What is a Practice Lab?

Tech companies use practice labs to deliver IT training in a completely virtual environment, meaning students and instructors never have to meet face-to-face or be in the same room. You can use a practice lab for a wide range of purposes, including employee development, certification, consumer education, and more.

Practice labs simulate real-world situations, letting employees learn through experience while allowing employers to assess work-readiness and offer certification. When it comes to IT training, practice labs are one of the best ways to ensure competency and career progression. Stimulated experiences empower learning in ways that textbooks and manuals simply can’t.

While students and instructors never have to meet in-person, practice labs provide the same standard of education as a real-world classroom. Multimedia content and seamless peer-to-peer and instructor-to-peer interactions take advantage of real-time analytics—such as remote control of a student’s desktop, and mouse-tracking capabilities—to mimic a physical learning environment.

Here are the main reasons why more and more tech companies are gravitating toward virtual labs for their IT training:

• Cut costs. Purchasing the right hardware and maintaining on-site computer labs is expensive. With a cloud-based training solution, companies remain fully scalable while saving wherever possible.

• Minimize security risks. Let your technicians learn to tackle cyberattacks and solve coding obstacles in an environment that’s totally protected. Your company’s hardware and software remain uncompromised while your employees learn the best way they can.

• Enjoy total flexibility. Instructors can teach from afar while taking advantage of real-time analytics to remain available to all participants. Students can access course materials anytime, anywhere.

• Train with experience. Experience is the best teacher. Allow your employees to explore real OS environments, troubleshooting tools, and network configurations. Lessons learned in actual practice are much more memorable than your typical PowerPoint.

• Put your data to work for you. CloudShare provides you with detailed analytics for the practice labs you run, so you can see where students struggle, how they progress through your labs, and other insightful metrics that can improve your development and marketing processes.

Practice labs are innovative virtual training solutions that help users develop job-ready IT skills, gain confidence, achieve certification, and progress their careers. Take full advantage of what virtual training labs have to offer with CloudShare’s exceptional feature set.

CloudShare replicates even the most sophisticated virtual environments, providing each of your students with realistic scenarios. Shut labs down when they’re not in use, auto-suspend features you don’t need, and scale up or down in seconds—saving your company as much money as possible while never compromising on speed and performance.