Online and self-paced training offers flexibility and accessibility, allowing learners to study at their own pace and access materials from anywhere.
These asynchronous learning methods are popular among training providers and L&D teams for their cost-effectiveness and scalable delivery, making them highly attractive for knowledge-based learning.
However, even the best online learning technology has its limitations.
Despite the L&D community’s endless debate on whether online or in-person training is “better”, we set the record straight that even in a digital learning world with AI-capability, there’s still a very much needed place for instructor-led training (ILT).
1. Your skills training isn’t improving ROI
New skills development is paramount for:
- Organizational success
- Professional success
- Industry success
Recent studies found that nearly 60% of CEOs found upskilling programs to be a key factor in positively affecting company culture and business growth.
For skills-based training programs, online and other eLearning methods may cover the breadth, but they certainly don’t cover the depth that training managers and organizations are looking for.
This is especially true when your overarching training objectives are designed towards improving a company’s specific line of business or developing leaders within an organization.
When it comes to increasing training ROI, your online upskilling and reskilling programs may be a concern if:
- Skills learned via online methods show poor comprehension while at work
- Learners have trouble translating key skills when it counts most
- Employees feel uneasy or unsure of the new skills they learned, despite online scores
While online training lessons can improve knowledge retention, application of new skills often lags due to the lack of in-person support and immediate feedback. Hard skills like technical troubleshooting, complex service delivery, and executive leadership are especially prone to this “transfer gap” when training on new skill sets.
Instructor-led training provides opportunities for hands-on practice, modeling experienced trainers, and immediate correction, which are essential for deep skill acquisition.
From the training seminars to the modern corporate learning academy, ILT is key to ensuring that taught skills go from concept to comprehension.
2. Learner engagement and application are declining
When completion rates have a downward trend and employees report waning motivation, it signals a failing training approach.
43% of learners recently found most online training to be ineffective. Industry research notes that online corporate training can have completion rates below 50%, especially for skills-based content.
Compare that with the fact that in the same study, 92% of learners felt more engaged with formal and informal on-the-job workplace training.
Self-paced learning frequently suffers from low engagement, procrastination, and eventual abandonment.
Skills programs that are instructor-led offer a much different alternative than their online training counterparts, including:
- Social interaction between instructors and trainees
- Opportunities for discussion and guided demonstration
- Accountability from live facilitators in guiding successful lesson plans
- Limit distractions during hands-on guidance
It’s no surprise, given these benefits, that among corporate learners, 68% prefer to learn during work hours or on the job.
Besides, who wouldn’t want to get away from the work computer for even a short while?
3. Employees need more constructive feedback and coaching
Despite the training metrics used to measure learning delivery effectiveness, learners are much more than a score.
The score provided by your online training platform, be it through an eLearning lesson or a gamification method, only tells so much both to you as the training manager and your learner.
The 100% on the online quiz your LMS provided can be a sign of learner success, but to the learner behind the computer screen seeking to put the knowledge into application, they may seem completely lost despite clicking all the right answers.
This is where constructive feedback and guided facilitation become key to nurturing the skills that learners need.
Online modules tend to rely purely on quizzes and automated grading, leading to uncertainty, missed learning opportunities, and perhaps even inflated training metrics.
Most online corporate learning programs noted in an MIT study lacked connectivity to work tasks and contextual guidance.
By contrast, immediate and personalized feedback during ILT sessions is crucial for correcting errors, mastering new tasks, solidifying key training concepts, and building confidence.
In return, learners can make your ILT sessions even better by providing their own training feedback and improvement recommendations.
4. Soft & hard skills have become too complex for online training
The future may be AI-driven, but every company wins by a combination of hard and soft skills.
According to the MIT Sloan School of Management, facilitator-guided soft skills training produced a 250% training return on investment in just eight months.
Every industry has its new set of complex topics that are hard to grasp.
Whether the topic is a hard technical skill like systems integration and machinery or a soft skills topic like negotiation or crisis management, it’s far-fetched to rely on online training for complete mastery.
Studies highlight the need for multiple explanations, classroom discussion, and adaptive teaching to help learners understand difficult material.
ILT allows trainers to clarify complex concepts and quickly address confusion that would otherwise take multiple sessions if using eLearning.
5. Your change management strategy relies on relationship-building
If your objective is to redefine your company culture and develop cohesiveness with your team across all levels, online training may limit your successes.
Change management as an organizational strategy is easier said than done.
While most training departments think that corporate learning portals will help usher in change at scale, learners are faced with frustration.
McKinsey’s 2025 report on the Future Development of Work translated the need for human connectivity even more as we augment our online training world with AI capabilities.
Key figures the McKinsey team discovered included:
- 83% of leaders believe leadership is key to the skills-based transition
- 28% of employees felt the company culture and strategy were poorly communicated
- Two-thirds of CEOs globally are considering soft skills training for all employees
The findings inform us that now more than ever, instructor-led training will play a pivotal role in change management strategies and corporate learning overall.
Proper change management must rely on empathetic, guided, and face-to-face experiences that can develop confidence across team members at all levels.
If the need to provide ILT is at a larger scale across time zones, training managers can look into providing virtual instructor-led training sessions to provide that one-on-one guidance corporate learners have been asking for.
How Leading Enterprise Scale ILT Successfully
Even in an AI-driven learning world, enterprise leaders continue to invest in instructor-led training.
See how Dell Technologies and Wells Fargo deliver large-scale ILT programs efficiently with the help of a training management system (TMS) – and what best practices they shared in a Brandon Hall Group webinar.
6. Compliance and safety training are overlooked or losing impact
With industry and government standards, it should be no exception to have compliance and safety training delivered at the highest caliber.
When delivered via eLearning methods, however, compliance and safety courses may just be another lesson plan that learners need to get through: Click, click, done.
LinkedIn reports that 90% of online learning fails to meet learning objectives, with 93% of learners forgetting the same information within a week.
Is your L&D team really about to take that risk with safety training?
For training managers working with high-risk industries like pharmaceuticals, biomedical, and manufacturing, this is no exception.
For L&D professionals, compliance & safety aren’t just about completing training but also fully understanding the concepts of such training since human lives and well-being are at the core of the lesson.
A study by Solomon, Mozersky, et al (2024) found that compliance training was dubious at best when done online, as there was no true way to measure the efficacy and truthfulness of learning.
With an ILT-based model for compliance and safety, training programs allow facilitators to ensure accountability, directly observe adherence to standards, and correct behaviors on the spot, especially for safety-critical procedures.
7. Learners show signs of frustration, fatigue, or procrastination
From the LXP to LMS, designers are crafting an online learning experience that engages learners to interact with the software at first and absorb the training content second.
The problem with the modern corporate training model is that because instructional design is purely eLearning-focused, learning effectiveness is confined to the features of the online software.
What’s even more ironic is this strategy completely ignores the needs of the primary user of the platform: the learner.
Common signs that training managers and L&D directors should be aware of with their learners’ experiences include:
- Frustration in navigating the online training portal
- Understanding in detail the key concepts of the online training session
- Missed or late training session completion rates
- Inverse relationships between high online training completion and low comprehension of lessons learned
A study on interactive courses by Ginda et al (2019) highlighted that while online course material was only a small part of delivering an effective learning experience, the presence of an instructor helped facilitate faster completion times and greater comprehension by the end of the course.
The biggest factor in determining whether or not frustration, fatigue, or procrastination occurred among learners was the presence of an instructor leading the lessons.
Why?
Whether in a blended learning or virtual instructor-led setting, qualified and engaging facilitators can make or break how well training goes, and therefore how well lessons get translated to applicable workplace skills.
8. Learning objectives focus only on knowledge, not skills
With decreased learning comprehension and the cost of training per employee can be upwards of $2,000 per employee, according to the Association of Talent Development.
With that steep price, it may not come as a surprise that your upper management may scrutinize your online training approach.
As training managers, we must focus on skills-based training as opposed to knowledge-based training to achieve the key training objectives.
Here are two examples:
- Knowledge-based training: “Memorize and familiarize the qualities of an effective leader.”
- Skills-based training: “A new product is in the development phase. Demonstrate how an effective leader develops trust from stakeholders and team members on the new go-to-market strategy.“
Corporate learning requires much more than the memorization that eLearning emphasizes.
Only when learners can effectively apply the skills companies need to succeed does corporate learning prove to be effective
Instructor-led training excels at both skills-based training, as it allows trainers to use holistic observation, role-play evaluation, and practical demonstrations to assess progress, which university research identifies as crucial for validating skills.
Online platforms excel with routine knowledge checks but often overlook qualitative improvements in confidence, communication, or critical thinking.
When test results don’t capture real skills, more direct assessment methods are required.
9. Leadership and managerial training is underperforming
With a projected valuation of $80 billion by 2033, the corporate leadership training market is projected to grow exponentially
Key reasons for investing in leadership and other soft skill training for the future included:
- Improving structure and flexibility within departments and external stakeholders
- Creating a collaborative work culture that relies on communication and respect
- Developing camaraderie and teamwork
Whether it’s the C-level or middle management, developing the next cohort of directors will take a whole lot more than online modules.
Instructor-led training remains the key delivery model when it comes to leadership and managerial training, as it focuses on key skills leaders will need to make a company successful, including:
- Communication and facilitation strategies
- Empathy and logic development
- Financial analysis and reporting
Much like an MBA program, ILT sessions provide a space for maturing leaders to express and develop the acumen needed to win.
10. Strategic learning initiatives are missing their targets
According to a Shortlister study, 83% of companies globally use an LMS to achieve strategic learning due to:
- Convenience in providing eLearning through online models
- Asynchronous completion of lessons by learners
- Scalability for large learning audiences
However, among companies that have centered their initiatives around LMS use, only 41% have achieved their core learning initiatives entirely.
ILT solves this by emphasizing the quality of training delivered compared to eLearning’s quantity of it.
Instructor-led training carries a multitude of benefits and advantages that corporate training departments simply cannot ignore.
While it may seem offsetting to exchange the “efficiency” of an LMS platform for traditional in-person training, ILT investment develops successful learning initiatives that have the chance to yield a net positive ROI.
How to Manage Instructor-led Training in the AI era of L&D
Despite our latest advancements in learning technologies, ILT and vILT will play a more pivotal role in enterprise training programs across the globe.
Ironically, the advancement of these new technologies will foster an increased need for human-to-human experiences for learning rather than human-to-AI.
To make ILT work at scale, training departments and L&D providers need a training management system to manage the scheduling and coordination of both in-person and virtual training experiences.
An integral part of modern training operations, the implementation of a TMS platform is key to ensuring your ILT-based strategy can fill skills gaps, achieve organizational objectives, and propel your company to the next level.
Learn More: Top 25 Training Management System Features for ILT Success
Orchestrate Instructor-Led Training at Scale
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