One of the biggest challenges L&D professionals face is ensuring training content stays with learners. Think about it: you might not remember the compliance document you read yesterday, but you can easily recall a funny story from your childhood. That’s because we tend to absorb and retain information better when it’s told as a story. In fact, using storytelling in learning and development can enhance retention by up to 80%, revealing a powerful opportunity for creating training that actually sticks.
At Totara, we’ve encouraged partners and customers to use storytelling in their learning programmes, and we’ve seen how it can turn routine training into experiences people remember and act on. In this article, we’ll look at why storytelling works for learning, share some practical ways to use it, and show how the right platform can support these stories.
Why storytelling is effective in L&D: 5 key benefits
Imagine you’re rolling out a new compliance module. One option is to list the ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ in a table and hope learners retain the information. A more powerful approach is to introduce a relatable character who faces a decision: perhaps they click the wrong link or leave a password written on their desk. As the story unfolds, the stakes become clear, and learners are prompted to think, “What would I do?”
This is where storytelling shines. It helps learners not only understand the facts but also feel the consequences and emotions tied to them. That combination drives deeper comprehension, stronger retention and lasting behaviour change.
Creating emotional connections
Stories help learners connect emotionally with the content, making material more relatable and memorable. When employees connect personally with training scenarios, they’re significantly more likely to retain and apply what they’ve learned. For example, in a leadership development course, you might follow a character navigating team conflicts, letting you feel the emotional weight of tough decisions before facing them yourself.
Promoting active participation
When you engage with story-based content, you stop being a passive observer and become an active participant. You imagine yourself in scenarios, weigh decisions and consider consequences before facing them in real life. Interactive courses can present branching storylines where your choices affect outcomes, creating a personalised learning path based on the decisions you make.
Breaking down complexity
Stories make complex ideas easier to understand. When technical details are explained through a story, they feel more natural to follow and stick more quickly. For example, in a multilingual learning environment, you might follow a character trying to handle a difficult conversation. That kind of situation shows how cultural differences play out and makes things like grammar rules or business etiquette easier to grasp in a real context.
Building practical context
Stories give you real-world frameworks that show when and how to apply new knowledge. Instead of memorising isolated facts, you see how concepts work in practice. For example, in a higher education business course, you might follow a group of students launching a startup, showing you how planning, budgeting and teamwork theories play out under real deadlines and unexpected challenges.
Improving knowledge transfer
Stories help you build patterns you can remember and use later. The story structure works as a retrieval cue, helping you recall relevant information when you need it most. So, when a challenge comes up at work, you can think about a similar situation from training and use it to guide what you do.
3 steps to use storytelling in training content
You don’t need to be a professional writer to create impactful stories. By applying a few simple techniques, you can turn training content into narratives that capture attention and stick with learners. Here are three practical steps to get you started.
1. Start with a scenario
There’s a place for clear learning outcomes in every course. Learning outcomes are essential for designing effective assessment, shaping feedback and giving learners a clear sense of what’s expected of them. What you set out as your learning outcomes at the start of the course should mirror what you evaluate at the end.
However, simply starting with a slide of bullet points can switch learners off before they’ve even started. This is why it helps to follow up immediately by immersing them directly into a narrative. For example:
- Health and safety module – “You’ve just started a shift at a busy warehouse. There’s a spill near the main walkway, but no one’s marked it up yet…”
- Data protection module – “Anika, a customer service rep, has just been emailed a spreadsheet with client data from an unfamiliar source. What should she do?”
These kinds of scenarios invite learners to step into the moment, reflect on what they know and feel the weight of the decision through real-world thinking.
You can expand these scenarios throughout the module to create an interactive case study or cohesive character journey.
2. Build empathy and engagement
Stories allow a person to feel and see the information as well as factually understand it. Recent research shows that narrative-based learning enables people not only to hear information but to experience it through context and emotion. This combination imprints the content more deeply in memory, with learners retaining material up to 22 times more effectively and being 63% more likely to recall it when delivered as a story rather than as isolated facts.
One of the most powerful reasons storytelling works in learning is because of how humans behave. Stories allow us to empathise, imagine and learn by watching. For example, is there a movie that always makes you cry? A book that makes you feel the rage of a character treated unjustly?
When you build stories around relatable characters and real decisions, you tap into this mechanism. Learners are no longer simply watching a situation unfold; they’re feeling it as though it’s happening to them. For example:
- They might see a character mishandle a customer complaint and cringe.
- They might watch someone struggle through an ethical dilemma and mentally walk through what they would have done differently.
- They hear the tone of a voiceover shift from confident to panicked and instantly react.
This kind of cognitive and emotional simulation builds a deeper connection to the learning material. It also reinforces the kind of experiential learning that is more likely to stick, without the risk of real-world mistakes.
To make the most from this, focus on emotionally believable moments and authentic dialogue. The more human your story feels, the more likely it is to trigger the learner’s own emotional and behavioural instincts and make the story meaningful.
3. Bring your stories to life with your LMS
There’s a big difference between clicking through a static PowerPoint peppered with bullet points and engaging with content that feels interactive. With the help of the right learning management system, you can build engaging learning paths, personalise content and create space for reflection and decision-making to pull people into your stories.
Take Totara Learn, for example. You can use course formats to guide learners through a structured storytelling journey. You could start with a scenario, build tension across modules that explore decisions or dilemmas and wrap up with a quiz to prompt reflection or ask learners to predict outcomes before revealing them.
Your choices of multimedia can help bring your stories to life. Videos, voiceovers and imagery can help immerse people in the story in a way that’s engaging and interactive. Don’t forget to employ the power of social learning, too. Forums and workspaces can invite discussion and healthy debate around a particular scenario; for example:
- “Have you ever faced a similar situation?”
- “Any advice for what could be done differently?”
Informal learning insights can also highlight who is most actively engaged and which resources are performing best, so you can test which narratives work.
Are you ready to transform your training with the power of storytelling?
In this article, we’ve seen how storytelling turns L&D from forgettable content into memorable experiences that drive real behaviour change. By understanding the science behind story-driven learning and applying practical strategies, you can design training that stays with learners long after the course ends.
That’s exactly what we focus on at Totara: supporting corporate learning and development by helping organisations translate theory into practice. With Totara Learn, you can design story-based training at enterprise scale, using flexible course formats, multimedia, social learning, and personalised journeys to make your stories feel real.
If you’re ready to put storytelling at the heart of your learning strategy, connect with our specialists to explore how Totara and Synergy Learning can help you create training experiences that make an impact.
