Connecting learner's prior experiences to new concepts and skills

When we connect learning to someone's prior experiences or existing beliefs, the new information or skill becomes more relatable, practical, and easier to recall.

Gainsight considers this a human-first learning approach, but it's also just sound instructional design. Here are some examples drawn from our own courses, where we use a familiar concept or example to build a bridge to a new concept:

For a moderately technical audience’s introduction to Gainsight data architecture, we start with the example of rows and columns in Excel, since most people have some familiarity with Excel.

To help learners understand the various steps to building an email program, we use the Who, What, When, How framework that most people learned in their early school years.

‍⚕️ To assist new administrators in thinking about customer health scorecard measures, we reference a doctor’s visit where they check multiple things (blood pressure, weight, breathing, etc.) to assess your overall health.

Analytics and reporting can be dry, so to engage learners and connect with pop culture, we start by talking about how some movies that critics hated actually performed really well with audiences and in terms of ticket sales. There’s often an interesting story to be uncovered in the data!

And to teach a more complex concept in our business rules engine, trainers ask participants to think about support ticket analysis, since nearly every SaaS business has a support team and ticketing system. Leveraging a familiar use case helps learners visualize the problem.

For more practical ideas on how to approach training from a human-first perspective, join our Humanizing Customer Education webinar series - there are two more sessions in July and August!