Using role-play in skills development has proven to be an invaluable training tool for all types of businesses – from industrial to corporate environments. Any training that involves human communication can benefit from this powerful tool.
Whether that be for training in Executive leadership, Sales Skills, Human Resources, Corporate Management, Assertiveness, Conflict Management, you name it, this interactive educational tool has proven itself time and again to be the best way for training participants to be assessed in and practice new and invaluable communication skills.
Skills Development Training Using Role-play
There is no need to take our word of it. Here is a bit of a snapshot of what others from a variety of industries are saying about role-play as a skills development tool:
“The role-play approach described in this paper was perceived by first-year pharmacy students to be a useful tool for developing essential patient-care skills, including communication, information-gathering, obtaining patient history, making an assessment and recommendation, and counselling patients regarding non-prescription medications.”
A white paper from American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education
“Role-play used in training can build confidence, develop listening skills and creative problem-solving.”
The magazine simply called Training
“The most powerful and effective tool in the training and development of your retail salespeople is role-play.”
Balance Magazine for small business
“Role-play pedagogy has been shown to be effective in reaching learning outcomes in three major learning domains: affective, cognitive, and behavioural (Maier, 2002; Rao & Stupans, 2012).”
Harvard University’s research
“Information, alone, rarely makes people change their minds, but personal experience often does. Role-playing, like any good inquiry approach, transforms the content of education from information into experience.”
Starting Point website dedicated to teaching entry level geoscience
“Because role plays can be involving, both in emotional and cognitive ways, they can also be used to help people understand others, and the positions of others. For example, a person can role play a position with which they disagree, to better understand that position.”
Training and Development World website
“The use of role-play in small groups is an important method to help learners cultivate the skills required to engage in nuanced, often difficult conversations with seriously ill patients.”
Most of the above articles also point out that many participants have had negative experiences with the use of role-play in skills development training, usually because of poorly facilitated experiences in the past.
Summary
The resulting consensus is that for role-play to work, it is advisable to “get experts in”, that is, people who know what they are doing and can make the role-plays beneficial, informative and enjoyable.
This is where a company such as Peers and Players can help at your next skills development training session. We have highly trained and experienced facilitators available worldwide that can assimilate your brief, regardless of what industry you inhabit, and ensure that participants gain practical experience for using the new tools that are taught.
Not only will the participants benefit from our expertise in delivering skills development training and role-play, they are guaranteed to walk away unscarred by the experience and most likely be new fans of role-play!
