Training Courses Virtual or Face-to-Face?
In 2010 we would not have even given a thought to running a training course via TEAMS – we would automatically have thought, ‘this doesn’t work’.
But here we are today in 2024 and post COVID where we were all forced to work from home things are very, very different.
Everyone is using TEAMS, ZOOM, Webex and similar to communicate, and many of us have transitioned to a 3-2 working week, working three days a week from home and two days a week in shared surroundings.
So are there advantages of face-to-face training over virtual conferencing based learning? Well, you get to interact with the trainer and the other delegates in the same personal space. That’s it.
But what about finding or renting a room, getting staff to travel to the venue, organising facilities within the room, and maybe paying for the presenter to travel to the location and paying for their overnight accommodation? And, what do you do if there are extra staff to be accommodated at short notice? Do, you have to cancel until a bigger room is available?
And, what about sharing screens, polling, chat streams, sharing whiteboards, drawing models and brainstorming? Tricky, because most of these tools are best hosted by virtual conferencing tools.
So this is why we at Mindgrove, whilst we loved travelling around the world to deliver training, have long since reset our mode of delivery to fit into a new model of learning delivery. We train via flexible virtual conferencing where groups of people are involved or via self-paced online learning for smaller bite sized chuncks of knowledge building.
And, bottom line, our feedback tells us that delegates are getting as much out of the training as they ever did before.