Lab Essentials

About this episode

This webinar explores how organizations can bridge skills gaps by shifting from traditional training to collaborative, hands-on learning that leverages internal expertise, AI-driven content, and personalized learning paths. It highlights how integrating tools like LMS/LXP platforms and virtual labs enables more effective skill development, real-time practice, and measurable business impact in modern L&D strategies.

Transcript of the video

Jeremy Davis: Hello, everybody. Welcome to our webinar with 360Learning, “Bridging Skill Gaps with Hands-on Collaborative Learning.”

Jeremy Davis: I’m excited to have everyone join us. This is going to be a fun webinar, and I’m glad so many of you joined right on time. We’ll get started in a minute. Feel free to grab some water and get settled, because you won’t want to miss this conversation. In the meantime, please share in the chat where you’re joining from. We love seeing where everyone is located. I’m in Tel Aviv, Israel right now. We already have people joining from Cincinnati—I’m originally from Cleveland, so there’s already a connection—Dublin, Omaha, South Africa, another Ireland, and Barcelona. This is a great international group.

Jeremy Davis: One of our hosts is here. Guillaume, where are you joining from?

Guillaume Vives: I’m from San Jose, California, but right now I’m in Paris, so I’m on the road.

Jeremy Davis: Nice. Carmit, do you want to chime in as well?

Carmit Pelleg: Tel Aviv.

Jeremy Davis: Tel Aviv. Okay. We’ve got a good group of people here. As more people are joining, I told Guillaume and Carmit that we were going to add a surprise question. For anyone who hasn’t joined our webinars before, we like to ask a fun question to kick things off. The question is: Pineapple on pizza—yes or no? Are you fans?

Guillaume Vives: Absolutely not. Not on my table, not in my house. No way.

Jeremy Davis: Carmit?

Carmit Pelleg: No pineapple. That doesn’t work for me.

Jeremy Davis: Wow. Anybody else in the audience want to weigh in on this long-standing debate?

Jeremy Davis: We have quite a split here. There are definitely some yeses and nos. We generally find a pretty even split. I’m personally not a fan. I like savory and sweet separately. I’ve had pizza with zucchini or broccoli and things like that, but I just can’t do the sweet topping. It looks like a good number of people are weighing in, and it’s a nice split.

Jeremy Davis: A lot of people have already joined, and we’re excited to kick things off. For everybody who’s been waiting, we’ll get started. We’re really happy to have everyone here. Guillaume and Carmit, thank you both for joining us. I think this is going to be a great discussion. It touches on a big part of L&D organizations and L&D professionals: collaborative learning and hands-on learning. I think we’re going to get into a really interesting topic. For our audience, please participate. Ask questions, answer questions, and engage in whatever way feels most comfortable. We want this to be something you can walk away from feeling that you really understood it and used your time well.

Jeremy Davis: We’re going to start by going through the agenda. First, we’ll talk about the macro trends in L&D and how we address these challenges. Then we’ll discuss measuring the impact of collaborative learning, the ultimate tech stack for strategic L&D, and a little about how CloudShare and 360Learning work together.

Jeremy Davis: To introduce our panelists, we have Guillaume, who is a veteran of the Silicon Valley enterprise software industry with a history of creating new categories for startups. A little-known fact is that he worked at CloudShare many years ago, before a name change happened. In his role at 360Learning, he has been driving innovation in the learning and development space. Guillaume, thank you so much for joining us. Of course, Carmit also has many years of experience in the software industry, bringing powerful features to market. As VP of Product at CloudShare, she has been instrumental in helping customer education professionals deliver powerful training experiences with purpose-built features that drive positive training outcomes. Thank you both for being here.

Jeremy Davis: Let’s talk about the big picture and the macro trends we’re seeing in L&D. There are some major challenges in the market. One is technological advancement: new technologies are advancing faster than most people can master them, but they are critical to performance. Everything coming out is meant to help workers become more efficient and achieve their goals, but it is all happening too quickly for organizations to train people effectively. In addition, the current workforce is retiring, so we need to transfer expertise to the younger generation. There is also growing pressure around skill acquisition and impatience. L&D organizations used to do weeks of onsite, hands-on training, but now they do not have time for that. They need to move faster. Finally, across the market, many businesses have realized that growth needs to rely on retention, not just bringing in new logos. So how do we make sure customers have enough product knowledge to stay longer? I’ll start by asking Guillaume: what challenges are you seeing in your day-to-day work?

Guillaume Vives: Before I jump into the changes, I want to give a snapshot of where we’re all coming from. If you go back a couple of decades, if you were in an L&D department and a line-of-business leader said, “I have a new team member who needs to learn SAP,” you had two options. You either called SAP or a partner and had a consultant come onsite, which cost a fortune and required a minimum number of participants, or you sent that employee to an SAP training center in places like London, Detroit, or California for a week of training. You paid travel expenses, and what always struck me was that they never asked what the learner already knew. They just assumed the person knew nothing and started from zero. Then you had SAP 101, 201, 301, and so on. We assumed people needed to start over every time.

Guillaume Vives: That time is gone. The market is asking us to be much more effective. People no longer want training; they want knowledge transfer. They want you to know what their people already know and bring them to the next level. You assess them first and then train them only on what they do not know. You do not need to reformat them. It also has to be very actionable. In those old SAP trainings, the first few days were theoretical and the last couple of days were hands-on labs. You cannot do that anymore. You need hands-on learning from the start and you need to test the skills. So the first trend is moving from traditional training to highly effective knowledge transfer.

Guillaume Vives: The second trend is impatience. If you tell someone an employee will be gone for several days for training, they react as if that is impossible. Now the expectation is a few hours here and there, spread over time. Another challenge we hear from L&D leaders is that they are overwhelmed by the number of training requests. Sales wants onboarding, then they want new product launch training, and every department assumes it is the only one asking. The demand becomes overwhelming, and then the impact is hard to measure. When L&D asks for more headcount, leadership asks, “What is the business impact?” It is very difficult to answer. So we see impatience from the business, a huge volume of requests, and a real challenge in measurement.

Jeremy Davis: Carmit, are you seeing similar things?

Carmit Pelleg: Yes. Building on what Guillaume said about efficiency and the volume of training, what we hear from our customers at CloudShare is that their challenges are evolving in several ways. First, they need to extend the reach of training, whether that means supporting global locations or accommodating large numbers of participants, while resources remain limited. That requires new methods and new technologies. Second, the shift to remote learning introduces an entirely new learning experience and a different kind of collaboration between instructors and learners, which also requires new solutions. Third, self-paced learning is especially challenging when training on complex systems or building complex technical skills.

Carmit Pelleg: We also hear about the difficulty of tracking and monitoring learner progress, evaluating skill acquisition, measuring impact, and in some cases even measuring the ROI of training. Those are the evolving challenges our customers are facing.

Jeremy Davis: Very interesting. I also saw someone mention in the chat that new associates need to learn more content faster and need a growth mindset because industries are moving more quickly. That connects directly to what you both mentioned about keeping up with content and maintaining knowledge as industries evolve.

Guillaume Vives: Absolutely.

Jeremy Davis: We have all these challenges affecting organizations, so the question is: how do you address them? I’ve heard of many different types of learning designed to address these issues, including collaborative learning. Can you first help us define what collaborative learning is and how L&D organizations should be using it?

Guillaume Vives: Absolutely. To define collaborative learning, let’s look at what L&D teams are dealing with. They need a multi-layered solution. First, they need the right content. There is a lot of content out there. If you look at providers like LinkedIn Learning and others, there are thousands of courses available. That content is great for generic topics like Excel or Salesforce basics. If you have a new accountant or someone new in operations, you can buy that content easily. It is well done, bite-sized, and engaging.

Guillaume Vives: What is much more difficult is expert training. Let me give you an example. A company that makes yogurt may not sound very technical, but if you want to hire and train a QA technician on a production line, the knowledge involved is highly specialized and proprietary. If you ask experienced employees how they do it, they will tell you it depends and that it is complicated. So how do you train new employees? You need the expert to create the content. That is where collaborative learning starts.

Guillaume Vives: Collaborative learning begins when you ask the expert to create the course and then engage with learners to improve it. The expert creates content, ideally in just a few hours, and then learners interact with it. They ask questions, point out what is unclear, call out redundancy, or identify contradictions. Through that process, the content gets refined. Learners help the author improve it. That collaboration is especially important when you are dealing with hard skills and expert skills. Collaborative learning is about helping experts author content and then iterating with learners to improve it. It is highly effective, but it is difficult because experts are not always naturally good at teaching others. That is why you need the right tools, techniques, and incentives, such as recognition, gamification, or social features that make contributors feel valued.

Jeremy Davis: That definitely sounds like something L&D organizations should be implementing. So what does that look like in practice? If they decide to implement collaborative learning, what should they actually do?

Guillaume Vives: That is a good question. Let’s step back. A typical L&D team faces requests from multiple lines of business. Manufacturing wants training for new QA technicians. Sales wants onboarding. The first traditional response is to gather all those requests and then find people to do the work. The first thing an L&D professional needs to do is change roles. Instead of being the owner of all the content and carrying the burden alone, they need to become the enabler.

Guillaume Vives: So when a line-of-business leader asks for training, the response becomes, “You have an expert in your organization, and I have a tool designed for someone like that person to create the content.” The first step is content creation. That is why we provide AI-based solutions. If you upload a long set of procedures, the system can generate a course from it. It may not be perfect, but it gives you a strong starting point. It is much better to begin with something mostly complete than with a blank page. These tools also help create content that is more engaging, with images, videos, and even podcasts.

Guillaume Vives: The second step is content distribution. In the past, people thought distribution meant pushing all the content to everyone. That is not what it means anymore. Today it is more of a pull model. A learner should be assessed first so the system can identify what they already know and what they need in order to close the skill gap. Then only the relevant content is delivered. One learner might need only a couple of hours of training, while another might need much more.

Guillaume Vives: The third step is hands-on labs, which is where CloudShare plays a crucial role. If learners cannot access the environment and test the skill, they cannot really prove they have learned it. They need to go through the training, enter the environment, and practice immediately. That closes the loop and verifies that the skill has actually been acquired.

Jeremy Davis: Carmit, can you expand on that? What can CloudShare do, and what are the tools that work well in that context?

Carmit Pelleg: Let me start by explaining what virtual labs are. Guillaume referred to content creation and content delivery being followed by skill testing or hands-on practice. A virtual lab is an online, cloud-based environment that simulates a real-world lab setting. It allows users to interact with hardware, applications, or systems in a controlled environment.

Carmit Pelleg: In CloudShare, you can build a replica of a production environment containing machines, servers, databases, applications, and network configurations. That is where virtual labs become critical: they support the part of learning where the learner needs to practice or demonstrate skills.

Carmit Pelleg: Virtual labs have a big impact on the learning experience. You do not need physical hardware. The environment can be set up quickly and preconfigured with specific scenarios, challenges, or simulations, which makes it ideal for teaching complex technical skills. Learners can access these environments directly through a browser link. They can experiment, try things out, and practice what they just learned. They can also collaborate around that hands-on experience. If they make a mistake, they can reset the environment and try again.

Jeremy Davis: How does that affect collaborative learning specifically? What role does it play in the collaborative space?

Carmit Pelleg: Let me give a couple of use cases first. For example, if a software provider develops a data migration solution, it needs to train users or demonstrate to prospects how to migrate databases with that solution. To do that effectively, it needs a set of realistic databases, which can be created virtually in a lab, so learners can actually practice migrating from one database to another.

Carmit Pelleg: Another common use case is cybersecurity. To demonstrate or practice cybersecurity solutions, providers can simulate attacks and defenses using virtual labs, allowing learners to practice on a realistic replica of a production environment without using the real production system.

Carmit Pelleg: As for how virtual labs support collaborative learning, they address collaboration challenges created by remote and self-paced learning. In addition to simulating environments, virtual labs improve the learning experience by allowing instructors to present content in the context of the lab, provide collaboration tools, and monitor progress in real time. They enable instant feedback for both instructors and learners, mimicking the experience of being in a physical lab or classroom.

Carmit Pelleg: CloudShare virtual labs include real-time collaboration tools such as chat, virtual hand-raising, the ability to call the instructor for help, environment sharing, and instructor takeover. Learners can collaborate with each other and get instructor assistance. We also introduced guided journeys, where instructors can present a sequence of instructions or exercises directly in the context of the hands-on simulation. Instructors can monitor the progress of each learner and the whole class. They can look directly into a learner’s environment to see what that person is doing and gather progress data and insights. We are also adding more advanced capabilities such as automated checks and auto-generated feedback for learners.

Guillaume Vives: That is pretty amazing. You can imagine the power of those tools. It is almost like gaming at home, except it is with SAP, Oracle, and other complex solutions. Congratulations.

Jeremy Davis: It is definitely very powerful. Guillaume, with a tool like this, where should L&D organizations expect the biggest impact when they pair it with collaborative learning?

Guillaume Vives: Let’s talk about that. We described where the industry is coming from, and I would love for people in the audience to add their own experience in the comments. What should organizations expect now that they have these kinds of solutions? First, they gain a much better understanding of the skill levels of their employees. When someone says they need training for a person in sales operations, you are no longer just assuming what that person knows based on the job title. You can actually measure it. You know what skills they have, their level of competency, and what they need to improve. A team leader can see exactly where the team stands and what training is needed. So the first major impact is better visibility into current and future skills.

Guillaume Vives: The second impact is that organizations can distinguish between the content they should buy and the content they need to create. Generic skills like Excel or Salesforce basics can be purchased. Proprietary or highly specialized skills must be developed internally, and now organizations can identify exactly which experts should create that content.

Guillaume Vives: The third impact is the ability to create that content. Now, when you ask an expert for help, you can give them tools that make the process much easier and less painful.

Guillaume Vives: The fourth impact, with what CloudShare can provide, is the ability to close the loop. You identify what is needed, provide the content, create the content, and then do the hands-on lab. In the end, what you get is a much more effective organization. You can actually say, for example, that the average competency level last quarter was at one level and has now improved to another level because of your investment and work. That makes the results concrete and measurable.

Guillaume Vives: It also helps justify budgets. You can show that a certain part of the business has low competency on core skills, that you assessed the gap, and that with the right investments in content acquisition, content creation, and hands-on labs, you can move people from one level of competency to another. That creates a much stronger business conversation when you ask for funding as an L&D leader.

Jeremy Davis: That makes sense, especially when you talk about impact and budget. We often hear at industry events, especially in customer education, the question of how to ask leadership for more budget. How do you convince them to invest more in L&D or customer education? You need to justify the cost.

Guillaume Vives: Exactly. When you can close the loop and say, “I can move the average competency from one level to another, and I have the tools to create the content, test the skills, and verify the transfer,” then it becomes a real business conversation.

Jeremy Davis: Speaking of that, as we think about measuring impact, what does the ultimate tech stack look like? What tools should L&D professionals be using? What roles do LMSs, LXPs, virtual labs, and AI play?

Guillaume Vives: Great question. Let’s talk about the landscape. If you are a smaller organization, you usually start with an LMS, a learning management system. That is the foundation. It hosts content, distributes content, and helps measure impact through dashboards. You can use it for onboarding, upskilling, compliance, and more.

Guillaume Vives: In larger companies, you usually have a legacy HR-connected system like SAP, Workday, or Oracle. These systems are deeply embedded in the company, and you cannot just replace them. What the industry created in response is the LXP, or learning experience platform. An LXP sits on top of those systems and presents content in a more attractive, user-friendly way. It also gives people better tools for creating content. The LXP makes learning much more engaging, while still feeding the results back into systems like SAP or Workday.

Guillaume Vives: The next concept is the academy. An academy is essentially a dedicated learning space for a specific part of the business, such as services, engineering, or sales. It is like a focused intranet for that function, where the relevant content lives. It gives users a more specialized and personalized learning environment instead of mixing accounting content with services content, for example. It is also a good way to increase transparency across the organization.

Guillaume Vives: Finally, there is skills-based learning. This is the most advanced stage. It starts with assessing employees, identifying skill gaps, using AI to match people with the right content, and then testing those skills in hands-on labs. That is the future of the industry. Fewer customers have these fully mature solutions today, but that is where things are heading.

Jeremy Davis: Someone in the chat asked whether anyone is using an LMS or LXP in a healthcare organization where they are tracking qualitative and quantitative data. Have you seen that with your customers?

Guillaume Vives: Absolutely. Healthcare and pharmaceutical companies are important industries for us. For example, we work with organizations that use systems like SuccessFactors and Workday together. They use our solution as an LXP layer over those platforms. It is especially common in healthcare because many organizations have legacy LMS solutions they cannot replace for a variety of reasons, but they still need a better front end. So yes, I see more LXP activity in healthcare than LMS replacement.

Jeremy Davis: Carmit, I know you can also speak to healthcare and virtual labs, and I’m curious about your perspective on the tech stack as well.

Carmit Pelleg: We started this webinar by talking about evolving challenges and the need for new solutions and technologies. That is where AI comes in. At CloudShare, we put AI to work where the biggest challenges are. We focus on extending the reach of the instructor, reducing blind spots, and providing insights about learning impact.

Carmit Pelleg: Our AI solution leverages proprietary computer vision algorithms combined with generative AI. That allows us to track progress, automate exercise checks, provide auto-generated feedback, and turn data into actionable insights for instructors and training stakeholders.

Jeremy Davis: That sounds great. In terms of bringing it all together, how have you seen organizations create a bigger impact with the full tech stack?

Carmit Pelleg: When we talk to customers about how their learning sessions are run, their concern is how they serve content and how they combine that content with hands-on experience. In CloudShare, we support integration into LMSs through LTI and also through APIs for custom projects when needed. That allows customers to create a seamless learning experience that begins with content delivery and then, with a click, takes the learner into a ready environment for hands-on practice.

Jeremy Davis: That leads us to how CloudShare and 360Learning work together. Can you walk us through how you can collaborate effectively to help shared customers reach their goals?

Guillaume Vives: Yes. I want to come back to my SAP story from the beginning, where people had to travel to training centers and spend all that money. We have a joint customer, a large software company in North America in the supply chain space. Imagine you are one of their customers, partners, or a consultant at a company using their software. You can go online, purchase a course, and choose the specific training you want. You can also select a hands-on lab so you can access the software directly.

Guillaume Vives: Then you enter the LMS, in this case our solution. You do an evaluation first, go through the training, access CloudShare directly from the LMS through the integration, complete your exam and lab, and then all the results are consolidated into the LMS dashboard. We can then provide certification, badges, or other completion indicators. Everything is done remotely and based on the learner’s actual starting point rather than assuming everyone needs the same experience.

Guillaume Vives: If you fast-forward from the old model to today, the world has changed dramatically. I recently looked at this in practice and found that for two individuals taking the same training, one might spend only a couple of hours while another might spend much longer, depending on existing skill level. The more skilled learner gets just the content and lab needed to close the remaining gap, while the other learner gets the fuller experience. That is the future.

Jeremy Davis: It is a beautiful future. We are not going to waste your time. This has been really interesting, and a lot of people stayed all the way to the end, so let’s take some audience questions. The first is about the pace of change. We have talked about industries moving faster and technical skills evolving quickly. Do either of you think this need for speed will plateau at some point, or will it keep accelerating?

Guillaume Vives: I do not think it will plateau, especially in the economy we are in now, where businesses are expected to do more with less. I do not think that will slow down. The other factor is what I call the “white hair revolution”—people retiring. A tremendous amount of knowledge needs to be transferred to the next generation. A lot of technology was developed during those earlier decades, and all of that expertise still needs to be passed on. I do not see anything slowing down. Doing more with less, combined with massive knowledge transfer needs, will fuel the next couple of decades.

Carmit Pelleg: I completely agree. From another perspective, we see our customers continuing to develop products and solutions that are becoming more advanced and more complex. That definitely requires more training and more education for users and customers. We also see them expanding, acquiring competitors, combining training operations, and reaching larger markets. We definitely do not see a plateau. We see continued growth.

Jeremy Davis: Excellent. It sounds like we are continuing full steam ahead. The last question is: we can see how all this applies to technical and task-related skills, but what about interpersonal, leadership, and sales skills?

Carmit Pelleg: Virtual labs are obviously most relevant when it comes to technical skills, so Guillaume can probably contribute more on that question.

Jeremy Davis: Guillaume, you’re on mute.

Guillaume Vives: Sorry. I was hoping speaking louder at the mute button would unmute it, but it didn’t. It is a good question. You cannot train everything remotely. Online training cannot replace all human interaction, especially for interpersonal skills. There will always be a human factor. You can absolutely train people in the theory of interpersonal communication, listening, speaking, and related topics through online learning, and there is excellent content available for that. But in the end, it comes down to practice.

Guillaume Vives: That said, there are some interesting new tools emerging. Our founder is working on a solution called Gentle Rain that uses an AI bot for role-play. You can speak with the bot to practice as a salesperson, for example. The bot plays the role of a customer, asks questions, raises objections, and lets you practice your pitch. It is not a replacement for human interaction, but it can be a very effective way to train salespeople on storytelling, objection handling, and communication.

Jeremy Davis: That sounds awesome. I have definitely seen more of that, especially in sales. We have looked at some of those platforms ourselves for sales enablement. It is not easy, and the ability to assess performance in that kind of context is fascinating.

Guillaume Vives: It is also not just about generic soft skills. With that tool, we can upload our own product marketing materials, so now the bot can train salespeople in a real product context. Imagine a bot saying, “Your product is too expensive,” or comparing you to a competitor. It can answer in the context of your competitive landscape and help the rep practice how to respond. It can explain why your product costs more, where the value is, and what options exist. That kind of contextual practice is incredibly powerful. I tried challenging that bot for quite a while and eventually gave up. It was smarter than I was in that scenario.

Jeremy Davis: Amazing. Thank you. I think this last part is about the community someone mentioned. Guillaume, do you want to speak to that?

Guillaume Vives: I can’t believe you’re sharing that secret. It’s the secret society of L&D. Joking aside, it is a great community. I strongly recommend it. It is made up of L&D leaders from all over the world. There is a Slack channel where people ask each other questions, exchange best practices, share vendor experiences, compare systems, and talk about training content. They also run virtual events. It is a great place to learn from peers. I have been invited to speak there from time to time, but it is not vendor-centric. They invite a variety of people and focus on genuine exchange. It is worth checking out.

Jeremy Davis: Excellent. Thank you again. Thank you to our amazing panelists, and thank you to everyone for attending. One of our representatives from CloudShare will be reaching out in the next few days to gather your feedback. In the meantime, if you want to learn more about CloudShare or see a demo of the solution, I added a link in the chat to book a call, so please feel free to click it and reach out. Also, join the community. You can learn a lot not only from our panelists, but also from your peers. That is true collaborative learning, if I understood it correctly.

Jeremy Davis: Thank you again, everybody. I hope you have a great day, and I look forward to talking with you again.

Jeremy Davis: Bye, everybody.

Guillaume Vives: Thank you.

Carmit Pelleg: Bye. Thank you.