Bloom’s Taxonomy for Training: Verbs, Learning Objectives & Template

Design training around what people need to be able to do

It is relatively easy to define what a training programme should cover.

It is harder to define what someone should actually be able to do differently once the training is complete.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is meant to help exactly for that purpose.

Developed from work led by Benjamin Bloom, Bloom’s Taxonomy is a classification system for different levels of learning. The original taxonomy was created to help educators classify educational objectives, while the widely used revised version reframed the categories around active cognitive processes.

Today, the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy organises the cognitive domain into six levels: Remember → Understand → Apply → Analyse → Evaluate → Create

The six categories represent increasingly complex ways of working with knowledge.

A learner might need to remember product information, understand a sales methodology, apply a discovery framework, analyse a customer situation, evaluate different courses of action, or create a recommendation for a complex account.

At the lower end, the framework supports relatively lower order skills such as recognising or recalling information. At the higher levels, learners increasingly need to interpret situations, exercise judgement, use critical thinking, and solve problems.

The associated Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs can help you turn those expectations into clearer learning outcomes. Words such as identify, explain, demonstrate, analyse, assess, and design make the required performance more explicit and give you more measurable verbs to work with.

But choosing a verb is only part of the job.

A useful training programme also needs to connect the objective to the right practice, the right assessment, and, where relevant, evidence that the capability is appearing back on the job.

That is why I created this Bloom’s Taxonomy training template.

It gives learning and enablement teams a practical way to move from: workplace performance → learning requirement → Bloom level → learning objective → practice → assessment → field evidence

The goal is to make the connection between what you teach, what people practise, what you assess, and what they eventually need to perform at work much clearer.

What’s included in the Bloom’s Taxonomy template?

The workbook combines a Bloom’s Taxonomy chart and verb reference with practical tools for instructional design and building workplace training programmes.

It includes:

Bloom’s Taxonomy levels

A practical reference for the six levels in the revised taxonomy:

• Remember – Recall facts, terms, rules, or information.

• Understand – Explain a concept in your own words, make connections, and relate new meaning to existing knowledge.

• Apply – Use knowledge or a process in a relevant situation.

• Analyse – Break information apart and identify patterns, relationships, or causes.

• Evaluate – Make and justify a judgement against defined criteria.

• Create – Combine knowledge and judgement to produce something new.

Each level includes examples of how it can show up in workplace training and the types of cognitive skills learners may need to demonstrate.

The workbook focuses specifically on cognitive learning. Other learning models also consider areas such as attitudes through the affective domain and physical skills through the psychomotor domain, but those sit outside the purpose of this template.

Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs

A structured bank of Bloom’s Taxonomy action verbs to help you write clearer learning objectives.

For example:

• Remember: identify, define, list, recall

• Understand: explain, summarise, compare, classify

• Apply: demonstrate, use, execute, perform

• Analyse: examine, distinguish, diagnose, investigate

• Evaluate: assess, critique, justify, recommend

• Create: design, develop, construct, formulate

The verbs are there to guide your thinking rather than act as rigid rules.

A verb does not automatically determine the cognitive level. The level depends on what the learner actually has to think through and demonstrate.

Learning objective builder

Use the objective builder to move from broad educational goals or training requirements to more precise and observable learning objectives.

You can define:

• The performance you are trying to support

• The type of knowledge involved

• The appropriate Bloom level

• Suitable action verbs

• The learning objective itself

• The conditions or context in which the learner should perform it

• The standard or evidence that would show success

This makes it easier to move beyond objectives such as “understand discovery” towards something you can actually teach and assess.

Training planner

The training planner connects the learning objective with the rest of the learning process.

For each objective, you can map:

• The desired workplace performance

• The learning requirement

• The Bloom level

• The learning objective

• The practice activity

• The assessment method

• Evidence to look for back on the job

This helps prevent a common design problem: setting an objective that requires higher order thinking skills, then assessing it through a multiple choice quiz that mainly checks recall.

Worked examples

The workbook also includes practical examples across areas such as:

• Product onboarding

• Sales messaging

• Discovery

• Qualification

• Deal reviews

• Account planning

These show how different Bloom’s Taxonomy levels can translate into actual workplace learning rather than remaining abstract concepts originally associated mainly with students and formal education.

Advanced Bloom’s Taxonomy matrix

For more advanced learning design, the workbook also includes the four knowledge dimensions from the revised taxonomy: Factual → Conceptual → Procedural → Metacognitive

You can combine these with the six cognitive levels to think more precisely about both what someone needs to know and what they need to be able to do with that knowledge.

This becomes especially useful when designing higher level skills where someone must move beyond recalling acquired knowledge and instead interpret situations, make decisions, and adapt their approach.

You do not need this level of detail for every programme, but it can be useful when designing more complex capability development.

What’s the value in using Bloom’s Taxonomy for training?

Bloom’s Taxonomy gives training teams a shared language for describing the level of thinking they expect from learners.

This is important because training objectives can easily become too vague.

A programme might aim to help sellers “understand the new methodology” or “learn how to run discovery”.

Neither tells you exactly what someone must demonstrate.

Should they be able to describe the methodology? Use it in a simulated conversation? Analyse an imperfect discovery call? Make an evaluation of whether an opportunity has been qualified effectively?

Those are very different learning requirements.

Using Bloom’s Taxonomy helps you:

• Write clearer learning objectives – Define observable outcomes rather than broad topics or intentions.

• Choose the right level of challenge – Separate recall and other lower order thinking skills from application, analysis, judgement, and creation.

• Design more relevant practice – Match activities to the type of thinking learners will eventually need at work.

• Improve assessment quality – Test the capability you actually care about rather than defaulting to multiple choice questions and knowledge checks.

• Apply stronger sales training best practices – Connect objectives, practice, assessment, and workplace evidence so the programme develops the capability sellers actually need.

• Spot design gaps – Identify situations where the objective, activity, and assessment demand different levels of performance.

• Connect learning with workplace performance – Define what evidence you expect to see once someone returns to the job.

I believe that the value is alignment.

If the job requires someone to analyse, judge, or adapt, the training should develop the necessary learning skills and give them opportunities to practise and demonstrate that capability rather than only remember information about it.

Who is the Bloom’s Taxonomy template for?

This resource is designed for anyone responsible for turning knowledge and skills into structured learning experiences.

It is particularly useful for:

• Sales enablement professionals – Use it to build onboarding, methodology training, product enablement, certification, and continuous development programmes around clearer performance expectations.

• Learning and development teams – Use the framework to write learning objectives and align activities and assessments with the required cognitive level.

• Instructional designers – Use the Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs, objective builder, and advanced matrix when structuring individual courses or wider curricula.

• Sales trainers and facilitators – Use it to move from training topics towards specific capabilities participants should practise and demonstrate.

• Sales managers and leaders – Use the framework when defining what sellers need to know, apply, analyse, or judge before being considered ready.

• Consultants and programme designers – Use the workbook as a practical planning tool when designing learning interventions for clients or internal teams.

Although many examples focus on sales and enablement, the underlying framework can be applied to workplace training more broadly.

How do I use the Bloom’s Taxonomy template?

Start with the performance you are trying to create rather than with the training content.

Ask: what should this person be able to do differently at work?

Then work backwards.

1. Define the required performance

Be specific about the job behaviour or capability you are trying to support.

Instead of, “Improve discovery skills”, you might define, “Identify the buyer’s underlying business problem and explore its operational and commercial impact during discovery.”

2. Choose the appropriate Bloom level

Consider the thinking the learner needs to demonstrate.

Do they need to:

• Remember information?

• Explain it?

• Apply a process?

• Analyse a situation?

• Make a judgement?

• Create something new?

Choose the level based on the cognitive demand of the task, rather than selecting a verb first.

3. Write the learning objective

Use the verb bank to turn the requirement into an observable objective.

For example: ‘Analyse a buyer scenario to identify the core business problem, its impact, and the information still missing.”

Now you have something much easier to design around than “understand discovery”.

4. Match practice and assessment to the objective

If the learner needs to analyse a situation, give them something to analyse.

If they need to perform a skill, give them an opportunity to perform it.

If they need to make a judgement, assess the quality of that judgement.

The objective, practice, and assessment should demand roughly the same level of thinking.

5. Define what you expect to see on the job

Finally, decide what would indicate that the capability has transferred beyond the training environment.

For a discovery programme, that might mean seeing more consistent exploration of business impact in real customer calls.

For account planning, it might mean stronger stakeholder analysis and clearer account strategies.

For product training, it could mean sellers selecting and explaining the right product capabilities based on the customer situation rather than simply recalling features.

This final step is particularly important in workplace learning.

Passing an assessment tells you what someone could demonstrate under the assessment conditions.

Field evidence helps you understand whether that capability is becoming part of how they actually work.

Use the template to make that connection visible from the beginning.