How experiential learning enables public sector readiness and risk compliance

Government and public sector organisations face a more unpredictable world today than ever before. They need to be prepared for serious situations, from cyberattacks on national infrastructure, sudden supply chain problems, and threats to transport and healthcare systems that are pushed to their limits.

In fact, The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) reported it handled 204 ‘nationally significant’ cyberattacks against the UK in the 12 months to August 2025. Most alarmingly, of a total of 429 incidents handled, 18 were classed as ‘highly significant’, with potential to have a serious impact on essential services. This represents an almost 50 percent increase on such incidents since the previous year and an increase for the third year running. There has never been more pressure to be ready and to protect citizens and the services that society depends on.

Behind the scenes, learning and development (L&D) leaders in Government, public sector, and the NHS need to continually upskill and reskill workers in order to tackle critical challenges, from emergency response drills, to complex maintenance procedures and general regulatory compliance.

Public sector training challenges

L&D leaders face some major hurdles to achieving this, most notably with a disparate workforce and outdated training methods that take up too much time. Traditional learning management systems (LMS) can be useful for delivering information and tracking compliance, ensuring everyone completes required training modules.

However, when it comes to environments where real-world decisions have life-or-death consequences, LMS platforms have clear limitations. They focus mostly on passive recall, not on testing how people actually perform. They lead to poor attention, limited retention, and reduced application of learning. Completion rates don’t reflect whether someone can apply what they’ve learned under pressure.

Organisations find it difficult to link LMS usage to actual effectiveness, risk reduction, productivity, or value. There’s rarely any assessment of how individuals perform in stressful, high-stakes situations or how well they collaborate and prioritise, for instance in water shortages, terrorism, data breaches impacting critical national infrastructure, as we’ve seen impacting scheduled hospital operations.

Why experiential outweighs traditional learning methods

Today, due to advances in cloud technology and immersive platforms, key obstacles to realistic training – like the logistics of getting the right people in a training room – are largely gone. Instead, agencies can run crisis simulations directly within their operational environments.

Digital, cloud-based simulations ensure that skill-building can take place without interruption, while live crisis workshops build trust, leadership, and shared situational awareness. This blended approach means readiness isn’t just an annual box-ticking exercise, but a continuous, evolving strength.

In addition, scenario-based, hands-on learning is more memorable than traditional methods. Through immersive experiences, people retain up to 75 percent of what they learn, way beyond the 10–20 percent of standard slide presentations. When handling unfolding, believable scenarios with real consequences, participants don’t just remember procedures – they put them into practice.

They learn to communicate under pressure, question their own assumptions, and adapt when the least expected occurs. These highly engaging and emotional experiences are conducive to learning and retaining lessons and applying to real-world situations. In summary, experiential learning turns theory into action, and action into resilience for the organisation.

How AI turns experience into actionable insight

One traditional challenge with experiential learning has been capturing and analysing the results. Where manual evaluation and reporting can take days or even weeks, AI has changed this entirely. Platforms like View360Global can now track every decision participants make in real time, transforming performance data into immediate, actionable feedback for participants. It generates clear behavioural analytics for leaders and supervisors and generates automated reports that meet governance and regulatory requirements.

Today, compliance isn’t just about ticking boxes. Managers must prove, in real time and under real pressure, that their teams are competent and prepared. Instead of vague feedback on training, senior L&D decision-makers can now obtain precise, timely evidence about how their teams perform and where improvement is needed.

 AI-enabled experiential learning empowers public sector organisations to build and measure operational capabilities with confidence, to strengthen collaboration across agencies and teams and provide clear assurance to ministers, boards, and regulators.

Revolutionising public sector L&D

The public sector can’t afford to use old methods for development. Experiential learning has always been the best way to prepare for an unknown future situation. With AI’s deep, real-time insight, L&D managers can finally measure, understand, and keep improving performance.

With the right platform, teams can develop tailored immersive learning scenarios that address specific organisational compliance challenges and objectives.

As risk evolves, government and public sector organisations must change how they prepare for it. And people will be able to trust the organisations that embrace this change when it matters most.