As we assess the changes in the learning and development landscape, we must also consider how we are managing the delivery of our learning. What is being learned, how people are learning, and where learning takes place have evolved dramatically, and how we manage the delivery of training has likewise changed.

During this evolution, your training delivery management may have become misaligned with what your business actually needs. Ensuring alignment in this area can facilitate better engagement, more growth, and increased customer satisfaction. Read on to learn how to capitalize on and enhance your training delivery management to bring the greatest results to your organization.

5 Tips for Better Training Delivery Management

1. Plan for Demand and Leverage Downtime

Proper demand planning is crucial when managing a training delivery function. It’s important to have an idea of your organization’s anticipated delivery needs—these details will help guide you and allow you to make decisions about how best to utilize your team and identify any resourcing gaps. Demand planning involves consistently looking into the future and anticipating needs.

Bringing attention to periodic or seasonal trends that indicate peaks and valleys in training need can help you manage resources effectively. Anticipating any future need also helps this process. If you know there will be an increased demand for a virtual learning initiative in a few months, you can use that information to ensure you will have enough virtual producer support when the need comes. Utilizing a common system for training intake and requests can help your demand planning run more smoothly.

When you adequately plan for demand, you have the opportunity to optimize for efficiency by leveraging your downtime. Leveraging your downtime involves measuring your utilization—the process of tracking how many days and hours facilitators and other delivery resources spent actually delivering learning.

It is wholly unrealistic to expect delivery resources to have 100% utilization. Needs will always fluctuate—an onboarding course that spans several months will involve much higher time utilization than running a few virtual instructor-led training (VILT) leadership sessions, for instance—but it is important that you also set a utilization target. The industry standard for utilization is around 65% of all available hours. As a delivery resource manager, you want to carefully consider where you want to dedicate the other 35% of the time, be it to plan for upcoming sessions, update materials, refresh skills, practice self-development, or familiarize yourself with operational procedures.

2. Align with Your Customers and Stakeholders

A foundational step in successful delivery management is gaining a deeper understanding of your customer and stakeholder needs. Whether you are working with program stakeholders, executive champions of the initiative, content designers or developers, or even a workforce management team, it’s imperative to align everyone to the same vision and strategy. 

A strategy our delivery management team utilizes when aligning with our partners is to ask various questions such as:

• What business problem are you trying to solve?
• What opportunities are you trying to grasp?
• What will be the duration of this initiative and program?
• What locations and languages do you need delivery support in?
• What expertise and skill sets may be required?

These details can help you build a resource profile to aid in selecting the right team members for the delivery. Once you have drafted a resource profile, remember to share the profile, and then calibrate it with your customers and stakeholders.

3. Have Processes and Procedures for Various Modalities

In recent years, many organizations have examined their learning programs and have begun utilizing different modalities to support learning, such as VILT. While there are still programs being delivered in person, many have shifted to virtual and digital deliveries.

To optimize and ensure a successful delivery management function, examine your processes and procedures and question the reason for choosing specific modalities. While much of the training we see today can be done virtually, a learning need may involve more than self-led eLearning and job aids, requiring a team of producers, facilitators, instructors, and systems that must be synchronized.

Examining how you set up all the distinct types of learning opportunities and how you determine what type of training is needed can help you establish procedures and steps to make things run smoothly. This will enable your project and program managers or coordinators to successfully execute critical steps and tasks for delivery at the time of need. Our experienced project and program managers review the processes and procedures aligned with training and training delivery periodically, for example. Staying up to date and incorporating best practices and your lessons learned can be invaluable.

4. Commit to Ongoing Upskilling and Resource Development Efforts

Learning modalities and strategies are constantly evolving and changing, and keeping current with platforms and tools is critical for delivery management. Because of this, you must develop a plan for ongoing upskilling and development of delivery resources. One way to do this is to take advantage of the various resources through ATD or even a partner like GP Strategies with its many blogs, articles, and webinars on industry changes and hot topics.

With this information on new industry trends, strategies, and modalities, you can build a strategy around how your team will stay up to date and continue its growth. If you have tracked your utilization, this is an ideal way to leverage downtime between training delivery projects. A side bonus of committing time to resource development is that it can dramatically increase engagement and the retention of your top talent.

5. Invest Time in Community and Engagement

A final, key way to improve your training delivery is to provide an opportunity for your training facilitators to communicate and share ideas in this era of decreased connection. Providing a space for your teams to share ideas on hot topics, themes, customer project wins, the launching of new programs, learner reactions, and design quality not only enhances your team’s morale but also promotes knowledge sharing and celebration.

Outside of online communities, you can also consider hosting regular Q&A events on hot topics or trends or creating ongoing touchpoints for quarterly reviews or industry update talks that invite discussion. Find the ways that make sense to build a community for your team and provide easy and constant access to it.

Build and Maintain a Successful Training Delivery Team

There are countless ways to ensure your training delivery management is operating at full efficiency. For more information on how to create or manage a successful delivery team, download GP Strategies’ eBook, First Class Delivery | Building and Maintaining Successful Global Training Delivery Teams, or learn more about our managed learning services.

About the Authors

Megan Bridgett

Megan Bridgett, a leader in training and talent development for over a decade, helps organizations implement, optimize, and increase capabilities in their learning management initiatives.

Nick Williamson

Nick is senior leader in delivery management with 18 years of experience. Nick has built delivery and leadership functions in the Middle East, South Africa, India, Hong Kong, and the UK. His experience spans automotive, communications, banking, and utilities industries. His key skill is the creation of learning delivery teams and governance that supports the consistent approach to having the highest-quality, right-sized faculty in the right location at the right time, to deliver the right course. Nick aims to achieve the right balance between customer satisfaction and business commercial drivers through a relationship and partnership focus.

As we emerge from the pandemic, we have all heard the expression the ‘new normal’. For Learning and Development (L&D), the new normal impacts how to deliver instructor-led training programs. Organizations have learned that there is no longer a ‘one size fits all’ solution. While some individuals are comfortable with reentering the classroom, others may be hesitant for many reasons, including health and wellness. This dynamic has created a need for a hybrid training environment for instructor-led training courses.

Hybrid training is when some of your audience is attending ‘in person’ and some are attending ‘virtually’. The thought of this approach can be daunting for L&D organizations, but certainly not impossible. There are many factors to take into consideration with this approach. For instance, it is important for facilitators to know where people are working from. Some people work virtually from home, in coffee shops, or in a shared space with others. It is especially helpful for a facilitator to know if there is background noise or if participants cannot use a camera. Participants need to ensure they have a place where they can focus.

Also, the facilitator needs to engage equally and understand that they cannot always read the room as easily as when they deliver the training virtually. They must build trust, ensure the training is inclusive, and that people joining virtually have an equally good experience as those in the classroom.

GP Strategies is helping many organizations adapt to this approach. Below are five tips to keep in mind when exploring a hybrid training approach. 

1. Have an onsite support person.

The onsite support person will help set up seating configurations and A/V equipment. They will also help distribute handouts, collect the roster, and serve as a point of contact.

2. Test, test, test.

Prior to the learning session day, it is important that the facilitator and onsite support person align on expectations and setup, as well as test to make sure the desired outcome is accomplished.

3. Determine audio configurations.

As part of the preparation and testing, you will want to determine the best audio configuration so that the learners and facilitator are able to communicate effectively. For larger groups, some find it best to use Voice Over IP (VOIP) which allows the site to use computer speakers to amplify the sound. A smaller setting might find it best to use dial-in with the phone on speaker.

4. Be mindful of activities.

If there are small group or independent exercises or activities, it is important to think through the logistics. How will the facilitator assign the learners to groups? Will the onsite support person provide the instructions? How will the facilitator know everyone is ready to proceed? How will the facilitator be alerted to questions from the participants?

5. Keeping the audience engaged.

The facilitator may not have access to typical body language or cues that help in monitoring for audience engagement. The facilitator will want to leverage strategies such as open-ended questions and pulse checks periodically to monitor for engagement. The facilitator will also want to keep their energy high as they are overcoming the challenge of being remote.

About the Authors

Megan Bridgett

Megan Bridgett, a leader in training and talent development for over a decade, helps organizations implement, optimize, and increase capabilities in their learning management initiatives.

Fran Colavita

Fran Colavita is a senior manager at GP Strategies, leading the instructor resource management teams and global associates network, which includes facilitators and producers.

At some point in our careers we have all experienced a virtual session that has gone wrong.  You’re unable to log in, you send in chats that go unanswered and ignored, and the background noise of another participant is loud and distracting. If the message and content is worth the investment in developing, then it is worth doing it well.

In early March, when our world was experiencing the disruption of daily life and business, I heard many organizations share their stories. One common theme was the need to expedite their virtual and digital learning strategy. But as organizations make this shift, many of these virtual sessions have been met with technical complications, delivery errors, and other issues creating a bumpy virtual experience.

As organizations move into virtual and digital learning, they need to consider adding a critical role to be successful. We have seen survey results from participants of virtual sessions and, frequently, the overall participant post-event survey scores increase when a virtual learning producer is present and supporting the session. Having a producer support virtual and digital learning will help take learning to the next level.

The Underrated Role to Deliver an Organized Session

Imagine a busy office running without the support of an administrator and office manager. Scheduling, customer service, deliveries, paperwork, and much more would add to their already busy schedules. The result would be people without any time, disorganized procedures, and other negative consequences. This is the same for virtual sessions.

We have all attended virtual training that felt chaotic, disorganized, and even distracting. These pain points detract from learning. The digital learning producer role can help take things from a mess to a big success.

Prior to the start of the session, the producer takes steps to set up the training for success. They establish the session in the platform, develop and send custom communications and instructions, and enable all features or tools to be used. A producer helps to establish a strong start to the session by sharing guidelines, answering participant questions, and enabling features that will be used throughout. Producers can provide tutorials on how to use the various tools such as annotation, whiteboards, and polling. They can also troubleshoot any technical challenges that a participant may be experiencing. This support creates a strong foundation for learning.

Imagine how challenging it can be as a facilitator to juggle participant questions, launch interactive tools, and keep participants engaged without a learning producer. We don’t want to eliminate those features, but better manage them. The producer can help by deploying polls, monitoring chat for Q&A, and setting up the whiteboards. This support enables the facilitator to remain focused on the learning and content.

Implementing Your Virtual Strategy With Producers

For these reasons and more, it is important to assess your producer needs and capabilities. Many organizations have shared that they have aggressive timelines in place in order to get learning into the hands of their employees. Because of this, many have leaned on their learning partners for support and upskilling in this space.

Organizations can implement training and certification programs to upskill people for these roles, including:

• Designing virtual instructor-led training (VILT)
• Developing virtual facilitation skills
• Offering producer skill training on a variety of platforms

As you continue to develop and implement your virtual and digital learning strategy, try not to forget the underrated role of the producer. Their support will not go unnoticed in your next virtual training or meeting.

Learn about our Virtual Training and Delivery offerings at GP Strategies.

About the Authors

Megan Bridgett

Megan Bridgett, a leader in training and talent development for over a decade, helps organizations implement, optimize, and increase capabilities in their learning management initiatives.