Incorporating Real-Life Scenarios into Safety Training: Practical Learning Approaches 

Safety training isn’t often considered an exciting part of your employees’ days, but it is an important one for the overall health and safety of your worksite. But there are ways to make safety training more engaging and, as a result, more beneficial to everyone involved. 

One way to do this is to incorporate real-life scenarios in your safety training. Read on to learn more about using real-life scenarios in your safety training and the benefits of this approach. 

What Is Scenario-Based Learning? 

Scenario-based learning (SBL) helps to create an immersive learning environment where your employees are faced with realistic problems during safety training, helping them learn to respond appropriately. Rather than providing lecture-based safety training full of slides and worksheets, SBL causes employees to think through how to apply what they’ve learned in safety training to potential situations they could face in the future. 

SBL allows your employees to not only learn safety policies and procedures but put them into practice. Experiential learning helps workers synthesize the lessons and, if they face a similar situation in real life, they’ll be more likely to respond appropriately. 

Benefits of Scenario-Based Training 

Incorporating real-world scenarios in your company’s safety training offers a variety of benefits for your employees, including: 

It’s Motivating to Employees 

Traditional safety training courses can be boring, causing workers to zone out and potentially miss important information. SBL, on the other hand, gets them actively engaged in the training and solving the real-world scenario correctly, making it more likely your workers will retain key procedures. 

You won’t have to worry about whether your employees are paying attention to scenario-based safety training. They’ll be up and actively engaged in solving safety problems presented to them by the trainer. 

It Prepares Workers for Real-World Situations 

Responding to a safety concern without practical experience can be stressful and cause workers to panic or make the situation worse. But by offering real-world scenarios as part of your safety training, your employees can learn how to respond to safety problems in a low-risk environment. They can make mistakes and wrong decisions during training, getting them corrected in the moment and teaching them what not to do as much as teaching them what they should do. 

It Has Better Retention Rates 

Safety training can be a necessary annoyance for your workers. And if that training isn’t engaging and informative, you’ll be more likely to see workers who finish safety training without any practical knowledge of the topics they were taught. 

By getting workers up and solving real-life scenarios, they’re more likely to retain the concepts taught by the safety training program, giving them a better chance of implementing that information if they face a similar situation in the real world. You’ll see higher rates of workers taking appropriate safety precautions, and better chances of emerging from a true safety situation with a positive outcome. 

The amount of engagement a worker has with a concept is directly related to how much information they retain after training is complete: 

• 10% retention: Lectures and other methods of oral instruction 
• 25% retention: Demonstrating a concept 
• 50% retention: Visual demonstrations and oral instruction paired with asking the worker to apply the information 

• 90% retention: Visual demonstrations and oral instruction that’s applied to the worker’s real life situation 

The more your safety training can be shown applicable in your employees’ lives, the more they’re likely to remember from your training. 

Your Safety Training Partner 

Keeping your jobsite safe is essential to reducing your instances of worker injuries and, as a result, decreasing your employee healthcare costs. Medcor’s safety training helps your workers learn key safety concepts through real-life scenarios, regardless of industry, so they feel confident responding in an emergency. Speak with an advocate today.