Built on We Are: How Thomas Cahoon-Karsten is making insurance training anything but boring

According to Thomas Cahoon-Karsten, an Agency Academy Consultant at Frankenmuth Insurance, a trainer is a person who talks to you and tells you what you need to know.

"What we try to do is ask you really good questions, get your thoughts turning."

Thomas acts as a facilitator, not a trainer, and he stresses that there is a difference:

“We want to get your mind working, so that you are taking part in the discussion and sharing your findings with the rest of the group."

Since, he points out, people have a notoriously low rate of retaining information when it is simply told to them; it is only when they work it out for themselves that they actually remember it.

Thomas, who trained to be an elementary school teacher, found his classroom in designing and delivering training for independent insurance agents together with his colleague, Amanda.

Building the on-demand, immersive learning experience

But neither Thomas nor Amanda is a designer, and they'll happily admit it. "It's kind of scary," he says of the early days. "I'm like, what are we doing? I don't know how to do this." However, they were passionate about creating engaging learning, even for learners who couldn’t always attend live sessions.

As someone who has spent years in insurance, Thomas quite honestly put it: "And let's be honest, it's a double whammy when you combine insurance with boring modules”.

They both, therefore, needed something that keeps learners interested enough to complete the course and remember what they’ve learned.

They set up a learning management system, then evaluated roughly ten different content-creation tools before settling on We Are Learning.

​Three things won them over. The first was engagement. The second was branding: having custom characters that could move, gesture, and speak like the team, so that learners could have on demand the same experience as they would in a live setting. The third was ease of use.

Since he sees himself as a beginner, he was able to get started, experiment, and begin building without having to know anything about learning design.

The team leaned on We Are's specialists to build their very first module, which gave Thomas a chance to reverse-engineer how a great interactive experience actually works. After that, he proceeded. Six modules are currently being launched, with the intention of releasing a new one each month.

Interactive scenarios and engagement in action

The finished modules are a long way from clicking "next" through slides. There are branching scenarios where learners have to choose how to respond, interactive hotspots, quizzes, and AI-driven conversation nodes that react to whatever the learner says.

Thomas's favorite example of that final point is what he now refers to as the 'taco Tuesday' moment. When testing the limits of the AI, the team attempted to disrupt a lesson about rate increases by suddenly saying 'taco Tuesday'.

Rather than failing, the system carried on and brought the learner right back in with: 'Love it, taco Tuesday. Quick brain twist — if tacos stand for claims, then what sort of taco, a small spill of salsa or a full kitchen fire, would actually cause a rate increase?'

Even a joke wasn't enough to get the learner to disengage from the material.

Thomas also makes a minor design decision that he is proud of: learners are allowed to go back and revise a section, but they cannot fast-forward.

"We never want anyone to be able to skip through it," he says.

The aim isn't to finish the material quickly. The aim is in fact to learn something.

The internal response, he says, was immediate. His marketing colleagues saw the modules and were, in his words, blown away. The characters moved like the team, talked like the team, and were even a little funny.

For an insurance training’s reputation, that's no small thing.

The future of insurance training is blended learning

Thomas has a clear-eyed view of where training is heading, shaped by watching the whole industry lurch toward all-virtual during the pandemic and then discover its limits. His answer isn't in-person or on-demand. It's both, blended.

He says that each method has its own role. General knowledge can certainly be presented in an on-demand module or through a webinar.

However, the more in-depth work—such as practicing, role-playing, and developing real skills—still proves beneficial when people are in the same room. Since learners come in visual, auditory, and kinesthetic varieties, no single format can meet the needs of all of them.

"A blended approach is therefore necessary to meet all those learners' needs."

What ties it together, for Thomas, is the same instinct that got him into a classroom in the first place. Make it engaging. Make it human. Refuse to be boring…even when the subject is insurance.

The teacher who never got his elementary school class ended up building one anyway, one interactive scene at a time.

Built on We Are is a series highlighting the people using We Are Learning to make training more human. Interview lightly edited for length and clarity.