Workplace skills are changing fast, and adult learning principles now sit at the centre of how L&D teams design training that sticks. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that “50% of their workforce has completed training… compared to 2023, when only 41%”. The same report says employers expect “39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030”.
For L&D teams tasked with upskilling employees, that pace raises the stakes on every programme.
Understanding how adults process information helps you tailor sessions, whether you are training new employees or working to close skills gaps across teams. This article covers strategies for the eight learning styles, as well as the examining how much a preferred style really matters.
The Adult Learning Principles Behind Effective Workplace Training
Before choosing techniques, it helps to understand how adults tend to approach learning. The theory of adult learning is called andragogy, a term popularised by the educator Malcolm Knowles. It describes assumptions about how adult learners take on new material, rather than fixed rules that separate them from children.
According to a 2024 paper in the British Journal of Biomedical Science, andragogy includes six principles that shape workplace training design:
- The learner’s self-concept: adults move toward self-direction, so give them choice over how they practise.
- The role of experience: adults bring workplace experience, so connect new material to what they already know.
- Readiness to learn: adults engage most when a skill matches a demand in their current role.
- Orientation to learning: adults prefer problem-based tasks over subject-based lectures.
- The need to know why: explain the purpose and outcome of each session before you start.
- Intrinsic motivation: internal drivers like confidence and mastery matter more than external rewards.
These assumptions point to one thing: adults learn by doing and by rehearsing real situations, which is why practice-based methods such as VirtualSpeech AI-powered roleplays help skills stick, giving learners a safe place to rehearse before the real conversation. Teams can build their own scenarios or start from a ready-to-use training library that maps to these principles.
The Learning Styles
Everyone has a dominant learning style depending on the situation. There are eight in total: Visual, Aural, Verbal, Social, Logical, Physical and tactile, Solitary, and Naturalist learners. We’ll go through each one and the strategies L&D teams can use.
1. Visual Learners
Visual learners retain information more effectively when visual aids are used, such as pictures, images, film clips, colours and diagrams. They are also good at understanding visual data presented in charts, graphs, maps, and dashboards.
Strategies:
- Use visual aids. Most other learners benefit from visual elements too.
- Provide visual analogies and metaphors.
- Write key points in front of the cohort as visual cues.
- Substitute words for colours and pictures.
- Ask employees to write down explanations and take notes.
- Colour or emphasise key points in text.
- Avoid large blocks of text.
- Include exercises where learners create mind maps.
- Use storytelling to help learners picture and remember material, as a 2024 SAGE Open study found digital storytelling improves knowledge retention compared with lecture-style delivery.
- Colour-code and organize materials.
- Get learners to visualise using phrases like “Picture this”.
2. Aural Learners
Aural learners respond to sound, music, recordings, rhymes, and rhythms. They remember conversations well, and music causes an emotional response in them.
Strategies:
- Encourage participation in discussions.
- Suggest audio books if reading is required.
- Suggest listening to music while going over material.
- Record sessions or make lessons accessible via your LMS or online course platform.
- Get learners to pair up and explain concepts.
- Encourage problem-solving aloud.
- Suggest rereading notes aloud.
- Use rhyming and mnemonic devices.
- Play relevant sounds when explaining a story.
3. Verbal Learners
Verbal learners favour using words and linguistic skills, in speech and in writing, such as reading, writing, listening or speaking. They like word games and puns, and are often strong public speakers.
Strategies:
- Use verbal training and writing activities.
- Ask them to discuss or present.
- Use acronyms or mnemonic devices.
- Get the cohort to read aloud, with varied intonation.
- Include role-play, such as practicing elevator pitches.
- Ask them to teach other members of the cohort.
- Suggest they reread and rewrite notes or summaries.
- Incorporate quizzes.
- Provide lists of key words.
- Combine verbal methods by reading, listening, writing notes, then discussing.
4. Social Learners
Social learners process information by interacting with and relating to others. They enjoy working with people and are often strong leaders.
Strategies:
- Ask what they think about a concept.
- Ask them to bounce ideas off each other.
- Allow them to discuss and share stories.
- Include group work.
- Engage them in a group role-play.
5. Logical Learners
Logical learners favour using logic and reasoning. They like to classify and categorise information and solve problems with numbers. They are especially good at analysing cause and effect relationships.
Strategies:
- Provide problem-solving tasks.
- Challenge them to work things out.
- Ask them to interpret abstract visual information.
- Include critical thinking exercises.
- Provide statistics and facts.
- Ask them to suggest conclusions from evidence.
6. Physical and tactile Learners
Physical and tactile learners process information effectively when they use their bodies and are actually doing something. They put their learning into practice.
Strategies:
- Use physical exercises and hands-on experiences.
- Include standing or walking exercises.
- Use pen and paper to map thoughts.
- Provide large spaces to write and draw.
- Encourage them to draw diagrams, flowcharts, graphs, and maps.
- Interact with physical objects or solve puzzles.
- Include role-play.
- Provide real-life examples such as case studies.
- Review notes during physical activity.
- Ask them to teach others.
- Explain sensations when visualising.
7. Solitary Learners
Solitary learners like to work and learn by themselves through self-study. They may come across as shy. If they feel comfortable during training, they are more likely to speak up during presentations or group work.
Strategies:
- Ask questions to learn what they think.
- Provide individual problem-solving exercises.
- Explain why the material matters, focusing on outcomes.
- Give them ways to track progress.
- Suggest links between prior and new concepts.
8. Naturalist Learners
Naturalist learners process information by working with and experiencing nature. They learn by finding patterns in nature and using scientific logic.
Strategies:
- Include experiments.
- Get them to find patterns.
- Set exercises to identify and classify.
- Use examples linking to daily life, people, or nature.
- Provide observational data such as case studies.
Evidence Against The Different Learning Styles
The idea that people learn better when taught through their preferred style is popular, yet there is evidence against this belief. We’re including this section to provide you with the full picture, helping you come to your own conclusion. The British Psychological Society’s Research Digest even lists learning styles among the most widely believed myths in psychology.
In a study published in Anatomical Sciences Education, researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine tested learning styles with hundreds of undergraduates, and found that grade performance was not correlated with dominant learning style. Most students (67%) failed to study in line with their supposedly preferred style, and those who did gained no better grades.
Broader reviews reach a similar view. A 2024 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology reviewed 21 studies. It found any benefit from matching instruction to learning styles too small and infrequent to warrant widespread adoption.
The University of Michigan’s Online Teaching guidance agrees. It says no study has shown that teaching to a learning style produces “better retention, better learning outcomes or student success”.
That does not mean method choice is irrelevant. Varying your techniques keeps a cohort engaged and can improve knowledge retention across a programme – and thinking about the different ways people can intake information can help you build a more varied, interesting training program for your employees.
Conclusion
Matching every employee to a single learning style is not well supported by the evidence. Even so, the practical lesson holds. Vary your methods and ground each session in adult learning principles. This keeps employees engaged and helps skills transfer to the job. Design training around real practice and the experience your people already bring, and the learning is far more likely to stick.
