As experienced technical trainers and curriculum developers, your goal is to provide meaningful and engaging training experiences. To enhance the effectiveness of your technical training program, it’s important to stay abreast of changes in the technical landscape. In this blog post, we’ll share some powerful and proven strategies to elevate your technical training to new heights, and deliver training with maximum impact to learners.
Enhance Training via Optimized Training Environments
One thing we’ve learnt from working with so many professionals like you, is that often the technical solution being used to deliver training is what takes up the most time. If you’re still using physical hardware, or an internally-developed solution, a large chunk of your time is probably spent maintaining these, or requiring support from IT. It’s a good time to consider using cloud-based lab environments. These solutions, containing features such as automated provisioning and reusable templates, are excellent tools that can streamline the setup and management of training environments. With this headache removed, you are now free to focus on developing compelling content.
Use Proven Strategies to Make it Easy for Learners
The learner experience is usually the top priority for technical trainers. Here are some of the best ways to help learners get the most out of their training experience:
- First, make the training easy to access. Learners should not be required to download or install any software.
- Next, ensure learners have everything they need in the training environment itself. This includes instructions, as well as supporting tools or files, application credentials, etc.
- Provide accessible support. Regardless of whether the training is instructor-led or on-demand, make it easy for learners to request assistance while completing training. Have support on hand to respond to queries. If possible, use remote assistance capability to gain control of the learner’s environment to help troubleshoot.
- Encourage collaboration. In a virtual classroom, knowledge sharing among learners can create a dynamic learning environment.
By following the tips above, you can ensure that your technical training will have maximum impact!
Use Real-World Scenarios for Maximum Impact
It may be that the software training you deliver can also be sourced elsewhere. Consider ways to develop innovative training content that provides practical, hands-on experience. Previously this wasn’t that easy to do, but there are now solutions available that allow for the creation of comprehensive scenarios, making learning relevant and relatable. This should enhance skill development by fostering a deeper understanding. We’ve also seen first hand how original content facilitated by Heropa has helped our customers scale and grow their training programs, leading to increased revenue from training.
Elevate Technical Training with Optimized Performance and Reliability
Interruptions and delays due to network connectivity issues and high latency are real barriers to learning, and a cause of deep frustration for technical trainers. Provide learners with a localized environment will help to overcome this challenge and result in a smoother experience.
Creating compelling technical training is a constant pursuit. It requires a blend of proven strategies and innovative solutions to deliver impactful learning experiences. If you’re ready to unlock the full potential of your technical training, reach out to discover how we can support your efforts.
For SaaS companies, customer education is an essential component throughout the SaaS customer lifecycle. Through customer education, SaaS companies can ensure their customers realise the value of their product. This in turn drives sales, increases adoption, and leads to higher retention rates.
Customer education is needed throughout the SaaS customer lifecycle
Customer education starts the very moment a prospect becomes interested in your product. However different methods to educate are used throughout the customer lifecycle.
Providing hands-on access to your SaaS product early in the sales process – at a marketing event or during a product demo – is a proven way to drive greater conversion through the sales funnel. This is because often the feature set is too extensive to describe. This way, prospects can also play around with the features that are most relevant to them, deepening their engagement. SaaS companies who are able to provide prospects with a fully-featured version of software to trial typically also see greater conversion success.
Once the deal is done, it’s not a case of set and forget. Ongoing customer education is a key component of customer success. At this stage of the customer lifecycle, customer education can again take various forms, the most prominent being customer training.
High quality training with hands-on practice is essential for customers of SaaS
High quality training is one of the primary ways to ensure high adoption and give users of SaaS applications enough experience and understanding so they can get full value from their SaaS subscription.
Even then, there are a variety of ways to provide training. With most SaaS applications, hands-on experience is the best method of training to ensure understanding. In our experience, hands-on training is best delivered by an instructor in a virtual or physical classroom environment.
Another, more flexible training option to consider is self-paced training. Many SaaS companies have chosen to create a training curriculum that can be completed on demand. This provides an immersive and safe learning environment for learners to have hands-on practice with their software.
Regardless of how the training is delivered, hands-on practice with real world scenarios should be the cornerstone of any SaaS training program. And in the ever-changing world of SaaS, ensuring customers say up to date and educated is of utmost importance.
Effective customer education improves adoption and retention rates
As you can see, for SaaS companies, a customer education program with different training options across the customer lifecycle provides numerous opportunities to develop strong relationships with employees across their customer organisations. An impactful customer training program increases user adoption, with employees using the product more often, using more features, and working more independently[1]. When done well, it can also reduce customer support interactions and costs.
SaaS companies who focus on making their customer training great see an increase in customer success as measured by high retention rates, which is a key driver of growth[2].
How could your SaaS company’s customer education program be improved?
SaaS companies should be working to ensure their customers have what they need for the software to help them achieve their business goals. This includes regularly looking at ways to improve the quality of their customer education across the SaaS customer lifecycle.
In the next blog post in our Customer Education series, we’ll share six ways SaaS companies can improve customer education.
[1] https://www.tsia.com/blog/3-ways-education-services-can-advance-the-customer-journey
[2] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/grow-fast-or-die-slow-focusing-on-customer-success-to-drive-growth
Say your organization offers virtual training, including virtual instructor-led training (VILT). You have a way to deliver it, and there’s a clear roadmap regarding the curriculum. Unfortunately, as soon as you get past the basics, you realise that it’s not easy to deliver an effective virtual instructor-led training session. You’re still dealing with people and systems, which means that the likelihood of problems arising is just as high – if not higher – than it was for physical training.
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. In fact, as many businesses who rushed into virtual training during the pandemic are finding, there’s huge scope for improvement.
The reality is, every training session comes with its own unique challenges. Consider implementing the suggestions below, and we’re confident your next virtual instructor-led training session will be more effective.
Find ways to personalize
Obviously with VILT, participants are not all in the one place. Taking this into account when designing the session can result in improved learning outcomes.
Start by taking note of where participants are located. Proceed to tailor training content to their respective languages and cultures. This can also include subtle details like the order in which names and titles are written in their country, or lab exercise instructions in different languages.
From here, focus on key elements in the training environment itself, by customising labels on form fields, buttons, and more. For example, different regions may accept varying responses for compliance reasons.
Personalization is largely about ensuring that the learner is operating in an environment that is in line with the version of the product they’ll eventually be using.
Encourage interaction during the virtual instructor-led training session
An effective virtual instructor-led training session is one where the training instructor delivers knowledge in a manner that isn’t entirely identical to what’s on learning materials like slides.
Try to put content into context from the beginning. For instance, rather than starting by reading out an introductory slide bullet points word for word, begin by demonstrating with a real life scenario. Teach by showing, so participants can learn by doing.
For larger virtual classrooms, consider grouping participants with similar needs or competence levels, or region. Assign an assistant instructor to support each group, leaving the main instructor as the host.
Another great way to incorporate interactivity is by letting trainees contribute to the conversation by speaking to the group, to give their own view of the subject at hand. Where remote assistance is provided, ask participants to share learnings back to the group. Ultimately, training sessions shouldn’t simply be a regurgitation of learning materials.
Optimize system performance
System performance is perhaps the most common challenge faced by those running VILT. This is particularly difficult when running a single training session across multiple locations. System performance is a challenge because it’s usually the hardest thing to control. Internet speeds and hardware device quality varies widely among participants, and often results in poor application performance.
If this has been your experience, it might be time to look for a solution that reduces this likelihood. Providing access to training environments based on localised infrastructure gives participants the best chance of an uninterrupted experience. Participants can focus on what they are there to learn rather than be distracted or discouraged by connection issues.
Are you trying to get the most out of your VILT sessions? Take your training to the next level by speaking to us here.
While many organizations had already set the ball rolling with virtual training and remote learning, others have had to play catch up during the pandemic. For some, their goal was to quickly move to virtual learning. Others needed to train people in disparate geographical locations. All had to adhere to COVID-19 guidelines, and learn how to operate in the world we’re now in.
Whatever the case, lots of virtual training solutions out there fall short. Through talking to and working with many organizations throughout the pandemic, we’ve observed the challenges these shortcomings create. Which is why, 12-18 months in, it’s time to ask:
Is the current way of delivering virtual training as good as it can get? How best to overcome virtual training challenges?
Here, we share 3 virtual training challenges we see a lot of, and provide some ways to overcome them.
Virtual training challenge #1: Administrative headaches
Delivering virtual instructor-led training (VILT) comes with support tasks such as scheduling sessions, tracking trainees’ progress, managing learning materials, and many more. It’s typically very time-consuming to set up schedules using one tool, host video calls with another, and assess learners via yet another tool.
When VILT takes a long time to set up, you either need more people, or you deliver less training. It’s a business process crying out for some re-engineering! Finding ways to streamline the administrative side of training is a big win.
One thing’s for sure, it helps to have a solution that isn’t an island. Even functionality like the ability to integrate with a learning management system (LMS) can go a long way. This can simplify admin intensive steps like user registration, and the distribution of learning materials. This is where an all-in-one virtual training platform can help.
Challenge #2: Difficulty providing remote assistance
One of the benefits of instructor-led training is that instructors are available to provide support to learners. This is particularly important for VILT delivering training of complex software applications.
Providing hands-on virtual labs during training is a proven way to immerse learners in a semblance of the situation they are being prepared for. Whether it’s navigating network security events, or setting up process automation, virtual labs help learners try out different actions and see whether they get the right results.
Most virtual training methods provide a way for instructors to demonstrate capability, and labs are also often part of the training offering. The hard part is replicating the over-the-shoulder assistance an instructor provides in a physical classroom. With no visibility of the learner’s journey, it’s harder to intervene or help when there’s a problem.
Both instructors and learners can benefit from virtual hands-on labs with deeper engagement capabilities, transcending live chat to provide remote control of a user’s desktop. This, together with other features in a virtual training platform, can go a long way in facilitating the right mix of instruction and demonstration.
Challenge #3: Training teams lack control over their environments
This is another area where troubles on the trainer’s side can dampen the learner experience. For the trainer, simplicity is key in areas such as provisioning lab environments for learners. A good virtual training software should remove the training team’s dependency on IT by providing lab components that can be re-used, further reducing administrative headache.
It should enable instructional designers, curriculum developers, and training and learning architects to start from scratch or use a template, and possibly tweak it on their own. It also helps if they can import VMs that have already been created. Ideally, a VILT solution should reduce the need for intervention from the IT team, and give the training team control.
In the next blog post of our Virtual Instructor-led Training series, we’ll show you how to make your VILT program more effective.
If you’re looking to take your virtual instructor-led training to the next level, we can help. Speak to us about how to improve it here.
For SaaS companies, customer education happens throughout the customer lifecycle. Increasingly, SaaS companies are looking to improve and scale their customer education and training programs, and acknowledge this is as a critical driver of business growth.
Here, we talk about six ways SaaS companies can improve customer education:
1. Apply the ‘as -a-service’ mindset to the design of customer education and training
A recent McKinsey article recommends SaaS companies apply the approach used for product to provide a streamlined, customer-friendly experience across business functions. Designing a customer training program with this mindset creates a seamless, intuitive customer training experience that meets evolving customer expectations and builds a sticky and satisfied customer base.
2. Keep SaaS customers informed
SaaS products are changing all the time. For this reason, it’s imperative that customers stay abreast of changes and updates. One way to make customers aware of these changes is by regularly communicating with them. For example, product updates about new features or iterative enhancements can be delivered in a variety of formats – email, website, or in app – and are often a starting point to improve customer education on an ongoing basis.
3. Educate in app
A common and effective way to provide ongoing education to customers is within the application itself. Again, different methods can be used to suit different learning styles and at different moments in the user experience. Contextual short form help can both support and educate at key points in the journey, while a knowledge base can serve as a complete guide to the product’s capability. SaaS companies who do this well typically observe a reduction in customer support enquiries.
4. Offer a variety of customer training options
To support different learning needs and styles requires a variety of different training modalities. One way to improve customer education is by providing flexible training options in a variety of formats at the right time in the customer lifecycle. At certain points, a short video or article will suffice. For more involved training, an on-demand course where learners can work through at their own pace might be more suitable. In our experience, instructor-led training is the most effective way to give customers hands-on experience in the use of complex software.
5. Monitor progress
To understand how your SaaS training is performing, it’s essential to have visibility of how customers are working through training content. The best training modality to directly interact with customers is physical or virtual instructor-led training, where instructors have live visibility of participant experiences and can offer assistance during the session. Seeking regular feedback from training participants allows for the identification of areas to be improved.
6. Make training material as relevant as possible
Too often there’s a tendency for training material to be oversimplified so it can be re-used. However, it’s important to strike a balance between being efficient, and creating relevant content. Customers have a far greater chance of success if training can cover real world applications of the software.
SaaS products are typically not built to support training objectives, making it really hard for training teams to improve the quality of their customer education program. A specialised platform for SaaS customer training can help improve items 4-6 above.
Next in our Customer Education series, we’ll share what to look for when choosing a training platform for your SaaS company.
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