Learning Analyst Interview: How Can Organizations Better Manage Instructor-Led Training to Achieve Their Goals?

ANALYST INTERVIEW ON ILT/vILT MANAGEMENT:
How can organizations better manage Instructor-Led Training (ILT/vILT) to achieve their goals?   

Despite the recent changes in learning over the past 20 years, one question among organizations remains the same: How can we maximize the ability to impact learners in the most effective way? And, what technology, beyond the LMS, can help support your classroom and virtual classroom training programs?

Find out from David Wilson, CEO of Fosway Group, how a Training Management System (TMS) like Training Orchestra can support your vILT / ILT management to achieve your goals… and more! 

Watch David Wilson’s interview on improving
vILT / ILT management:

 

Watch the full interview with David Wilson of Fosway Group and find out where ILT & vILT is headed in the new today:

Here are some of the questions that were discussed:

1. How can organizations better manage 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 mange 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 of 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 have been 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.

2. In regards to these core challenges, how can a Training Management System like Training Orchestra, support organizations’ ILT management?

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 you 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.

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More from Fosway on ILT management and the role of ILT / vILT in today’s learning ecosystem:

• Article: Learning System Suites & Specialists: Why Specialists weren’t rated as leaders in the corporate learning ecosystem… until now By guest author and senior industry analyst, Fiona Leteney of Fosway Group
• Article: Corporate Classroom Post-Pandemic: What is Next for Instructor-Led Training? By guest author and senior industry analyst, Fiona Leteney of Fosway Group
• Resource: Training Orchestra’s Training Management System Earns Strategic Leader Status on the 2021 Fosway 9-Grid™ for Learning Systems

What’s Next?

For over 18 years, Training Orchestra has been helping 600+ organizations worldwide address the complexities to automate and optimize their ILT and vILT training operations: session scheduling, resource management, instructor calendars, vILT, cost tracking and reporting. As a complement to your existing learning technologies, Training Orchestra’s Training Resource Management System can replace all XLS spreadsheets and manual tasks, so you can better manage training as a business.

Interested in how you can improve vILT and ILT management? Contact us to learn more!