Examining disaster cases offers an opportunity to learn from past failures, without individuals and companies having to experience these themselves. However, to be confident in such professional learning experiences, we need to evaluate their value beyond the learning moment. In this paper, we examine what participants could recall from a series of workshops that used case based methods to cultivate knowledge of non-technical capabilities in the service of public safety among engineers. The workshops included discussion cases, role plays, and serious game learning methods constructed from real and imagined disaster scenarios. As part of a suite of methods evaluating the workshop's effectiveness, we conducted semi-structured interviews with participants three months after the workshops. Our findings suggest that source material from within a participant's sector supports recall of technical details from a technical specialist position in the sector. We observed source material from another hazardous industry sector as linked to more general safety lessons and often from the perspectives of non-engineering professionals and the public. Workshops involving a role play element (role play cases and the serious game) facilitated lessons about the social nature of engineering, where with discussion cases participants took lessons principally related to management of particular hazards. Participants typically could not name the non-technical capabilities, but in their discussion of the cases in interview they showed a knowledge of these non-technical capabilities, i.e., the generic lesson is bound to the narrative, rather than recalled abstractly indicating deep learning outcomes. © 2025 The Author(s)
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