How can you ensure employee training works and the learning actually sticks? One way is by using Bloom's taxonomy to help you plan.
Training is a key part of personal development, enabling people to achieve their career ambitions and deliver value for the organisation they work for.
But many industries are also required to deliver mandatory training courses to ensure compliance with regulations in areas such as health and safety and financial crime. It’s not only the risk of fines for non-compliance to consider; failure to deliver effective training can cause serious harm to individuals.
For example, Valencia Waste Management Limited was fined £3 million after two workers died following a health and safety incident, where the investigation highlighted inadequate training.
Research shows nearly half of UK adults have engaged in learning in the last few years, so the drive to improve knowledge is clearly there. There are plenty of learning approaches, strategies and theories you can adopt to train your team, depending on preference and what you're aiming for. Bloom’s Taxonomy is a framework known for helping learning stick.
Bloom's Taxonomy is a set of three hierarchical models used to classify learning objectives. In simple terms, it breaks down the ways we think and learn, so educators/trainers can plan teaching around how people take in information. The concept was initially introduced in the 50s by Benjamin Bloom and is still widely used today.
The three hierarchical learning models are:
This article explores the first level of learning, the cognitive domain (knowledge-based hierarchy), which aims to develop skills in critical thinking, problem-solving and creating a knowledge base.
The original taxonomy comprised knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. It was revised in 2001 to the following.
Learners move up a level of cognition as they get to grips with successive objectives. Broadly, the closer to the top of the pyramid they go, the closer they are to mastery of a subject. Bloom's Taxonomy’s higher-order skills include evaluate and create, alongside basic information recall at the bottom.
Knowledge includes recall of material, from specific facts to complete theories, laws or policies. But recalling information is the lowest level of learning in this framework.
Example: Outlining key points of our anti-bribery policy, picking out the name of the UK's anti-bribery law, remembering the gift threshold is £50 in our Gifts and Entertainment policy, etc.
Here, learners must demonstrate comprehension and the ability to explain ideas, concepts and material. It goes beyond recall and may involve translating information from one form to another, interpreting or summarising.
Example: Classifying specific behaviours or examples (e.g. intermediaries, places, etc.) as high or low risk, distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, interpreting a risk map or global corruption index, etc.
This is the ability to use learnings in new situations. It includes rules, methods, principles, laws and theories, and demands a higher level of understanding than the previous stage.
Example: Deciding what course of action to take in a given situation (e.g. if you're given a lavish gift by a client and asked to make a facilitation payment in return, or when a government official subtly requests a kickback) to comply with our anti-bribery policy.
This is the ability to break information down into key elements to understand how they relate to each other and the overall structure. It involves grasping the principles involved, making inferences or assumptions and distinguishing what is relevant. Analyse demands a higher level of understanding than understand and apply.
Example: Presenting a scenario on the process for conducting due diligence, where learners analyse specific client information, using their knowledge to determine a recommended course of action, having weighed up the outcome of all the decisions available. Or, a situation where learners are given material about the corruption risk profiles of different, undisclosed countries, and analyse it to ascertain which is being described.
This is the ability to judge the value of materials (such as a report, statement or course of action). It’s the second-highest cognitive domain in Bloom's hierarchy, requiring elements from previous levels.
Judgments may be based on clearly defined standards and criteria set internally (e.g. by a business unit or company) or externally (e.g. by a regulator or law).
It may involve assessing the value of a piece of work or critiquing someone's performance based on internal criteria or standards of excellence.
Example: Reviewing how a colleague performed when onboarding a new client at a bank in accordance with our internal policy. Or, presenting a situation where a bribe was solicited, exploring the responses of three colleagues and determining whose was best.
The final level is the ability to bring elements together to devise something new, or reorganise them into an alternative structure or pattern. It involves compiling information in a different way (e.g. a communication, presentation, speech or strategy), integrating learning from various areas to solve a problem or formulating a new scheme.
Example: Developing a risk map of jurisdictions where we operate, producing a presentation to showcase our anti-bribery strategy, writing a risk assessment on a given client, etc. Note: This is not generally testable in e-learning.
Of course, individuals learn differently. The model isn’t perfect, with arguments saying it's too artificial, and in the real world, we don’t learn in neat categories.
The distinction between lower and higher-level learning can be misleading and undervalues the importance of fundamental knowledge. If you don't know the red flags, you won’t be effective in preventing bribery, right? Others claim it is better suited to learning skills rather than content.
But, whether you like it or not, you can't deny the impact Bloom's work has had on education and training and its continuing influence on instructional designers and game developers today – those who draw on the same 'levelling up' ideas to build their content and products.
The question is, are they on your level? Have you stopped to consider what degree of mastery your staff need with the latest piece of training? Is basic recall enough, or are you looking for a deeper understanding, with, say, a refresher module? The decision is yours.
Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl, shifting focus from nouns to verbs, while removing synthesis at the highest level and replacing it with create. Learning and teaching methods had evolved since the original taxonomy, prompting the new version, which is better at analysing and articulating cognitive skills and more relevant for 21st-century teaching.
It helps educators, instructional designers and e-learning developers create curriculum, content/activities and assessments that cultivate deeper learning and progression from simple to complex thinking.
A tool to create learning objectives. They describe the expected observable, specific behaviours expected at the different levels. For example, learning outcome verbs for remember are recall, cite, define, describe, list, name, state and so on. For create, they include construct, design, develop, formulate, write, revise and synthesise.
Bloom’s Taxonomy demonstrates the different learning layers – for example, retaining information alone may not be enough; you may want teams to apply it, especially when it comes to compliance.
Our Essentials Library contains e-learning content designed to help organisations meet fundamental compliance requirements. If you’re looking for focused training, our training packages offer a complete solution for your compliance programme.
Our e-learning courses are designed to engage employees with our microlearning library, which was created to support knowledge retention.
Our Compliance Portal also features a range of tools to digitise and automate your compliance learning. These include our: