Before I became a Training Program Manager at Articulate, I spent eight years on our support team. That role taught me a lot about what good training looks like, because I was on the receiving end of it. Support agents are expected to hold a lot of knowledge. We need to know the ins and outs of how our products work, the processes running behind the scenes, and the much harder skill of helping a customer who’s stressed and up against a deadline.

The training that stuck with me the most didn’t necessarily include advanced branching techniques or fancy e-learning gamification. It reflected challenges I faced in my everyday job and helped me practice real skills. For example, I learned better when the training allowed me to practice a tricky support case or talk through what to say to a frustrated customer. So when people ask me how to make workplace training engaging, my answer isn’t more animations or gamification — it’s relevance. People learn best when training helps them do something they actually have to do.

If you’re reading this, you probably build training for your internal team, your customers, or your partners, and want to learn how to get results. In this article, I’ll share my approach to making training stick, plus a few new formats in Articulate 360 (the platform behind Rise and Storyline) that make it much faster to build really engaging training.

Engagement starts before you build anything

This might sound funny coming from someone in training, but the most engaging course might not be a course at all. Tom Kuhlmann, our Chief Learning Architect (and my boss), makes this point in Stop Building E-Learning Courses Before You Know the Problem. When someone asks for training, it’s tempting to open Rise or Storyline and start building. But if people already know what to do and just need a best-practices model, or a few resources to help them do it, a beautifully designed course won’t make much of a difference.

Here’s a simple way to quickly select the right kind of training for your needs from our E-Learning Heroes Community. I love the five simple and effective steps it outlines to help you through a training needs analysis.

Identify what performance should look like.
Find out what it actually looks like.
Measure the gap.
Figure out what’s causing it.
Propose a solution.

The article explores a call center example, which probably resonates with me because of my support background. It starts with a common problem: managers want training to help agents handle calls faster. After some observation, they discovered that the real culprit behind slow call handling turned out to be a slow computer system. Agents had to wait for customer data to load before they could resolve the caller’s issue. No course was ever going to fix that problem!

But let’s say your analysis points to training as the best way to address a performance gap. Start your training design by identifying what learners need to be able to do when they’ve finished. Be clear about the kind of goal you have. For example, “Understand our refund policy” is a knowing goal. “Approve or deny a refund request with confidence” is a doing goal, and a doing goal is what belongs in the course.

Here’s another example. Say you’re training a support team on how to handle software bugs with customers. You might be tempted to create a course that lists every known software bug and what to say if a customer encounters it. Nobody is going to memorize that list, and that’s not what makes a support agent great anyway. What they really need is to learn to de-escalate tense moments and guide an angry customer toward a helpful fix. Build the course around that empathy skill, and the bug list can simply be a reference they pull up when they need it.

Turn information into decisions

Once you know what learners need to do, give them a chance to practice it. A go-to framework I learned from Tom is the 3C model: challenge, choices, and consequences.

Challenge: Drop learners into a realistic situation that needs solving.
Choices: Offer a few believable options, including some that seem reasonable but aren’t the best move.
Consequences: Show what happens as a result, then give feedback.

Let’s go back to a support team example.

Challenge: A customer is furious that their file won’t open the night before a big launch.
Choices: Send the troubleshooting article, promise an escalation, or acknowledge the deadline pressure and walk them through a workaround right now.
Consequences: The customer either cools down and says thanks, or the support ticket comes back in all caps with three more exclamation points.

The 3C model is also a great solution for a course with too many bulleted lists. Trina Rimmer’s article on turning boring bullets into engaging interactions suggests imagining the story behind your bullets, and I love that. The dos and don’ts on your slide are really just consequences you could use to create a scenario.

Allison LaMotte gave similar advice when a community member asked how to make dry content engaging. Her answer was to break the content into smaller pieces, then build scenarios from real situations. Her tip to ask the people who do the job for stories is gold. Your most realistic challenges are easy to find if you ask the target audience for real stories.

How AI speeds up building engaging content

Writing good scenarios used to be one of the most time-consuming parts of building training. That’s where the new AI-powered features in Articulate 360 really help, and each one fits the 3C model I described above:

AI Scenario builds a realistic conversation from your approved messaging. Learners respond, see how their choice plays out, and get feedback at the end. That’s challenge, choices, and consequences without manually building every branch. You can prompt it with your de-escalation guidelines to create a lifelike scenario, and your team can practice with a fictional frustrated customer as often as they need.
AI Avatar brings the challenge to life. Choose a character, pair it with one of more than 5,000 voices, and add a script. Learners hear the angry customer rather than read about one. When your messaging changes, you update the script without reshooting a video.
Code Block lets you insert a vibe-coded simulated environment right inside a course. For example, you could create a timed, rapid-fire challenge where learners make a call on the spot and get real-time feedback.

Adult learning principles that drive engagement

One mistake I often see in the training industry is courses that are much too lengthy. No learner can be expected to retain 90 minutes’ worth of content consumed in one sitting. Shorter, focused lessons will better fit into your learners’ already busy schedules. Spacing them out also helps fight the forgetting curve documented by Hermann Ebbinghaus, which shows how quickly we lose new information we don’t revisit.

Two features help here:

Interactive Video turns recordings you already have, like a town hall meeting or a product demo video, into a searchable experience. It adds auto-generated chapters, a transcript, and knowledge checks. A learner can easily double-check a detail by jumping to that chapter instead of scrubbing through an hour of footage.
AI Tutor lets learners ask a question without leaving the course. You can enable the AI Tutor in courses and several other Articulate formats.

Meeting learners where they are also means meeting them in their language. This one’s close to my heart, since much of my work is training enterprise customers on localization. If you train a global partner network, an English-only course quietly signals to part of your audience that it wasn’t built for them. Articulate 360 can translate content into more than 80 languages, including all course text and paired audio. The software adjusts the layout automatically for right-to-left languages like Arabic. Every translated version lives in one course file you can toggle between, so you’re not dealing with several separate versions of the same file.

Engaging all learners also means accessibility. Captions, readable contrast, keyboard navigation, alt text, and plain language help everyone engage fully, and the WCAG guidelines are a good place to start.

Remember, a course is a starting point, but you can take learning so much further. I see the power of communal learning in the AI Assistant Certification Cohort I run, which had more than 750 members this past quarter. The lessons matter, but a lot of the real growth happens in a community setting on the discussion boards. That’s where people share what they tried, what broke, and what they’d do differently. A peer practice group can carry a course much further than any single interaction.

Measure what’s actually working

So how do you know if your training is engaging? Most of us check completion rates first, but that’s not the most reliable metric for indicating successful learning. Someone can click through every screen and walk away with nothing.

Look for signs that people are thinking:

Scenario choices: If learners keep picking the same wrong option, you’ve found a skill gap or a spot where your content isn’t clear.
Questions learners ask: AI Tutor questions feed into Articulate 360’s analytics. You can see the themes people raise and when they reach out for support. It’s like having a support queue for your course.
Survey results and duration: Quick surveys tell you how training landed, and time spent shows whether people are engaging or racing to the end.

Having access to this kind of data means you can address issues in a course before they show up on the job. For help tying training to business results, these five questions to calculate training ROI are worth a read.

Then put what you learn to work, and treat every course as a draft you’ll keep improving. If your learners already live in Thinkific, you can publish from Articulate 360 straight to Thinkific, so updates don’t add extra steps.

Make every course worth the learner’s time

Engaging training comes down to respect for your learners. Your content should match your learners’ real work and give them a safe place to practice real decisions that come with consequences. You don’t have to overhaul everything at once. Pick a course, find one slide full of bullets, and turn it into a challenge, a few choices, and some consequences. See what happens, and I’d bet your learners take notice.

Ready to give it a try? Start a free trial of Articulate 360 and build your first scenario.