Staff Training through Comics
100 Years of Public Health in Scotland - Glasgow University & Dekko Comics
Since 2017, a year after its founding, Dekko Comics has been collaborating with clients across the world to help them utilise the power of comics as an educational tool. We have shown the value of teaching through the medium with with Dekko Comics #1-12, our KS2 curriculum titles, but their significance as a training tool for businesses is often underestimated…
When Stan Lee, the father of Marvel Comics, enlisted with the military during World War II, his skill with visual storytelling was recognised and he was tasked with reducing staff training time. Stan Lee, already well versed in comics, used his experience and storytelling skills to reduce the training time of soldiers processing payroll from six months to six weeks, and is credited with reducing general military training time by as much as 30%.
Marvel’s Stan Lee during his US military service, circa 1942-1945
Dekko Comics knows how comics can support staff training and help to reduce cognitive load, particularly for those who are neurodivergent. Through using text and visuals symbiotically, comics can help to communicate complex information easily compared to dense textbooks. They also have the added benefit of being easy to re-read, helping staff to quickly refamiliarise themselves with important information.
Disabling Interview Practices - Heriot-Watt Unversity & Dekko Comics
I often wrote entire training manuals in the form of comic books. It was an excellent way of educating and communicating. – Stan Lee
Comics additionally provide room for character, storytelling and humour to make the learning process more accessible and engaging. Here’s a little task for you: try to remember a quote from your favourite show. Now try to remember a specific passage from a training manual. Which information was easier to recall? Is the scene from the show memorable only because of what was said, or do characters, storytelling, costume, humour and your enjoyment help to anchor that information in your memory?
It is a simple example of how many components of comic and visual storytelling can be brought together to improve information retention. Indeed, in a 2016 study conducted by Alexio & Sumner that explored information retention between material presented in the comic format and traditional text format, the found that ‘memory scores were significantly higher in the comic condition than in the text-only condition’.
Traditional text vs multimodal learning
In an age of TikTok and Instagram where attention spans have gotten so used to short-form visual content, comics can prove an invaluable tool for disseminating complex information in engaging ways. Through the benefits and accessibility of the comic format, as well as its movement into broader popular culture through licensing, Dekko Comics has experienced first-hand the medium’s growth in popularity — especially when it comes to businesses and organisations harnessing the power of comics to teach and share their message, as can be seen through our diverse range of clients from universities to limited companies.
The appeal of comics as a learning and training tool seems very much alive and well.
A Health & Care Comic - Heriot-Watt University & Dekko Comics, Photograph: Ben Glasgow
If you’d like to find out more about Dekko Comics commissions and see examples of our earlier work, visit our commissions page. We’d love to hear from you.
The Dekko Team