4 Ways to Provide Virtual Training With a Cloud-Based Classroom

You want your team to be up-to-date on the latest technical skills, leadership methods, and industry trends. However, your budget is limited, and you simply can't afford to pay for expensive travel and registration fees for all of your employees to attend conferences or seminars.

Thankfully, you now have another alternative: using an online classroom for video-based virtual training. With cloud-based technology, you have a variety of options, including video, online collaboration tools, and a hybrid of the two to offer training. Your team can interact with each other and the trainer using whiteboard, poll, or chat features.

Virtual training gives you access to many more options. You can even set up the training based on your company's schedule, so you don't have to worry about having a team member gone the week of a product release because it's the only time the course is offered. In addition to saving significant funds, the sessions can be recorded and other team members can listen to at their convenience.

Here are four ways to use a virtual classroom at your business:

1. New Employee Orientation

It's important that all new employees are onboarded and welcomed to the company so they have the information they need for first day on the job. However, this can be challenging, especially for small companies where a single employee may start on any given day. You can use a virtual classroom to create video and instructions from all the appropriate experts and employees, and then have the new employee complete the training at their leisure. This results in less downtime, and your employees need only present their portion once for the camera, instead of each time a new person joins the company.

2. Customer Training

You land a great new client that requests training for its employees on your product. It used to be easy — just send a team member to hold a session in the company's conference room. Yet with today's global and distributed workforce, it's likely the customer has employees working virtually and/or in satellite offices. Virtual training allows your company to create customized training for all the customer's employees — no matter where they are located — at a fraction of the cost. Companies that were previously unable to offer customer training due to travel and scheduling expenses can now include this as an important feature for new customers.

3. Sessions by Outside Experts

You found the perfect motivational speaker or perhaps the best technical expert on a new software program. However, your employees are not all located in one building — or even the same time zone. You can use a virtual classroom and hire an outside expert to provide training for your distributed workforce at a fraction of the cost of flying everyone to the same location, not to mention the hidden costs of lost productivity.

4. Employee-Led Training

Sometimes, the best experts are your own employees. By using a virtual session, employees can lead a class for others on their area of expertise. And if you send one employee to a conference or training, that team member can lead a session to teach the material to colleagues. Virtual training allows you to deliver the same information to your remote workforce, as well as give employees the option to take the interactive and video training at a time that fits with their work deadlines.

Using a virtual classroom dramatically increases your ability to provide training for your employees and support customer training. By providing virtual training through a cloud-based virtual classroom, your company can boost revenue, productivity, and employee satisfaction.

For more information on the technology needed to start a virtual classroom, contact a Vonage Business representative.