Virtual Training. Jeb Blount
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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 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 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 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 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.
2 Look 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