Virtual Training. Jeb Blount
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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.
3 The 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.2
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