Match Training Scenarios to The Real World Experience of Your Audience

One of the biggest mistakes I see in training design is this: scenarios that don’t match the real world of the people in the room.

Too often, training scenarios are too generic—or worse, they reference industries and challenges that are completely different from the audience's context and reality.

As trainers, as best as we can, we need to address real-world issues that the audience is facing. The wrong one can leave people disengaged.

So, for example, if your audience consists of government workers, instead of simply grabbing a case study from the private sector, research one from the public service, or build one that is more specific to the audience's roles and areas.

Work with co-creators from among the demographic or area you are training to co-create real-world case studies. This can be done with interviews, or by creating an initial draft using AI to rapidly generate user-specific scenarios, and then present them to the co-creators to tweak them.