Examples carry more than explanation

And they are the first thing cut for length.

Adults learn a procedure faster from a worked example than from a description of it, and materials in this sector are consistently long on description and short on worked examples, because examples take space and do not map to a criterion.

The example that works is complete and specific: a real situation, the actual decisions, and what the outcome was, including the part where something did not go smoothly. Sanitised examples in which everything proceeds correctly teach less than a messy one.

Examples also carry the contextualisation a resource otherwise lacks, since they can be set in the industry the learner is actually entering rather than in a generic workplace.

The counter-example is undervalued. Showing something done wrong, and naming why, addresses the misconceptions that learners reliably arrive with, and it is the material trainers most often add themselves.

Where space is genuinely constrained, cutting explanation and keeping examples produces a better resource than the reverse, which is almost always what happens instead.

There is a further argument for examples that has nothing to do with pedagogy, which is that they are the part of a resource that ages visibly. An example referring to equipment or software nobody uses tells a learner that the material is old, and that impression transfers to everything else in it.