Picture a new HR graduate, six weeks into their first job, sitting across from an employee who has just been told their role is being made redundant. The employee is angry, or frightened, or both. Nothing in the graduate's coursework covered what to do with their hands, how long to let a silence sit, or what to say when someone tells them, quite reasonably, that none of this feels fair.
That is precisely the gap Dr. Madeleine Pickles saw from the other side of the desk. Twenty-five years as an HR practitioner across South Africa, France, England, and eight other European countries, then a move into academia at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) Business School in 2018. Her students could recite employment law and cite conflict-resolution models without hesitation. What most of them hadn't done was sit across from someone in genuine distress and hold their composure.
After 25 years in HR, I saw a clear gap in traditional CIPD programmes: not enough real-world skill development in negotiation and conflict management.
— Dr. Madeleine Pickles, Associate Professor of Organisational Transformation, LJMU Business School
That gap isn't unique to LJMU, and it isn't waiting for a formal curriculum review to close itself. HR and business educators, many of them practitioners-turned-teachers like Pickles, already know their graduates need this kind of practice, and a growing number are building it into their teaching themselves, module by module, whether or not it has been formally written into a validated syllabus. National workforce data on the size of the conflict-resolution gap, set out below, only underlines why.
Pickles didn't wait for a curriculum review either. Before 2022, she was already running in-person simulation exercises drawn from her own case history: cultural conflicts, perceived bullying, difficult managers. It worked, up to a point. Then COVID emptied the room, and running those same exercises over Zoom simply stopped working.
In 2022, she applied for internal funding, bought VR headsets, and started building her own AI roleplay scenarios instead: a redundancy simulation drawn from her own doctoral research into redundancy implementation, a wellbeing-policy negotiation between an HR Director and a cost-cutting finance director, and conflict and negotiation practice built specifically around active listening and influencing skills.
Students choose how they use it: VR headsets, laptops, or phones, and they can redo scenarios as many times as they want. For Pickles's cohort, many working professionally on a part-time Master's, that flexibility is the difference between practising a difficult conversation five times before a live seminar and getting one shot at it cold.
The results, tracked across four consecutive cohorts of her Master's Employee Relations module, are the kind of before-and-after numbers a programme lead can take straight into an accreditation review:
Employers rate communication as almost universally important, but rate barely half of graduates as proficient in it.
Introducing Bodyswaps into my HR Masterclasses has been a game-changer.
— Dr. Madeleine Pickles, LJMU Business School
The reason theory-only teaching underperforms here isn't a mystery, and Pickles is blunt about it: the majority of the HR job is problem-solving, conflict resolution, and mediation, which is exactly where the ability to communicate, negotiate, influence, and hold your ground under pressure becomes critical.
A case study in a seminar teaches a student what conflict resolution looks like on paper. It does not teach them what it feels like to be on the receiving end of someone else's anger, to notice their own voice rising, or to recover after fumbling the opening line of a genuinely difficult conversation. That is a rehearsal problem, not a knowledge problem, and rehearsal is the one thing a lecture cannot provide.
CIPD's own research backs this up at scale, well beyond any single classroom. In a 2024 survey of more than 5,000 UK employees, only 36% of those who had experienced workplace conflict in the past year said it had been fully resolved, despite 70% of employers believing their organisation has effective conflict resolution procedures in place.
Three in ten organisations (30%) don't provide any people-management training at all to the line managers who are meant to be resolving that conflict on the front line. The gap between "we have a policy" and "our people can actually do this in the room" is precisely the gap that scenario-based practice is built to close, and it's a gap graduates are walking straight into on day one of their HR careers, whether their programme prepared them for it or not.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 puts a number on how much more this will matter, not less, going forward. Leadership and social influence, the skill cluster that includes negotiation and conflict management, saw a 22 percentage-point jump in employers naming it a core skill compared with the 2023 edition of the same report, and it's projected to remain among the fastest-growing skills employers need through 2030. Business schools training the HR professionals who will themselves be expected to build this capability in others have a narrowing window to close the gap in their own graduates first.
What makes Pickles's approach worth studying isn't simply that she introduced roleplay. It's what she built around it. Bodyswaps sits at the start of a four-stage sequence, not the end of one, and the sequencing itself is the structural detail most worth copying:
1. Individual practice. Students work through AI roleplay scenarios on their own device and their own time, without an audience watching them fail.
2. Reflection. They write about what they noticed: what they'd do differently, where they felt out of their depth, what surprised them about their own reaction.
3. Live negotiation. In class, two practising employment lawyers from Bramhalls Solicitors, one acting for the union side and one for management, put students through a realistic dispute negotiation.
4. Final reflection. Students write again, connecting what they practised privately to what actually happened in the room, under real pressure, in front of legal professionals who challenge their assumptions and push back on their arguments.
The digital practice isn't decoration bolted onto an existing module; it's the safe failure that makes the high-stakes, real-world negotiation survivable, and ultimately more useful, for everyone in the room. Students who have already fumbled a redundancy conversation once, privately, with no one watching, arrive at the Bramhalls negotiation having already made their first mistakes somewhere that doesn't count.
What began as a single funded pilot in one Master's module has since spread well beyond where Pickles first introduced it, and entirely without her driving that expansion herself. LJMU's Employability Team now uses the same approach for interview simulation training, and a separate senior lecturer has independently adopted it into the undergraduate HR programme. An idea that started with one internal funding application now operates across multiple layers of the curriculum, from undergraduate study through to postgraduate and employability-focused provision.
For a business school programme lead weighing up whether this could work in their own teaching, a few things from LJMU's experience are worth building in from the outset, rather than retrofitting later.
LJMU's Employee Relations module didn't reach four straight years of 100% student satisfaction and a pass rate climbing from 82% to 100% through a minor curriculum tweak. It got there because one educator, who had lived the job before she taught it, refused to accept that theory alone was adequate preparation for a genuinely difficult conversation.
The educators building this practice into their teaching right now, formally embedded in a validated curriculum or not, are the ones whose graduates will walk into their first redundancy meeting having already, safely, got it wrong once before.
Self-rated confidence (1–5 scale) among medical students before and after a single AI roleplay session on difficult conversations.
What is scenario-based practice in HR education?
It's letting students rehearse real workplace conversations, such as redundancy talks or grievance meetings, through roleplay before they face them at work.
Does practising negotiation skills improve academic results?
At LJMU Business School, embedding AI roleplay practice into the Employee Relations module helped raise the pass rate from 82% to 100% and the mean mark from 55% to 84%.
How do you teach conflict resolution without creating real conflict?
Safe, private roleplay lets students make mistakes and reflect before a real, high-stakes conversation, such as a live negotiation with practising employment lawyers.
Why are educators building conflict and negotiation scenarios even when it isn't in the formal curriculum?
Practitioners-turned-educators like Dr. Pickles already know from experience where their graduates fall short, and national workforce data on unresolved workplace conflict backs up why many are building this practice into their teaching ahead of any formal curriculum review.
1. Bodyswaps (2025). Human skills for Human Resources: Liverpool John Moores University Business School case study. https://bodyswaps.co/resources/case-studies/liverpool-john-moores-university-business-school
2. CIPD (2024). Only around a third of employees feel the conflict they experienced at work has been fully resolved. Press release, 17 September 2024. https://www.cipd.org/en/about/press-releases/third-employees-workplace-conflict-not-resolved/
3. World Economic Forum (2025). The Future of Jobs Report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/