With today’s new normal having a significant impact on learning and development programs and training operations alike, organizations worldwide are wondering how to get more impact from their Instructor-Led Training and virtual Instructor-Led Training programs. And, although the growing use of digital media and content, and the new changes in learning activities point to a rise in eLearning, it’s clear that ILT and vILT are here to stay.
How to Get More Impact from Instructor-Led and Virtual Instructor-Led Training
Some old and some new, organizations are facing challenges including the barriers that often affect their training operations such as resource use, costs, time for delivery, and more. But, when it comes to getting more impact from their ILT and vILT programs, the most important questions still remain: How do we impact our learners in the most effective and engaging way? How fast can I reach my audience? And, how can I create stronger learner experiences?
Find out from David Wilson, CEO of Fosway Group, what his take is on the current state of Instructor-Led Training and virtual Instructor-Led Training, and how learning leaders can make the biggest impact for their organizations. You’ll learn:
- How to overcome the barriers facing organizations wanting to get more impact from their ILT / vILT
- How organizations can better manage their ILT / vILT with technology to achieve their goals
Prefer to read? Here’s what David said about ILT and vILT:
1. What are the challenges facing organizations that want to get more impact from their instructor-led training (ILT) and virtual instructor-led training (vILT)?
There are a lot of challenges organizations face around it. That was true, in absolute terms all the time, but in the modern world, the pressures around it have become more extreme. COVID-19 has dynamically changed the dynamics for a lot of organizations, and we’ll talk about that more later.
At the end of the day, it comes down to basic things: How fast can I reach my audience? How can I impact my audience? How do I create stronger experiences?
It then comes down to fairly obvious barriers: resources, costs, travel, time for delivery… All of these create huge challenges for organizations in order to optimize how they can deliver to their audience. The biggest is, how do I reach my audience fast enough. And, how can I be agile enough in terms of engaging with them.
Ultimately budget is always a challenge as well. How do I optimize how I spend money and where I spend money? What kind of value or impact do I get from that? That’s probably the most hidden one, I think. Learning organizations are guilty of ignoring focusing on what outcomes they get from these activities. And focusing all on input challenges. But that’s critical as well. The more effectively you can show that the easier it is then to justify everything else you want to do.
The final thing is ultimately, especially if it’s face-to-face delivery, then people have to be there physically to do that. In the current climate that is even more difficult to do. But even before recent challenges, the reality of everyone traveling has always been there and has been significant. It’s one of the reasons we’ve also seen huge growth in VILT activities as well.
2. How can organizations better manage Instructor-Led Training and virtual Instructor-Led Training to achieve their goals?
First thing is recognizing what the challenges really are and then understanding how to build strategies and manage things towards it. Also working out where you really spend money. If you’re trying to really better manage and optimize the way that you manage any learning, you have to understand the core dynamics of it. Where you spend money, what drives activity in the background, and you need to look at how you actively engage in managing those activities. In the past, organizations tended to focus maybe sometimes on the headlines around things and ignore the basics.
The biggest issue for most organizations is how they do that in scale. It’s fine to be able to manage, if you’re only doing a few things, managing it is not very complex. But what we see particularly with large enterprise organizations or global companies, is being able to manage the resources that are tied into these learning activities (whether it’s face-to-face or not) is actually a really significant challenge for them. And, they need to be able to track and have strategies for how they optimize the different resources around it, whether that’s physical training facilities, instructor resources. Obviously, things like instructor resources, that’s a relevant issue regardless if whether it’s face-to-face or virtual delivery. You can only allocate them in certain ways.
Also, I would argue that organizations have become blended and digital as part of the mix. The more challenges that has created in terms of how you manage instructor optimization and so on. It’s really important to understand the basic units of what’s going on and you can actually build and track those activities within it. There are some pretty disproportionate gains to get from that. From an aggregate spend point of view, ILT is still often 50-70% of an organization’s overall training budget. Then, if you even just do that 10% better, it has massive disproportionate gains.
So, it’s really critical part of the mix. It won’t go away; it just becomes more complicated because the number of elements you’re trying to manage becomes more complex. And, again coming back to the point of being more agile, we need to be able to understand that on a more granular level, we need to be able to make decisions on how we allocate resources faster. And we need to be able to make decisions that have a better impact on what we’re trying to deliver as an organization. All of those are critical factors in determining how we manage learning in totality and looking at ILT elements of it.
3. In regards to these core challenges, how can a Training Management System like Training Orchestra, support organizations’ ILT and vILT programs?
It starts with understanding the core units of what you’re doing and being able to track those. And then being able to make sensible decisions around them. In order to do that you have to be able to analyze the way you’re allocating resources, the way your allocating budget. And also looking at basic things like schedules and optimization of schedules, and so on. There is potentially a significant value that can be had in optimizing those things. If it’s a big chunk of your budget, that has a disproportionate impact in terms of what it either frees up or enables you to allocate into other channels and so on. A lot of this is around bringing proper management structures and also understanding how you can analyze that data in an intelligent way. Plus, support tools within the systems you’re using that enable to do that automatically. That’s a critical factor as well.
The specifics of how you do that are sometimes challenging, especially in large organizations because learning is often a decentralized activity. Therefore the visibility of the data associated with that is not necessarily managed centrally. Another significant challenge for organizations is how do they manage these things on a decentralized basis as well. The answer is to not always just to try to put it all in one central pot and assume that can then be managed effectively with full outcomes. That’s never likely to work, or maybe temporarily if it does. Having proper tools to manage these things are really, really important.
What’s Next?
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For over 18 years, we’ve been helping 600+ organizations worldwide manage their instructor-led training and virtual instructor-led training operations and over $6B in training budgets. Training Orchestra can help you optimize face-to-face and virtual training operations: session scheduling, resource management, instructor calendars, vILT, cost tracking and reporting. As a complement to your existing learning technologies, Training Orchestra can replace all XLS spreadsheets and manual tasks, so you can manage training as a business.
Interested in how you can improve ILT efficiency? Contact us to learn more!
