Best Practices for Instructor-Led Training in an Enterprise Environment

Virtual instructor-led training, or VILT, is a popular and effective tool for scaling business operations and improving the organizational bottom line. Instructor-led training and virtual instructor-led training can be used for a wide range of educational needs. This could be anything from supporting employees in learning new technologies and skills, to helping channel partners improve their sales skills. You can even use this approach for providing that all-important hand holding to customers when they’re looking for quick value with your product. 

Why Choose a VILT Platform?

Remember when you had to stay six meters away from your colleagues? Those days feel like a distant memory, but the remote working realities it left behind are still part and parcel of our working culture. In 2023, 25% of all professional jobs will be remote. With the inclination to work from home, getting new recruits—and even current employees—up to speed on changes can be a challenge. 

This is where virtual instructor led sales training, and other kinds of remote training solutions can make the difference. VILT enables companies to provide training over the internet, negating the need for physical meetings and on-site server hardware. Anywhere that employees, partners, or customers have an internet connection, they can log in and get hands-on with a virtual lab environment that mirrors their own. No risk, no complex set up, and no limits on virtual training across the business. 

How does it work? By partnering with a virtual software experience platform provider, a company simply pays a subscription, and gains access to a flexible, customizable virtual training lab environment that can suit any training need. 

Virtual instructor-led training best practices can be used within the technology to ensure that learners get the most out of their session. For example, you can create blended classes where some of the content is hosted by an expert, and other parts can be accessed on-demand using self-serve tools. 

Hosted online, instructor-led training is more effective than handing out PDF guides or PowerPoints. The instructor component ensures that every user stays up to date on class progress and can have questions answered at any time, improving the engagement gap that has been such a challenge with virtual-only events and training.

Virtual Instructor-led Training Best Practices

How can you get the most out of VILT? Adopting virtual training is a significant change in your organization’s training process, and so it often requires a shift in your company culture. Here are some of the top best practices to keep in mind. 

Setting Goals

What do you want to accomplish with virtual training? Is it to help your clients achieve more success with your product or service? Or do you need to boost your sales department’s performance using virtual instructor-led software sales training to give sales reps more hands-on experience handling objections or showing value with the technology?

No matter what, have measurable goals in mind that fall in line with the goals of your organization as a whole. The typical results of VILT adoption include better knowledge retention (measured by assessment and certification scores), stronger consumer satisfaction rates (measured by CSAT or NPS scores), and higher ROI, (measured by churn rate, subscription renewals, or product adoption).

Developing the Content

You’ll need more than just text to promote a productive learning environment. Modern VILT platforms can include videos, images, audio files, and other multimedia to enhance knowledge retention. Online training labs can also provide simulated experiences for users to practice what they’ve learned, either during the class, or afterwards in self-study. 

It’s also worth planning out some discussion prompts and activities to encourage peer-to-peer collaboration and take advantage of the “instructor-led” aspect of your class. Think about Q&A sessions, polls, and feedback icons as a start. The more engaging you can make the content, the more likely that users will stay listening and learning.

Testing It Out

Switching to VILT doesn’t happen smoothly overnight. It’s worth consulting with your provider about a trial session, where you can bring in trial users to interact with the platform and engage with the technology. This could be internal staff, or super-users and brand champions who will be happy to give feedback on a Beta version of the new training solution. 

Once any issues have been worked through, you can identify any elements which may still include friction, so that IT staff can help get inexperienced users acquainted with the new service. 

Making It More than Just a Webinar

You’re not getting your money’s worth from a VILT provider if you’re only providing webinars in your training. Instead of making users passively absorb information, have the instructor play an active role in their development.

Standard eLearning elements like YouTube videos and webcast lectures are  mostly a one-way avenue of communication. Under VILT, an instructor can share files, screens, and tips in a live classroom setting. Participants can collaborate with their peers as well, and learn from one another. 

It’s these differences that make virtual training environments so effective compared to other forms of online learning. So, don’t forget to take advantage of them!

Looking to Implement VILT? Get Started With CloudShare

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Are you interested in learning more about how CloudShare can help you create successful virtual training environments? Get in touch with CloudShare today for all your virtual training and sandboxing needs.

This post was originally published on November 2020 and updated on November 04, 2022.