Protecting Your Corporate Training ROI With Virtual Learning
Maybe you’ve been here before: you need to make a critical business decision, but you don’t have a reliable source of data you can use for drawing conclusions. Whether the data at your organization is unstructured, inaccurate, inconsistent with other sources, or simply missing, you can’t possibly make a confident decision. You’re stalled, and maybe in disagreement with other leaders about the facts and next steps.
This kind of ambiguity can be frustrating at best, toxic at worst. You can lose out on revenue, overspend on budget, and waste valuable time just attempting to get the facts straight among stakeholders.
In our experience, many companies may only need to make a few small adjustments to remove this kind of decision ambiguity — and it starts with setting yourself up with a data-driven decision making tool.
Examples of Data-Driven Decision-Making
Data-driven decision making (DDDM) is the process of using business intelligence to align strategic decisions with your goals and initiatives. What are some of the questions you can answer with data-driven decision-making? Here are a few examples:
Determining how many front-end developers you need for a project
Finding the best time to schedule virtual training sessions
Scoping out the length of a development cycle based on given resources
Adjusting marketing strategies based on campaign ROIs
If you’re a business decision maker, your challenge may be similar to one of the above or completely unique. Regardless of your role and function, you know you need DDDM — but how do you leverage the data you already have? How can you be sure you’re looking at the right data, and that you’re interpreting it correctly? How can you compare multiple datasets at a glance and draw meaningful conclusions?
One strategy that we’ve seen help with challenges like this is to use a data visualization tool.
VILT is the natural evolution of ILT
While e-learning is a very effective form of training, VILT can be a more reasonable (and cost-effective) transition if you’ve already been using ILT and don’t want to lose that investment. Many times, this can be done using the same facilitators you’re already working with — the primary difference is that sessions would be done via video conferencing instead of in-person and learner engagement strategies may need to be rethought and modified to account for the limitations of interacting virtually.
On the other hand, VILT allows your employees the benefit of person-to-person contact and communication during their training.
With VILT, the learner can ask the instructor questions in real time and engage in meaningful conversations around complex topics. This live feedback loop helps ensure the course material makes sense to all learners, while also giving the instructor valuable feedback about the effectiveness of their course content and delivery methods. This can save significant time for both the individual employee and the company as a whole while providing a more robust learning experience for the user.
So, can VILT help you drive ROI? Here’s a comparison of costs and benefits of adapting your ILT to VILT:
Costs
New tools/technology subscriptions (web conferencing software, for example)
Time and resources associated with adjusting course material to fit into live video sessions rather than in-person sessions
Training your instructors on using VILT technology
Training and preparing your learners to use VILT technology
Returns
No travel or event expenses for instructors or employees
No fees for booking a learning space or classroom
Increased flexibility of scheduling (more convenient for everyone)
The ROI of eLearning
While the transition from ILT to VILT may be an easier shift than launching a full e-Learning program, e-Learning can play a very significant role in your corporate training (and can provide incredible ROI). Here’s a quick look at the benefits of e-Learning in comparison to its costs, so you can assess if e-Learning would be a good investment now or later.
Costs
New technologies and LMS required
e-Learning course production fees (whether designing courses in-house or hiring a consultancy or firm to help you develop them)
Training learners on using new tools or technologies
Access to more, and better, data empowers course and skill optimization for the future
Returns
Instructor costs significantly reduced or eliminated
Potentially more engaging or gamified learning will result in better retention and learning outcomes
More targeted and diversified learning paths possible for large groups of employees
Ability to quickly and easily scale up and serve more learners without additional expenses
Access to more, and better, data empowers course optimization for the future
Use digital learning analytics to prove (and strengthen) ROI
VILT and e-Learning aren’t just more convenient and cost-effective as training delivery methods, they can also help you analyze and prove the ROI of your training programs. While the only data you likely have from your ILT courses is from surveys and test results, your VILT and e-Learning technologies can gather very detailed data that tells a bigger story.
Studying your LMS analytics, for example, can help you can discern:
Which modules were most and least effective
Whether learners retained knowledge in different time intervals after the course was completed
Which modules might’ve been too challenging or confusing
The exact moments when learners were most engaged or most distracted
Consider how you might use the data you already have from your LMS, your web conferencing tool (for VILT) or relevant data from other tools, like Google Analytics, to demonstrate the effectiveness of your training programs with data — or make an informed game plan to improve them.
Virtual learning helps protect corporate training ROI
Both VILT and e-Learning allows companies to continue reaping employee training benefits when in-person contact is limited or impossible. But we believe virtual training will continue to be a mainstay of the corporate training world due to its ablity to scale training, its creative potential and immense ROI. If you’re ready to take the next step toward implementing virtual learning at your organization, reach out to the Digital Learning Team at Prime 8 Consulting. We’ve helped organizations just like yours adapt existing learning programs and leverage the potential of modern learning solutions.
