what they learn.  

Highly relatable 

But it’s goes further than storytelling – the situations are often based on real life, making them relatable. The fact that learners can apply their new knowledge and skills in a real life (virtual) situation means that they are ready to apply the learning with confidence from the get-go, improving ROI and achieving results earlier than with other methods. 

A safe place to fail  

We really do learn from our mistakes. So, doesn’t it make sense to let employees make those mistakes in a virtual environment? Through careful planning and discussions with managers or Subject Matter Experts, it’s possible to create realistic situations with believable distractors.  

Those distractors mean employees can get it wrong without impacting anything that really matters, all while building the confidence to get it right when it does. 

Bringing it all together 

A scenario-based activity can be used strategically within a learning programme to bring together different elements covered in multiple modules. By doing this, we can build complex situations that really puts learners’ knowledge and skills to the test, in a way that regular testing just can’t. 

So, the next time you want to see how well learners can apply their knowledge and skills, instead of reaching for a multiple-choice quiz, take a moment to consider whether you could get better results from a scenario-based learning activity.