Virtual training
10 VILT Tips: How VILT Software Can Help Your Business Stay Competitive in a Changing World
There is no longer a place for boring, passive slideshows in the world of employee training and customer education. Today’s learners demand something more engaging, dynamic, and compelling. Virtual Instructor Led Training (VILT) arguably represents one of the best ways to deliver this — provided you can find the right platform to support it.
Why is VILT Software Essential for Business Growth?
Compared to traditional learning, VILT software tends to be more cost-effective and accessible. Rather than having to schedule a classroom session, provision equipment, and manage transportation, VILT allows both instructor and student to sign in from anywhere. Paired with self-paced training, it allows everyone to engage with an organization’s training on their own terms and at their own pace.
So basically, you can deliver training to more people with greater efficiency and at a lower cost.
Those are pretty significant advantages, but they aren’t what really makes VILT valuable — it’s the software’s capacity to scale. Because your classroom sessions are entirely virtual, there’s no need to rely on a physical, on-premises lab to spin up new instances. This not only makes it easier to run custom demos, but also allows your organization to effortlessly provision new resources for both additional training and larger groups.
Last but certainly not least, it’s also worth noting that while students do enjoy the flexibility of self-paced training, VILT leads to better course completion rates and higher engagement. For employees, this means ensuring they’re armed with the knowledge and skills to excel. For customers, it means empowering them to make the most of your software.
Either way, effectively-deployed VILT software represents a net positive — to say nothing of its many other advantages:
- Centralized access to all training materials for ease of updates.
- Breakdown of information silos between different departments.
- Simple implementation and maintenance with a low overhead.
- Fully customizable.
- Supports personalized learning and continuous improvement.
- Analytics allow for more granular assessment of both student progress and weaknesses in training materials.
Tips for More Effective VILT Implementation and Management
1. Establish the Business Value of the VILT Model Up Front
Whether you’re implementing a virtual training program for your employees or for the sake of customer education, organizational buy-in represents the most important step. You need to ensure that all departments that are even tangentially involved in the training fully support it. That includes company leadership.
As for how you achieve that buy-in…that’s another topic altogether — fortunately, it’s one we covered in our eBook Building the Perfect Business Case for VILT to Win Over Senior Management.
2. Create a Realistic Implementation Timeline
Although your implementation timeline is technically part of your presentation to senior management, it’s so important to the overall success of your VILT program that it deserves its own section. This rollout strategy is as much for your benefit as it is to provide leadership with peace of mind. It ensures that you don’t inadvertently torpedo your VILT deployment before it even gets off the ground with rollout delays or unrealistic deadlines.
3. Identify Your Most Important Content
What is your core objective in deploying VILT software? What department or demographic will benefit from your training? What content must your VILT materials include so as to ensure your training provides the greatest value possible?
You need to answer all three of these questions before deployment — this will require that you combine your own intuition and expertise with analytics data and input from team members and employees.
4. Consider the Before and After
Training neither begins nor ends in the classroom. It’s an ongoing process, and you must treat it as such. Your instructors should be available both during and outside regular classroom hours, and you may also want to consider sending out supplementary materials to drum up engagement and provide further context post-training.
5. Keep Classes Relatively Small
In some cases — such as conferences or seminars — large classes are unavoidable. Most of the time, however, you’ll want to keep your classes small enough that your instructor has time to directly attend to each student if necessary. The upper limit of this number varies by instructor, but we’d recommend trying to keep it lower than twenty people if possible.
6. Blend VILT and Self-Paced Training
We mentioned earlier that VILT is at its best when combined with self-paced training, a format known as blended learning. This delivery style is fast becoming the norm in the training industry, and with good reason. It allows you to provide learners with the best of both worlds, giving them the engagement of working with an instructor and the freedom of learning on their own terms.
7. Focus on Interactive, Hands-On VILT Materials
The legacy approach to training is broken. It relies far too much on rote memorization and passive materials such as slideshows and glossary pages. While these do technically teach students a thing or two about a topic, they provide almost nothing in the way of practical knowledge.
Modern training solutions need hands-on training — they need to give students the ability to ‘learn by doing.’
8. Track Student Progress
Most VILT tools provide administrators and instructors with comprehensive analytics that allow you to track both student progress and overall usage data. Here’s what you should do in order to leverage this information to the fullest:
- Provide ongoing feedback and guidance to students throughout their learning journey.
- Offer personalized assistance and training based on a student’s usage data.
- Proactively reach out to anyone that appears to be struggling or disengaging.
9. Keep Sessions Short and Manageable
While it’s your call whether or not your organization embraces microlearning, you should keep an eye on the clock as far as your training is concerned. Individual modules should be short and sweet so as to be easily digestible for students. Larger courses, meanwhile, should be broken into modules.
10. Choose the Right VILT Tools
Last but not least, remember that not all VILT solutions are created equal. Make sure you choose one with the following characteristics:
- Stability.
- Ease of use.
- Interactivity (breakout rooms, chat, polling, video, etc.)
- Customizable training modules and materials.
- Secure by design.
- Seamless integration with other software (learning management systems, customer relationship management tools, sales enablement platforms, etc.)
- Supported by a dedicated vendor with expertise in your industry.
Next Steps: Drive Your Success Home with our Webinar on VILT
You’ve probably already guessed that CloudShare possesses all of the qualifications we mentioned at the end of the previous list — and if you aren’t quite convinced, we suggest booking a demo to see for yourself.
In the meantime, now that we’ve discussed the building blocks of a successful VILT implementation, it’s time to shift our attention forward a bit. In our webinar Sneak Peek into VILT in 2023: How to Achieve Data-Driven Success, we go over what CloudShare’s power users are doing to get the most out of our VILT software. The webinar also discusses:
- What CloudShare can achieve for your organization.
- The best strategies and tools for better training ROI.
- Incorporating data visualization and analytics into your training strategy.
- What a hybrid training experience looks like.
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