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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Serie: Jeb Blount
- Sprache: Englisch
Remote learning has been around since the 18th century. Caleb Phillips began advertising correspondence courses in the Boston Gazette in 1728 allowing people, for the first time, to learn new skills no matter where they lived.
For the past 300 years, virtual training, in its various formats, has been meandering into shore on an inevitable yet slow building tide. And then, just like that, everything changed. A global pandemic. Social distancing. Working from home. In an instant, the tide became a tsunami.
The global pandemic accelerated the broad adoption of virtual instructor led training along with awareness that classroom-based training is often expensive, inefficient, and fails to deliver a fair return on investment. While it is certainly more challenging to re-create the collaborative environment of the physical classroom in a virtual setting, virtual training combines the structure, accountability, and social learning benefits of classroom training with speed, agility, and significant cost savings.
Simply put, virtual training enables organizations to rapidly upskill more people, while generating a far higher return on the training investment. Virtual training is also green. Studies indicate that virtual training consumes nearly 90% less energy and produces 85% fewer CO2 emissions than classroom training.
Still, the biggest challenge with virtual training, and the reason there has been so much resistance to it, is historically the experience has been excruciating. Not the quality of the curriculum or content. Not the talent of the trainer. The learning experience. There are few people who haven’t had the pleasure of sitting through agonizing virtual training sessions. Death by voice over PowerPoint, delivered by a disengaged instructor, has an especially bitter flavor.
It is the way virtual training is delivered that matters most. When the virtual learning experience is emotionally positive:
- Participants are more engaged, embrace new competencies, and knowledge sticks
- Participants are more likely to show up to class and be open to future virtual training
- Trainers enjoy their work and gain fulfillment from making an impact
- Leaders book more virtual training
- Organizations more readily blend and integrate virtual training into learning & development initiatives
This is exactly what this book is about. Virtual Training is the definitive guide to delivering virtual training that engages learners and makes new skills and behavioral changes stick. Jeb Blount, one of the most celebrated trainers and authors of our generation, walks you step-by-step through the seven elements of effective, engaging virtual learning experiences.
- Trainer Mindset & Emotional Discipline
- Production & Technology
- Media & Visuals
- Virtual Curriculum & Instructional Design
- Planning & Preparation
- Virtual Communication Skills
- Dynamic & Interactive Training Delivery
As you dive into these powerful insights, and with each new chapter, you’ll gain greater and greater confidence in your ability to effectively deliver training in a virtual classroom. Once you master virtual training delivery and experience the power of remote learning, you may never want to go back to the physical classroom again.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Special Note: Free Virtual Training Resources
PART I: The Virtual Training Tsunami
1 Just Like That, Everything Changed
The Remote Learning Tidal Wave
Notes
2 Look Mom, I Built a Virtual Training Studio
“Our People Won't Accept It!”
Virtual Training Explosion
3 The Case for Virtual Training
What about E-learning?
Enter Virtual Instructor-Led Training
Notes
4 Experience Is Everything
Five Truths About Virtual Training Adoption
5 The Five Elements of a Legendary Virtual Learning Experience
VLX Certification
Let's Get Started
Notes and Reflections
PART II: Mission and Mindset
6 Mission and Mindset for a Legendary Virtual Learning Experience
Mission Drive
Mindset
Learning to See in the Virtual Classroom
Rewire Your Brain
Notes
7 Emotional Discipline
A Deep Sense of Vulnerability
Emotional Self-Control
Obstacle Immunity: Growing a Backbone
Notes
8 Rise Above Your Tech and Video Camera Phobia
Rise Above Video Camera Phobia
Note
9 Good Enough Is Not Good Enough
You Are Onstage and Under a Microscope
No Margin for Error
Sweat the Small Stuff
Notes and Reflections
PART III: Production
10 The Brain on Virtual Training
Step into the Video Frame
Triggering the Negativity Bias
Ramping Up Virtual Training Production to Create Wow! Moments
Notes
11 The Essentials of Highly Effective Virtual Training Production
Audio
Lighting
Cameras and Lenses
Internet Connection
Video Conferencing Platform
Note
12 Virtual Training Backdrop
Elements of an Effective Virtual Training Background
Monitors
Smart Boards
13 Live Switching
Think Like a Television Producer
Show Your Face
Four Ways to Switch
Reflection
PART IV: Virtual Communication Skills
14 Be Video Ready
Grooming
Wardrobe
Accessories
Enclothed Cognition
Notes
15 Video Framing
Six Frames That Cause Negative Perceptions of You
Proper Framing
16 Body Language
Decoding and Encoding Nonverbal Communication
The Three Elements of Body Language
Notes
17 Eye Contact
The Eye-Contact Paradox
Reflection
Notes
PART V: Design and Delivery
18 Essentials of VILT Course Design
Converting Existing Training to Virtual
Building Virtual Training from Scratch
Notes
19 Media and Visuals
Reduce Visual Noise
Presentation Slide Deck Layout
Choosing Images
Text and Fonts
Colors and Slide Backgrounds
Variation
Notes
20 VILT Delivery Preparation
The Virtual Classroom Is Unforgiving
Lesson Plan Power
Winging It Is Stupid
Preparation Is the Mother of Confidence and Credibility
Notes
21 Set the Rules
Rule One: Virtual Training Is Still Training
22 Controlling the Virtual Classroom
Participant Distractions
Disruptive Learners and Challenging Communication Styles
Attention Control and Being Present
Notes
23 VILT Communication Plan
Leverage Multiple Communication Channels
Communicating Virtual Classroom Access
Pre-course Assignments and Creating Buzz
Inter-Class Communication
Post-Class Communication
Leveraging Video Messaging Along the Learning Journey
Shooting Video Messages Is Wickedly Easy
Notes
24 The Fine Art of Engagement
Win Learners Over
Interactivity
Pacing
Bring Content to Life
The Curriculum Is Your Canvas
Reflection
Notes
Prologue
Ready Learner One
Lift the Chains of Limitations
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Training, Workshops, and Speaking
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 Trainer Home Studio Backdrop
Figure 12.2 Sound Studio Backdrop
Figure 12.3 Textured Backdrop
Figure 12.4 Smartboard
Chapter 13
Figure 13.1 ATEM Mini Switcher
Figure 13.2 Connections to ATEM Mini
Figure 13.3 Professional Production
Chapter 15
Figure 15.1 Poor Video Frames
Figure 15.2 Proper Framing
Chapter 17
Figure 17.1 Sightline Camera Monitor Setup.
Chapter 19
Figure 19.1 Slide Examples
Chapter 21
Figure 21.1 Screen shot of countdown video.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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VIRTUAL TRAINING
THE ART OF CONDUCTING POWERFUL VIRTUAL TRAINING THAT ENGAGES LEARNERS AND MAKES KNOWLEDGE STICK
JEB BLOUNT
Copyright © 2021 by Jeb Blount. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.
Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available:ISBN 9781119755838 (Hardcover)ISBN 9781119755814 (ePDF)ISBN 9781119755845 (ePub)
COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHYCOVER ART: © RAINBOW NIMA/SHUTTERSTOCK
Foreword
I'm the first to admit that I thought that in-person training was the only real way to teach people. I never imagined that I'd be delivering hundreds of hours of virtual training to audiences around the world from my virtual training studio on my farm in New Jersey.
But, as Jeb will share with you, our organization was forced to pivot fast in the spring of 2020 as the global pandemic raced around the globe. Our survival rested on my training team quickly embracing and mastering virtual training delivery.
It was not easy. Some of our trainers were in a momentary state of denial. But Jeb challenged us to adopt a new set of beliefs and think differently about virtual training. He pushed us out of our personal comfort zones. He demanded that we elevate our craft and deliver a legendary virtual learning experience.
My training team implemented and executed the exact techniques and tactics laid out in this book, and the results have been nothing short of remarkable. Mastering virtual instructor-led training has allowed us to scale faster, deliver more training, and make a massive and lasting impact on our clients' learners and their organizations.
More importantly, these techniques have made our master trainers better than they ever were before. We now seamlessly blend classroom-based training, virtual instructor-led training, and self-paced e-learning, in ways we never thought possible, to deliver a far higher ROI for our stakeholders.
An important and undeniable truth is that the organizations that continually train and develop their people build an unassailable competitive edge. These organizations are more agile, attract and retain top talent, and win. Within these “learning organizations,” learning and development professionals are under constant pressure to source, develop, and deliver impactful training that is relevant, engaging, and sticks over the long haul. But you already know this, which is why you are reading this book.
It's likely that you picked this book up because you are seeking answers to the same pressing questions being asked by the leaders of forward-thinking organizations:
How can we leverage virtual training to deliver more training, at a lower cost, while making an even bigger impact?
How do we leverage virtual training to accelerate, elevate, and advance learning initiatives?
How do we evolve as a learning and development organization and stay ahead of the curve?
How do we make virtual training more engaging and impactful?
How do I teach my trainers (or myself) to be comfortable delivering a high-quality experience in the virtual classroom?
In Virtual Training, Jeb Blount, who is one of the most celebrated trainers of our generation, answers these questions and delivers a blueprint for leveraging virtual instructor-led training to accelerate the velocity of learning initiatives and make training stick.
He gives you step-by-step instruction for leveraging technology, building virtual training sets, designing, and delivering engaging high-quality virtual training that learners and their leaders will embrace. You will learn the keys to future-proofing both yourself and your organization. Most importantly, you will learn how to elevate your craft and deliver a legendary virtual learning experience. I can tell you from first-hand experience that when you adopt and implement the techniques laid out in this book, you will begin making a far bigger impact than you ever thought possible, now and in the future.
This book matters because now, more than ever, we must think differently about the value of virtual instructor-led training and where it fits into broader learning initiatives. Virtual Training is a rare, transformational book that will reshape the way you and your organization view and deliver virtual instructor-led training forever.
—Keith Lubner,Executive Vice President andHead of Training & Consulting, Sales Gravy
Special Note: Free Virtual Training Resources
Virtual Training covers the fundamentals, which will likely remain constant, but it's impossible to include everything you need. The tools, technology, and trends in virtual training are constantly changing, so I created a place to keep you updated on the techniques that will give you an edge as you grow your virtual training skills.
The companion website to this book will keep you up to date and give you a place to dig into details about our favorite tools that we use at Sales Gravy, recommended apps, and other tips. As a special bonus to thank you for purchasing this book, you get free access to these resources.
Book passages that connect to additional website content are marked with this icon:
You can visit the companion website using this special, exclusive code, which will give you free access. Go to the following website and follow the instructions:
Web address: https://www.salesgravy.com/vt
Access code: VTB2021X
PART IThe Virtual Training Tsunami
The only way you survive is you continuously transform into something else.
—Gini Rometty, Executive Chairman of IBM
1Just Like That, Everything Changed
An instant wave of panic came over me as I grasped the gravity of the situation. The Covid-19 pandemic had made its way around the world.
Two days earlier, I'd delivered a keynote to 6,000 people. I didn't know it then, but it would be the last time I'd walk onto a physical stage or into a physical classroom for almost a year.
Before Covid, my training and consulting company, Sales Gravy, had been on a hyper-growth trajectory. Our master trainers were on the ground delivering training on every continent except Antarctica.
The year before, I'd spent 311 nights in hotel rooms, clocking over 200,000 air miles as I crisscrossed the globe delivering keynotes, workshops, and trainings to a who's who of the most prestigious organizations in the world.
With the economy on fire and our company growing at an ever-increasing pace, my trainers and I were road warriors. Our training calendar was packed, and my sales team was inundated with calls and emails from even more companies that wanted to hire us. I was getting regular inquiries from venture capital and private equity firms that wanted to discuss potential investments. It felt like we were unstoppable.
And then, just like that, everything changed. A global pandemic. Travel bans. Social distancing. Working from home. Panic. In a heartbeat, we were grounded.
Educators, instructors, and trainers were confronting a harsh reality. Classrooms were empty and livelihoods were on the line. It was chaos and we were in an all-hands-on-deck battle to save our company.
I remember sitting down with my company's CFO to figure out how long we could keep paying our trainers if we lost all of our training contracts. My number one focus was saving the business while retaining the talented people on our team that we'd worked so hard to attract and develop.
Meanwhile, customers were ringing our phones off the hook. Most of our scheduled trainings in physical classrooms were being indefinitely postponed. Our account executives were working to calm our panicked clients long enough to move those deliveries to the virtual classroom. As entire companies shifted from working together in office buildings to working from home, the organizations we served were frantically seeking alternatives to classroom learning.
In the midst of this initial shock wave, large companies were laying off members of their learning and development teams. Out-of-work corporate trainers were contacting us in droves. They were looking for advice, a shoulder to cry on, and, mostly, jobs.
The entire education, training, learning, and development industry was being forced to instantly pivot from classroom-based training to virtual training. And most trainers and organizations were woefully unprepared.
History is full of transformational points in which smart, innovative people were pressed to invent technology that could help them meet the moment, but at least for those of us in the training world, the powerful, high-quality technology was right in front of us. All we needed to do was catch up.
The Remote Learning Tidal Wave
In those early months, virtual training felt entirely new. Legions of trainers, disoriented and unsettled, approached virtual training as if they were stumbling into an alien world on some distant planet.
Remote learning, instruction, and training, though, is not new. Correspondence courses have been advertised in newspapers since the early 1700s, when the United States was still a colony. The earliest on record was for a course in shorthand, a style of notetaking, that was placed in the Boston Gazette in 1728.
It took until the 1920s for colleges to start broadcasting courses over the radio, and by the 1950s, some universities offered courses over broadcast television. Thanks to teleconferencing, in 1976, Coastline Community College in California became the first fully virtual institution.
Then, the internet arrived and brought remote learning into a new era. As corporate learning, development, and enablement started investing in new technologies, online courses became mainstream. I took my first virtual instructor-led course in the late 1990s. It leveraged an online content portal and weekly conference calls (audio only) with the instructor.
By the early twenty-first century, video conferencing technology was ubiquitous—and virtual instruction and e-learning technology exploded. Massive investment in online learning by corporate and governmental organizations accelerated innovation even more. Over the past 20 years, there has been a 900 percent market growth rate for online learning.1
But there was a problem: Most of the investment was focused on self-directed, asynchronous e-learning. Those types of courses aren't instructor-led—meaning, students log on whenever they want, consume preassigned content, and do some assignments that may or may not be graded or reviewed by anyone. Students and instructors often don't interact, and there's only a limited student community, if there's any at all.
Despite these drawbacks, venture capitalists and investors have poured money into e-learning companies, and some e-learning platforms were snapped up by bigger organizations. LinkedIn, for example, paid $1.5 billion for Lynda.com.2
In the online learning boom of the past two decades, there was a massive focus on asynchronous e-learning, while synchronous virtual instructor-led training (VILT) was mostly treated as an afterthought. Even with all of the investment and attention focused on e-learning, only 10 percent of synchronous training delivery was virtual.3
Don't get me wrong. Plenty of people and technology entrepreneurs were thinking about it. The problem was that, in learning and development (L&D), virtual training was more likely to be talked about than actually delivered. (It didn't help when the initial excitement about massive open online courses (MOOCs) fizzled with a 94 percent abandonment rate.)4
My company was one of the few that had been delivering VILT programs since 2011. These deliveries almost always supplemented our in-person, classroom-based courses or simple broadcast-style webinars without substantial interaction. It was exceedingly rare that we'd teach an entire course in a purely virtual environment.
The primary reason was demand. Our clients and their learners did not want virtual instruction because they saw no value in virtual training.
My trainers didn't enjoy delivering virtual training, either. It wasn't fun or fulfilling. The virtual environment didn't offer the same emotional high, that juice you get when you walk into a classroom as an instructor. VILT was uncomfortable for them. They believed, as did our clients, that the only viable way to really teach people was face to face.
We were far more likely to get on an airplane and fly 20 hours to Singapore to deliver a two-day classroom-based course to participants who'd also flown in from various places across the globe than to teach those same students virtually. In those pre-Covid days, the virtual instruction we delivered was mostly on-screen PowerPoint slides accompanied with live voice-over. Because of this, we were not particularly proud of our VILTs, so we charged very little for them. That led us and our customers to view virtual training delivery as a low-value option, so we didn't actively pursue the sales of virtual training deliveries.
This was where we found ourselves as we entered the spring of 2020: Asynchronous e-learning was sexy. Synchronous face-to-face training was perceived as the most valuable. And virtual instructor-led training was a low-value afterthought. Then, everything changed.
For 300 years, remote learning had been meandering to shore on a slow-building tide. In 2020, it became a tsunami that washed away the foundational belief that in-person training was the only real way to teach people.
To remain relevant, trainers had to immediately shift the way we were delivering training and engaging learners. Likewise, learners, leaders, and entire organizations had to rethink their negative perceptions of virtual learning. The global coronavirus pandemic moved synchronous virtual instructor-led training into the spotlight and accelerated its broad adoption. VILT finally emerged from the shadows and met its moment.
As March rolled into April, my team at Sales Gravy was catching up fast, scrambling to hold onto our training contracts, retain our customers, and save our company.
The good news is we had two things going for us. First, we had already made significant investments in both technology and developing our competency to deliver high-quality virtual training. Second, our customers, trainers, and learners no longer had a choice. The only way to deliver and attend high-quality, interactive synchronous training was in a virtual classroom.
Notes
1
eLearn2grow, “62 eLearning Stats and Facts That You Need to Know Now,” eLearn2grow, June 16, 2020,
https://www.elearn2grow.com/2020/06/16/elearning-stats/
.
2
Darrell Etherington, “LinkedIn to Buy Online Education Site
Lynda.com
for $1.5 Billion,”
TechCrunch,
April 9, 2015,
https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/09/linkedin-to-buy-online-education-site-lynda-com-for-1-5-billion/
.
3
Cindy Huggett, “Is Your Organization Ready for the Future of Virtual Training?”
Training Industry Magazine
, November/December 2018,
https://trainingindustry.com/magazine/nov-dec-2018/is-your-organization-ready-for-the-future-of-virtual-training/
.
4
William Leonard, “So Why Did MOOCs Fail to Live Up to the Hype?”
University World News,
February 8, 2019,
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20190207110446568
.
2Look Mom, I Built a Virtual Training Studio
In January 2019, I sat down with David Monostori, who leads our creative team, and laid out my plan to build a virtual training studio complex at our corporate headquarters from the ground up.
There were two things driving this plan. First, I was worried about the inevitability of a recession hitting within 18–24 months and that we needed to be prepared. Second, I was very unhappy with the of our virtual training deliveries (see voice-over PowerPoints).
In recessions, travel budgets always get slashed, which is generally devastating to private training companies and corporate learning and development (L&D) departments. However, even in recessions, people need training. In fact, when times are bad, elevating and training talent gives organizations a competitive edge. Back in 2019, my plan had been to prepare to shift to high-quality virtual delivery as a hedge for when the next recession hit.
I also thought we could do better, whether or not there was a recession. Personally, I wasn't proud of our virtual training performance and quality. Our virtual deliveries were often poorly planned and delivered on the fly in airports, hotel rooms, and even cars.
David and I devised a plan to build broadcast-quality sound studios specifically for virtual training delivery. When we presented the idea to the rest of the team, though, it didn't go over well. My CFO was not happy about the massive expense involved in building the studio. The sales and training teams thought we were nuts because, in their minds, no one was going to buy virtual training on a scale that could justify the cost to build studios. To them, I was just another Don Quixote fighting imaginary giants.
We ignored the skepticism and forged forward with construction anyway and built three full-production virtual training studios. A year later, at the beginning of March 2020, the construction crew was still working on the finishing touches and much of the equipment we'd ordered wasn't even out of the boxes. Then, the pandemic stuck. We worked around the clock for several weeks to get the studios ready for action.
This included teaching our trainers to deliver virtual training in a whole new way. Gone forever were the days of voice-over PowerPoint slides. Our trainers stepped out from behind the slides and in front of the camera and we became laser-focused on delivering a legendary virtual training experience. Our new studios gave us the ability to re-create the feel of being in the classroom and interacting with the instructor.
“Our People Won't Accept It!”
With the studios up and running, we were able to beg, plead, and convince our customers to give virtual training a chance. We sent them pictures of our sets, did virtual tours of our studios, and put on our tap-dancing shoes.
Many of our clients pushed back against moving their classes to a virtual classroom. The head of leaning and development (L&D) for a large Fortune 500 client argued emphatically, “Our people won't accept it!” Like so many of our customers, he worried that it would be a low-quality disaster. Such was his experience. Finally, though, we convinced him to give it a try. He agreed, but he forced us to conduct a twice-per-week planning meeting over the three weeks prior to the training.
On that first run, we had people from all over the world in the classroom. Traditionally, these folks would have traveled to the company's headquarters for the training, spending hours on airplanes, days in transit, and thousands of dollars to attend the two-day course that we taught for his company.
Following the virtual experience, we surveyed the participants. They gave the experience a 4.9 on a scale of 5.0. The in-person, classroom experience that we had been delivering for the past three years averaged a 4.7 across all of the previous participant surveys.
This was not what the head of L&D was expecting because, up until that point, his experience with virtual training had been dreadful, and his learners had agreed with that assessment.
One participant commented, “I'll admit, I didn't want to attend this training. But, I'm glad I did. I never thought a virtual training could hold my attention. The training was outstanding.” (Most other comments from that session followed this same pattern.)
Our client was convinced—so much so that he hired us to teach his internal trainers to deliver virtual training like ours. It was our very first Virtual Learning Experience® Train the Trainer delivery. Today, his organization is delivering more than half of its courses from a virtual classroom, and the course we teach has remained virtual.
That wasn't a one-off experience, either. In April 2020, we were confronted by a CEO of a mid-sized business-services company that had scheduled a three day in-classroom training with us. He demanded a refund for the course because he didn't want it delivered virtually, which, at that time was our only choice. He hit us with a stream of expletives, among them, “I'm not f@cking doing that [virtual training] to my people.”
We managed to convince him to give the virtual training delivery a try with a guarantee that if he and his people didn't like it, we would give him a full refund. As he entered the virtual classroom, along with his skeptical learners, I'll never forget the look on his face as he mouthed wow silently. He did not ask for his money back, and we are still delivering virtual training for his company.
Virtual Training Explosion
A couple of weeks later, we were delivering virtual training to a group of sales professionals in India for one of our most valued clients. Because of our history with this company, it hadn't been too difficult to convince them to shift the scheduled physical deliveries to virtual.
Still, there were top executives observing the training because there was so much skepticism (this was true for almost all of our early VILT deliveries). About 10 minutes into the training, we overheard the senior vice president on an unmuted mic calling the CEO and telling him, “Log in now … You've never seen anything like this!”
The company subsequently engaged us to deliver virtual trainings to participants in countries all across the globe. We began following the sun from Asia to Europe to North America, teaching people from around the world, from our virtual training studios in Georgia.
Suddenly, at least in the eyes of my team, I went from a man tilting at windmills to a genius. My trainers bought in and my salespeople, for the first time, felt confident selling virtual training. Our clients and their learners loved the experience we were delivering. Once they experienced our methodology, they were willing to pay a premium for high-quality virtual instructor-led training.
What we hadn't anticipated, though, was that the savings on travel costs and flexibility that VILTs afforded would cause them to double, triple, and even quadruple the trainings they were ordering. In the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, our business exploded.
3The Case for Virtual Training
Before I make the case for virtual training, let's acknowledge that dynamic in-classroom training can be a powerful learning experience. This is especially true when it includes collaborative breakout sessions and experiential learning elements delivered by a talented, passionate instructor. For many participants, perhaps, it provides the very best overall experience on an emotional level. Few rational people would argue otherwise.
The problem is that classroom-based, instructor-led training is both expensive and inefficient. First, there is the investment in the actual training:
The trainer
Content licensing (when using a third-party curriculum)
Then there are the expenses for:
Travel and meals
Lost productivity while participants are out of the field and in the classroom
The training space (whether it is a dedicated area in your building, or rented space at a hotel or conference center)
Printed materials (e.g., name tags, tent cards, handouts, and workbooks)
Liability insurance
Indirect environmental costs (e.g., energy consumption, carbon emissions)
More often than not, the investment in the trainer (and licensing, if applicable) is dwarfed by the expenses that aren't directly related to the actual training. We surveyed our clients and found that between 50 and 80 percent of classroom-based, instructor-led training investment is spent on nontraining expenses like travel. With so much money wasted on incidental expenses, in-person training programs make it challenging to get a return on the investment.
These high costs also mean that learning and development (L&D) organizations cannot afford to experiment or make mistakes with physical classroom training. This stifles innovation, agility, and speed when organizations need to change. These incidental costs also put severe limits on the amount of ongoing training that can be delivered by an organization.
The truth is, there will always be a need for in-person classroom instruction for adults. There are some forms of training—for example, how to repair a diesel engine or perform a medical procedure—that require a hands-on learning experience. Yet, even this type of training may be blended and enhanced with e-learning, virtual training, and virtual and augmented reality components to accelerate skill development and mastery.
What about E-learning?
Of course, you can eliminate most of these costs and rapidly deploy training with asynchronous, self-directed e-learning. Just send learners to your learning management system (LMS) and have them advance through a series of videos, online modules, and assessments.
Most large organizations have made significant investments in LMSs and building out e-learning catalogs. Self-directed e-learning is the hottest segment in L&D, and it's projected to grow to $325 billion globally in the near term.1
With e-learning, people may consume training content and learn on their own terms anywhere, anytime, on any device. It is a cheap and easy way to train lots of people fast, with little friction. But driving real learning through self-paced e-learning courses has some serious drawbacks, as anyone who's tried it will tell you. The truth is:
When left on their own, most people abandon the training. Studies indicate that more than 90 percent of online learners never complete their courses.
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E-learning on its own doesn't work well for teaching complex skill sets and competencies.
People learn better when they collaborate with other people.
Don't get me wrong, there are certain subjects such as compliance and technical how-to instruction in which e-learning excels. Even so, because e-learning leads to a “set it and forget it” mentality, leaders and L&D professionals tend to take a hands-off approach to directing and monitoring e-learning activities. This dilutes the potential return that e-learning offers because either learners abandon the coursework or just go through the motions to check off the requirements so that they look good on reports.
I've observed, on many occasions, competent people fail an end-of-course assessment that should be so easy that a cat could pass it. This happens because they click through the content on the LMS like zombies without paying attention, just to check the boxes.
Most humans need more than a set of videos to truly learn and adopt new skills and behaviors. Albert Bandura's social learning theory posits that people learn best in groups where they have the opportunity to observe, emulate, and practice new skills together.3
People wish to communicate, collaborate, and at times commiserate as they stretch through the process of shifting their mindset and acquiring new skills. Humans long for social engagement and the shared community and experience of a classroom cohort.
Simply put, e-learning is missing that social component, so by itself it is not an effective way to develop competency and drive behavior change.
This is exactly why synchronous classroom-based and virtual instructor-led training is, and will continue to be, an important cornerstone of learning and development initiatives.
Enter Virtual Instructor-Led Training
Virtual instructor-led training (VILT) blends the social learning benefits of classroom-based training with the speed, agility, and cost-effectiveness of e-learning—without the wasted expenses associated with the physical classroom.
