Virtual training

See How Your Online Training Program Measures Up to Industry Benchmarks

The CloudShare Team

Jun 05, 2023 - 4 min read

You already understand the critical role of data in your training program.

Whether you’re onboarding a new customer, educating your employees, or testing a partner’s knowledge of your products, the right metrics are invaluable in both measuring your overall success and identifying where you might improve.

Since you’re here, we’ll assume you already know your KPIs. But do you know how well those KPIs stack up against the industry’s leading training and development benchmarks? We were curious, too.

That’s why we took our 2022 user data of CloudShare’s 130,000 customers, and compared it to leading industry benchmarks. We then compiled what we learned into a comprehensive data report titled Just Beat It: Can Your Online Training Program Beat Industry Benchmarks?

Reading this report will give you an overview of the current training industry, including benchmarks for online course completion, emerging technology trends, and some key metrics for learning and development. By combining industry benchmarks with our own data and insights, we’ll also show you not only what you can improve, but how to do so.

Download the full report right away if you like — or keep reading for an overview of what the report contains.

Course Completion Rates Are Shockingly Low

We’ll start with what might be our most startling finding. The current benchmark for online course completion is just 13 percent. The industry, it seems, is chock full of poor-quality courses that fail to engage students.

This is problematic for several reasons:

• A poor onboarding process, which directly contributes to customer churn.
• Insufficient understanding of your products and/or processes.
• Increased support costs.
• Unmet expectations and unfulfilled objectives.

The Meteoric Growth of Self-Paced Learning

Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT) may still be the preferred way to deliver online training, 2022 marked the third straight year in a row where self-paced training experienced triple-digit year-over-year growth. Given current events, this is unsurprising. Between the pandemic and the impending recession, 33 percent of companies have experienced a reduction in their learning and development staff and another 42 percent tightened their budget.

Because self-paced training is inherently measurable and scalable, it represents an incredibly cost-effective alternative to other training techniques, one that’s easy to iteratively adjust and improve. On-demand training is also beneficial for students, providing them with a convenient, flexible experience that fits both their schedule and the rate at which they learn.

Emphasizing Quality Over Quantity

Whether online or offline, it’s common practice to assign more instructors as the size of a class increases. As it turns out, however, more is not always better. Two appears to be the “magic number.” For each instructor beyond the second, course attendance plummets:

• 81 percent lower attendance with three instructors.
• 95 percent lower attendance with four instructors.
• 97 percent lower attendance with five instructors.

Concerning though these numbers may be, they also don’t tell the full story. How many instructors you assign to a single course is significantly less important than whether or not that course encourages active student engagement. Real-world, interactive experiences will always trump passive lectures, no matter how many instructors you add — which is precisely why VILT continues to provide such a strong showing.

Why Learning is Ultimately a Social Experience

In a truly successful classroom, the students converse not just with one another, but with their instructors. They ask questions, they collaborate on coursework, and they share insights and experiences with one another. This socialization has a knock-on effect on student success, resulting in:

• Twice as much time spent on-site.
• Three times more active contribution from students.
• Five times the number of course completions.

The Growing Prominence of the Public Cloud

In 2022, cloudification and digital transformation continued to pick up steam with a 62.5 percent increase in business public cloud adoption. This growth is expected to continue, with projections ranging from $157 billion to $597 billion by 2028. If you haven’t already migrated your training into the cloud, you need to do so sooner rather than later — ideally with a vendor-agnostic platform that supports both VILT and self-paced training.

Support for both private and public clouds is also a must.

Preparing for 2023 and Beyond

The training industry is in flux. Amidst digital transformation and cloudification, training leaders are exploring new training methods and modalities, even as course completion rates remain abysmally low. Students, meanwhile, appear to embrace both self-paced and instructor-led training in equal measure, as the value of socialization and conversation remain constant.

You know the trends, and you know how your KPI for training stacks up against the industry as a whole. That just leaves one question. What are you going to do about it?

Maximize the ROI of Your Online Training with CloudShare

Here’s where CloudShare comes in. We’ve walked you through the major trends and challenges that currently face training organizations. But that’s only one half of our report.

The other half is where we share our own insights and compare our own data to the wider industry. In so doing, we show you how CloudShare can help you go beyond the benchmarks to improve every facet of your training program. We even identify the number one determinant of instructor-led course completion in 2023.

Whether you know your current benchmarks and want to improve them, or still aren’t quite sure what you want to measure, download our data report and we’ll show you exactly how to get started.