Session Description When hiring a new employee or promoting someone from within, most organizations look for experience appropriate to the position and responsibilities. Although skills are an important part of the requirements, experience often trumps skills because it is essential that the candidate be able to utilize those skills in context applying both experience and critical thinking to the situation. Organizations typically use training strategies to improve performance which are built on instructional design techniques. When experience is required and the issues are contextual and therefore require critical judgment to effectively address, instruction is not enough. In this workshop, the speaker will demonstrate a methodology for capturing and ultimately deploying simulations which translate specific experience into learning modalities that engage the learner and help them apply the simulated experience to real-life situations. The result of this approach is that Simulations, once thought of as unrealistic because of cost and time, can become a key part of any organizations learning portfolio in a very practical manner. Learning Objectives 1) Understand what Experience Design is and how it can be used to complement more traditional instructional-design methodologies 2) Be able to determine when to use simulations to support your overall learning objectives 3) Understand how in simulations, the challenge is to create to the illusion of complexity in the articulation of a decision tree, so that it can be easily accomplished 4) Be able to make the simulation experience 'sticky' to support learner retention and application even though it is ‘simulated