What Is Virtual Training and When Should Your Organization Use It

As more of the professional world moves to a digital space, the increased need to weave in accessible, flexible, virtual training has also increased. While online training may seem necessary only for remote workers, the reality is that virtual training benefits your entire workplace. In this article, we’ll explore the answers to important questions, like “What is virtual training?” “What is virtual instructor-led training?” “What is a virtual training session and how does it differ from in-person?”

Online training, whether in a virtual classroom or leveraging other employee engagement tools, has a number of benefits for any organization. Additionally, there are times when a blend of in-person and virtual training may make sense. Let’s start from the beginning.

What is virtual training?

Utilizing a virtual training platform or other virtual training technology, this approach to learning and development takes the process of upskilling/reskilling employees—or even onboarding—and brings it into a digital, controllable, and scalable environment. Courses can leverage the power of videos, polls, breakout rooms, and more to diversify the process of virtual training for employees.

Virtual training benefits for your organization

There are virtual training benefits that exist for companies and government agencies. Some of these benefits are immediately clear—the ability to reach a distributed, remote workforce—however, there are many that organizations don’t always consider.

Why use virtual training platforms

VIRTUAL TRAINING CAN BE AVAILABLE ANYWHERE

A positive boost that organizations have experienced since tapping into remote working opportunities is the ability to hire the best individual, regardless of their location, to fill a given role. While this increases the capabilities of the organization, it also places new hires all across the country—even the world. In order to properly onboard these highly skilled employees, organizations must either spend a lot of money to bring new hires to a physical location or leverage the functionality of virtual training platforms, which not only make onboarding possible from different geographic locations, but also can use certain asynchronous modules to keep new team members progressing forward regardless of time zone, as well.

COST-SAVING MEASURES

Whether your organization has just hired new talent on the other side of the country or you have a new management-qualified cohort that needs to undergo upskilling before promotion, getting all these employees on the same page in the same room can be incredibly expensive—especially if you’re doing this multiple times a quarter for different groups. Virtual training—and onboarding—can help to curb those costs considerably by removing travel expenses while still providing accurate, engaging learning and development.

CONSISTENT CONTENT

In addition to being a cheaper option to an ever-expanding travel budget, online job training programs deliver the same experience for all who take part—whether on different days, in different countries, or for different teams. Regardless of the virtual training activities you may choose to leverage, a uniform, already approved version is what’s being presented to your employees, ensuring no detail is accidentally skipped or forgotten.

Related: The Benefits of Virtual Training for New Employees

When to supplement in-person training with virtual training

With the rise of high-quality virtual training platforms, onboarding, reskilling, and upskilling no longer are divided into either synchronous or asynchronous learning and development opportunities. As such, the need to provide solely in-person or entirely virtual training has also been reduced for many organizations. Now, there are times when in-person learning can actually be supplemented by virtual training technology. Whether your organization is undergoing virtual HR training, reskilling a group of programmers, or onboarding a new support team, there are numerous ways a virtual training platform should wisely be added into the mix. An excellent example is properly tracking engagement.

Why virtual training tools can improve your in-person trainings

IMPACTFUL INSIGHTS IN REAL-TIME

While in-person onboarding or training may provide cues of employee engagement, the takeaways after the course remain largely anecdotal. With a virtual training platform, though, employee engagement can be accurately and uniformly measured. Real-time speak time tracking, off-page distraction notifications, and other features can provide next-level insights to your organization for understanding the effectiveness of the modules. Plus, because it exists as real data, these trends can be investigated over time, broken out by different cohorts, and more.

Amy Drozd, Leadership Development Program Manager at Schoox, a Class customer, felt this very issue, explaining, “We really wanted to find a tool that could help us see if our learners were engaged.” If your organization wants reliable analytics that can be explored to discover connections and correlations related to training modules, supplementing on-site learning with online training programs could be highly fruitful.

CONNECTION AND SCALABILITY

Similarly, for organizations that already utilize in-person training, the infinite scalability of virtual training platforms through templates can not only shorten the amount of time and resources necessary to get new cohorts up-and-running, but, as noted above, the consistency of the output—one uniform experience—can actually help foster connections during those in-person moments.

If each new employee onboarded, or every individual who goes through management upskilling, has experienced the same module, they can speak with one another about what they’ve learned, where they could use additional insights, or even communicate back to the organizations which specific courses helped prepare them most.

Virtual training is communal, dynamic, and accessible

As Abby Stemper notes in her Forbes article discussing successful virtual upskilling strategies, “If you want the learning to ‘stick,’ create a virtual training experience that is communal, dynamic, and accessible for all.” Leveraging the power of a robust virtual training platform can help empower your organization to provide that communal, dynamic, accessible experience and the long-reaching positive impact built-in.

Are you looking for virtual training ideas for employees? Or perhaps you’re looking to deliver the most engaging and impactful virtual training process your employees have ever experienced? Have a chat with our team, and let’s make it a reality!