Do you want behavior change, or do you want acknowledgement from your learners? Before you get too far in your training development, refine your training goals by considering this difference in learning outcomes.

Do you want your learners to know about a subject so that they are instructed on their jobs; or do you want learners to apply their knowledge in their jobs? The difference is understanding happens at the first level of learning, while applying a concept or creating new concepts happens much later in the learning process.

To put it in a critically: before you can correctly respond to someone having a heart attack, you have to infer when someone is having a heart attack. And you can’t infer when someone is having a heart attack without first understanding what a heart attack is and recognizing the signs of when one is occurring.

Step by step we learn. Overlooking a step is what creates training gaps and poor outcomes. Experts have mapped this learning journey for you so that all you need to do is consider where your learners are in their process. Use researched methods like Bloom’s taxonomy when determining where your learners start, and where you want your learners to end up.