CoverStory
Photo courtesy of J Amado Photography, jamadophotography.com
Galleries are remarkably adaptive spaces. From fine art to sports memorabilia to dinosaur bones, there are galleries around the globe displaying wildly divergent collections. At the same time, no matter the content, most galleries feel comfortingly familiar in the ways they engage us cognitively, emotionally and socially.
It is precisely because gallery spaces are inherently welcoming and expansive that they are ideally suited to support life sciences training. By inviting participants to engage with a series of learning stations strategically organized in a dedicated space — a hotel ballroom, for example, during a national sales meeting — training teams can create custom-made learning experiences that are at once highly individualized and powerfully communal.
For training teams, one of the great advantages of the gallery model is how its learning stations — much like the interactive exhibits at a science or natural history museum — can be tailored to address a wide range of topics. For example, over three years, our Teva Commercial Training & Development team created learning galleries that responded to quite different training needs:
In 2023, a product launch necessitated representatives to be trained on a new interactive visual aide.
In 2024, manager feedback indicated that it was important for representatives to better understand the personal experiences of patients who had certain disease states.
In 2025, collaborating with talent management, we determined our colleagues would benefit from a greater awareness of — and experience with — available development resources.
Though our resulting galleries varied greatly in terms of focus, use of space and even audience, they shared a similar design process. As you set out to launch your first gallery, consider the following:
Determine the need. Don’t put the cart before the horse; define your training gap. Then decide if a gallery is the best tool to meet this need. Sometimes it won’t be. For example, if you want representatives to improve customer conversations, roleplay scenarios would be a more effective option than a gallery.
That said, the self-directed nature of galleries provided an ideal training solution to meet the range of needs faced by our team. The interactive learning stations in our patient experience gallery, for example, paired patient testimonials with activities that fostered empathy by helping learners to personally engage with patient struggles. One such station asked visitors to wear glasses that created symptom-like distortions.
Understand your space. Where will you place your learning stations? How many stations can you comfortably fit? Where will learners enter and exit? Keep in mind that a room’s dimensions, ceiling height, even window placement, will impact how you can present your materials.
For each of our galleries, we used the constraints of the room to our advantage to create positive flow. When the room was largely open, we arranged pop-up signs and cubicle-like walls to make the space more intimate. When the room was octagonal, we guided entering participants to a central learning station, where they could orient themselves before setting off in whatever direction they chose.
Vary your approach. There is no rule as to the number of learning stations you should include. This will be influenced at the very least by your budget, the size of your space and the amount of time you wish participants to spend in the gallery. However, no matter their number, your learning stations should always work in concert toward an overall goal while each also provides a unique learning experience.
This drive to create a distinct experience with each learning station naturally caters to serving multiple learning styles across the gallery. For example, in our professional development gallery we included (among other exhibits) a touchscreen video activity well-suited for visual and auditory learners, a social-learning experience that paired participants in a storytelling activity and a tactile activity that prompted learners to contribute to a group collage. Diversifying learning elements in this way ensured our gallery had greater reach and that each visitor had multiple opportunities to find a point of connection.
Start planning (very) early. Gallery design is, in our experience, a highly collaborative effort. Multiple brainstorming sessions are invariably needed just to define the rudiments: the need, the theme, the number of stations, etc. And with an effort of this size, you’ll likely need buy-in from multiple teams as well as leadership. Without a long runway, you simply will not have time to get your gallery off the ground.
Of course, once your plans are set, the real work begins. Crafting the videos, activities, worksheets and various interactive elements your team dreams up will take at least as long as sketching them out on paper. Build extra weeks into your timeline to ensure every detail is in place at that thrilling moment when the doors to your gallery first open.
Like a great museum, learning galleries invite participants into an immersive space that prompts exploration, introspection and, ultimately, conversation. That said, launching one can feel risky. As trainers, we may spend months designing a gallery space, but when the gallery opens we must cede control and trust our learners.
Three times now, our team has witnessed this risk more than pay off. The success, I am sure, is because of — not despite — the self-directed nature of these learning experiences. In each gallery, participants were invested in their learning because they had agency, deciding when and how they completed the stations. Though post-event surveys and manager feedback testified to this, we already knew it to be true because of what we had witnessed during each event.
However, as powerful as these galleries were on an individual level, they were maybe even more successful as communal experiences. Each brought people from across the organization together in real time — and, at least in these spaces, for a limited time.
The bustle and activity of each were infectious. Conversations about the learning topics naturally bubbled up as participants encouraged each other to visit their favorite stations. This was an energy and sense of investment we were able to build on and reinforce long after the gallery had closed.
So, why wouldn’t we build #4?
Jamie Zona is senior manager of commercial training & development for Teva Pharmaceuticals. You can email her at Jamie.Zona@tevapharm.com or connect through linkedin.com/in/jamie-zona-595baaab/.
