LearnaBytes

Virtual training or Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT) has been around for a while and I first encountered it around 2006 when I had to deliver a Microsoft Excel training session to two staff members based in different time zones. I was based in the UK and they were based in Dubai and New York. Back then I remember using WeBex for the training session.

Fast forward to today and virtual training has come a long way and become a stable part of the learning and development ecosystem. I believe one of the factors that made virtual training more acceptable was the COVID pandemic (between 2020 – 2022). Training providers rapidly had to move away from face-to-face training and find a viable alternative because of lockdown issues and other requirements preventing people from meeting together.

There was the option of moving training into eLearning courses and many organisations did that, including the organisation I worked for at the time (I was responsible for developing a number of those eLearning courses). But there was also the need for something more interactive where discussions and skill practice could be facilitated. This is where virtual training came in. While it’s not as interactive as in-person training, it’s also not as passive as eLearning either, and with the use of good platforms and facilitation skills, a lot of what you would experience in a face-to-face session can be replicated in a virtual training session. Plus, virtual training has its own unique benefits which sometimes make it a better choice than in-person training.

From delivering a lot of virtual courses during the COVID pandemic up till now, I’ve learned a lot about virtual training, and in this book I will share some of what I have learnt by showing you how I design and develop virtual training sessions.

What I will show you is not the only way to develop virtual training courses. It is my own personal method which had worked successfully for me.

To take through my design and development process we will go through developing a real course which I personally developed and have delivered a couple of times.

My intention is to make this book simple and straightforward with ideas you can start using immediately. I won’t be going into adult learning theory or anything like that and for some what is in this book will just be a confirmation of what you are already doing.

I hope you can learn something from my ideas as I have learned from the ideas of others. Thank you for reading the book.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

This is the last of the gaps that can lead to inadequate performance. In this case, it’s not an issue of not having the right skills or knowledge or even a lack of motivation. Rather it has to do with miscommunication. It happens when instructions or directions given are poor.

Julie Dirksen has identified a number of ways this gap can occur which include:

• when the person communicating isn’t clear about the goals to be communicated

• the person communicating is clear about the goals but communicates poorly

• the person communicating the goals may say one thing and not support it or they intend to do something else.

This can happen for instance when change is happening in an organisation but the leaders either don’t communicate the change at all or they do it badly which leads to miscommunication, wrong assumptions, and people just not being able to perform as they ought to.

Typically, this is not a learning issue. It’s not one you can solve by designing and delivering a great learning intervention and we need to be mindful of this. Unfortunately, communication gaps can sometimes be disguised as learning issues.

Julie Dirksen gives some very good advice about how to deal with communication gaps and it is:

“Frequently, the best you can do in those situations is document the issue, handle the politics, and do no harm to the learners, if possible.”

To summarise, I’ve written about a number of gaps (knowledge, skills, motivation, habit, and communication) that can affect people’s performance. Knowing about these gaps is important for us as learning and development practitioners for two reasons:

1. Identifying the right gap can help us identify the best and most appropriate solution.
2. Sometimes the gap may imply that what we are dealing with is not a learning issue and we need to be honest about that so we don’t end up plugging a round hole with a square peg.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

I have been writing about different gaps people have that affect their performance. So far, I’ve looked at the following gaps:

• knowledge gaps (read about it here)
• Skill gaps (read about it here)
• Motivation gaps (read about it here)

Sometimes people may not have a knowledge, skill or motivation gap but still not perform as required. There still is a gap. An example that Julie Dirksen uses to describe this type of gap in her book, Design for how people learn, is a new manager who knows why it’s important to give feedback, can demonstrate the right level of skills to give feedback, and truly believes giving feedback is the right to do but still struggles to give feedback.

Why? Because giving feedback is not a habit for the manager. This is a habit gap.

When we get good at our job a lot of what we do that drives good performance has become habits. But it is not easy to teach people to develop habits or to turn aspects of the work they need to do to become habits.

Also, traditional learning solutions are not very good at helping people to develop habits either. Therefore, habits do need a different learning approach. That is a post for the future as I learn more about designing appropriate learning interventions for developing habits.