How to have fantastic virtual training with minimal spending

Virtual training has been more important than ever over the past two years (for reasons that should be apparent). But often, virtual training is seen as sub-par training. But with a solid strategy in place, you can make your virtual training actually more effective than face-to-face training options. We’ve put together this checklist to help you plan your virtual training schemes in the most cost-effective way possible. This way you can save money and upskill your employees more quickly, more efficiently and with a lower budget.

Make your virtual training interesting!

What’s more boring than sitting through a training session that makes no attempt to engage you and is seemingly punishing you for some past wrong? Sitting through the exact same lecture but having to stare at a screen the whole time, whilst the session leader somehow doesn’t realise they’re on mute despite being over two years into a pandemic which has almost mandated the mastery of video conference technology.

If your learners are bored, they won’t learn. It’s really as simple as that. 

Make sure that your content is engaging, makes use of different formats and mixes up it’s delivery. Why not try creating a comedic video? Try tying in the content into real world phenomena at the office or making a game out of your learning exercises. A good rule of thumb is if you can picture a tweed coat professor enacting it in a dusty lecture hall, don’t put it in your virtual training.

Prepare, prepare, prepare!

Ever watched the slow horror creep on someone's face as they start a point in front of all the peers and lose sight of the end of it? Would you like it if your face was immortalised in this state via the medium of the dreaded frozen Zoom screen?

Making sure that you know where you want your virtual training to go and what you want your learners to get out of it is absolutely crucial. 

Imagine a scenario where one of your learners messages you after the session, and it was the best possible thing they could have messaged. 

What does that message look like? 

Is it about them feeling engaged and heard? A bevy of actionable insights? Excellent use of comedy gifs in relation to life-changing points that completely reshape the way they view their life and the lives of those around them? 

Write down your goals and several steps along the way and follow that structure to achieve success.

Build in a way to get feedback

Let’s be honest, you are going to smash your virtual training with this amazing list, but it’s probably not going to be the absolute pinnacle of perfection, as nothing ever is!

As people who work in the L&D industry, we all know how important gathering constructive feedback is to people’s continuous development and that goes for the person delivering the training as well. Make sure you have an anonymised way for participants to share what they thought about the session. There’s a tonne of free-to-use tools out there, but my personal favourites are Suggestion Ox and Survey Monkey. 

Don’t just send an obligatory link at the end of the session either, make sure you actively encourage feedback, assure anonymity and let your learners know that this is a crucial part of the learning process to increase their likelihood of engaging.

Try new things

There’s a reason people love going to tech conferences and sitting through hours of people saying the words “data driven” and “deep learning” repeatedly and in the wrong context. Because seeing new stuff is awesome! 

As long as you have prepared and ironed out any technical hitches/know the platform well enough to not make a complete fool of yourself, trying out a new technology or something flashy is a great way to make your training more exciting, engaging and memorable.

If you are feeling brave, augmented reality is a great way to bring virtual training to life!

Be ready for technical hitches

When you are reinventing the way virtual training is conducted for better and for always, there’s going to be inevitable complications. 

Don’t panic when this happens, this is what you prepare for! 

Make sure you always have one or two conversations topics or even a small group exercise to hand to make sure you can keep your learners engaged whilst you frantically bash your WiFi router with a hammer.

It’s easy to lose sight of why we do virtual training with all the excitement and nerves involved. With these handy tips and the secret ingredient of remembering why you are doing the training in the first place, you will be a virtual training maestro in no time! 

No virtual training is complete without top quality content to go alongside it, so why not tick one thing of your virtual training to-do by signing up for a demo of our amazing Content Club. Also while you are here and clearly so engaged, there’s no better way to increase your employee engagement than by using the best learning platform in the world!