Dave Derington: [00:00:00] Yes. Shaggy would say zoinks.
No, that’s Scooby.
Welcome to CELab the customer education laboratory, where
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:19] we explore
Dave Derington: [00:00:19] how to build customer education programs, experiment with new approaches and exterminate the myths and bad advice that stopped growth. Dead in his tracks. I am Dave Derington
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:31] and I am rockin AdamAvramescuu Rajan and rock.
Dave Derington: [00:00:36] Oh my gosh.
Okay. I’ll have to come up with one for the next episode.
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:40] It’s been a while since we were, on mic together there. Sorry, I just got so excited that I had to come up with a new DJ persona.
Dave Derington: [00:00:47] let’s frame this up. we’ve come off of a lot of CEO based, Sessions podcast episodes, the whole thing where we talked and we got the lay of the land of the industry, and now we’re going to do something a little bit different and equally as important.
So what is it we’re up to today?
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:02] you’re right. We’ve had plenty of really good CEO interviews. We’ve gotten the view from that level, but we’re also recording this again during, the global pandemic and the world and our country is just starting to. Reopen. And so if you take that broad view, 2020 has brought some really dramatic changes to the world in general, not just for customer education, but those of us who are in training and education we’ve we felt those impacts.
So we thought maybe a good time to continue looking at the state of the industry.
Dave Derington: [00:01:33] Yeah, this is really good. as we would say, the work still goes on, we’re doing a lot and Adam, I know you’re doing this as well as I am at outreach where we’re scrambling to bring, really good new types of programs, more virtual, more online, focused on scale that we haven’t done before.
This is all kind of new. So this is. We’d say a good time to start taking a step back and really look at the landscape of customer education. Where is our industry at today and where it’s going? So
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:05] today, Dave
Dave Derington: [00:02:06] today? Yeah,
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:07] today’s national practice delivery day.
Dave Derington: [00:02:09] Oh, there’s a few down the street from me. I need to check out.
what have you gotten your neck of the woods?
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:15] I think most of them are doing takeout only, but we’ve got some good places here in Oakland, California.
Dave Derington: [00:02:20] no delivery
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:22] a delivery from a craft distillery. I would have to check that out. I don’t know.
Dave Derington: [00:02:30] Cool.
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:31] Yeah. So to that end, there have been a few reports released in the past few months on the state of customer education. And actually some of them are so recently released. That they actually include some insights on the impact of COVID-19 on training programs. So we’re going to do a bit of a series of mini episodes, and this will be almost like a literature review where we analyze some of these reports and we summarize the findings and, Dave and I will, we’ll talk a little bit about our takeaways and insights as well.
Dave Derington: [00:03:02] Yeah. So let’s get going here and we’ll start today with, the state of education services 2020. The first report we’re looking at comes from TSIA at the technology services industry association. and this is by our friend, Maria Manning Chapman. She leads their education services practice. So this is really relevant, really timely material for us.
And what’s interesting about this report is that it came out mere days before we all started this diaspora from our offices, taking home, all our gear, getting set up and going into quarantine. Yeah.
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:37] So we’ll take a look at the findings from this report and we can also actually compare this to some post quarantine data that Maria compiled.
So she has a customer education at the time of COVID-19, okay. Let’s dive in. The first finding in this report is really around the purpose of education organizations. And you’re going to see this in a lot of the reports that we analyze. Everyone’s trying to figure out what is customer education here to do exactly.
And let’s highlight that this report does by a somewhat towards education and services organizations, excuse me. Cause TSIAis primarily for services based programs, right? It’s technology services. So we’re going to be seeing education services more than say these like very smaller startup oriented customer education teams, where they’re doing very generalized things.
Cool.
Dave Derington: [00:04:29] So this is really interesting. and I don’t know about you, Adam. I’ve been in both, I’ve been in several different kinds of departments as a customer education function. One of them being professional services. So I’m really interested in all of these. Yeah. Because they’re helping us validate some of our hypothesis that we’ve had.
Why, what customer education does, where does it belong? So let’s go to this one. Now the TSIApolled a number of organizations, which are largely moving towards that SaaS software as a service model. And they pulled them about their top objectives, services, profitability, how much money are you pulling in market?
Share customer satisfaction. C-SAT really important services, revenue, or product adoption. And the results compared to 2019 were rather interesting. in 2019, the largest driver was what do you think it was?
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:20] I am going to say, what were the options again? Profitability market share C-SAT services, revenue, or product adoption in 2019.
What was the most important driver? I think it was probably services revenue.
Dave Derington: [00:05:35] That’s correct. So blessed, but let’s talk more about what that is. w why is that important? What do we mean?
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:42] Okay. So I think that’s important because that’s the actual revenue generated through education services.
So like I sell an onsite training for $20,000. And so I brought in. $20,000 in revenue now, right?
Dave Derington: [00:05:52] Yeah. Good job. That’s pretty good.
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:56] That’s pretty good amount math that I can handle
Dave Derington: [00:05:58] no square number. so yeah, the last year that was the top response, 40% of orgs, they were driving that
Adam Avramescu: [00:06:06] goal. And
Dave Derington: [00:06:07] this year, however, something’s changed that moved to second place.
Only 24% of the org said, revenue. Was their primary goal now. Okay. let’s go back quiz show. What do you think? And everybody listening, what would you think is the top goal for this year?
Adam Avramescu: [00:06:28] So I’m going to pretend like I haven’t seen the report. I’m guessing profitability would not be the main driver because most education programs, even education services programs, they generate revenue, but they don’t necessarily.
Exist as a pure profitability play. it’s probably not market share either because again, for a lot of education services, if you’re attached to a SaaS product, you’re probably not necessarily just trying to dominate market share in the same way as if you were saying like an education business,
Or a learning business, right? Yeah. And those aren’t really a Vogue as the French say for education teams, it could be customer satisfaction, but. That doesn’t usually pay the bills. And again, I’m thinking this is education services here, so I’m going to say it’s product and function.
Dave Derington: [00:07:19] Yeah. Product adoption.
and let’s think about that again. I like to frame it in terms of Adam, what was your saying? no. customer education is
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:30] the scale engine of customer success.
Dave Derington: [00:07:34] that’s product adoption. did you reduce churn and increase, increase revenue and increasing your revenue is increasing your product adoption?
Yeah,
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:43] absolutely. And this is something Dave that you and I have seen as an industry trend for awhile, and I’m actually, I’m surprised in some ways that we’re seeing these larger education services teams start to shift in that direction as well. And if you look at some of the. Analysis from Maria’s report.
She actually analyzed this as well. And I think she was surprised, but she called it the education services paradox. So in the report she has a hypothesis. Yeah. here’s the paradox. Her hypothesis is the people are answering the product. Adoption is their top objective because that is the response that is.
As the French say,
Dave Derington: [00:08:24] everybody’s doing it. Everybody’s saying it
Adam Avramescu: [00:08:27] everybody’s. Yeah, exactly. So everybody is saying the product adoption is the most important thing. our SaaS products are SaaS companies. They really care about product adoption. So we’re all running after that training, like how every education services team over the past five years has gone from being just a pure revenue play to saying that.
customer education is customer success. I think that like part of these survey responses might be obvious skating. The actual purpose of these education services teams, which is probably still a revenue based. So that’s her offices. So she,
Dave Derington: [00:09:02] Oh, you’re saying that it’s a ruse or it’s misleading.
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:05] Not that it’s a ruse, I don’t know. I think they’re answering disingenuously. I don’t think that’s how she would interpret it, but more rather than. Because we’re seeing such a push towards the ROI of customer education coming from the way that it drives product adoption. She thinks that’s why more education teams are starting to answer that’s their top objective and that’s their purpose.
But because product adoption doesn’t necessarily pay the bills, most education services teams don’t actually directly drive or measure product adoption because that’s usually what the product team does or maybe a growth marketing team. I think the idea here is that maybe they’re responding the product adoption is the most important thing in name only because they support SaaS products, but really the main thing that they’re still driving and the main thing where they still have the most agency is driving revenue.
Is that, does that resonate with you dad?
Dave Derington: [00:09:58] Unfortunately it does. Maybe. I shouldn’t say unfortunately, Okay. W well, let’s get down to brass tacks here. So even though you and I have worked for, companies, various different sizes, optimize the slag Checkr, Gainsight, and now, outreach and no, I’ll let them drop.
That was really cool too. the larger you get, let’s go back. Each one of these programs we built has different kinds of programs and different kinds of goals. w we may have an outcome of, we have, we want to increase product adoption, or maybe the real problem is that people just don’t get what we’re trying to do.
so the larger you get. The more pressure there really seems to be, to generate that revenue. Now, I want to tell you a live story, a real story. I live this life. I think this is the thing Adam, that you and I value about this podcast is because this is a us as service practitioners, right? We’re servant leaders.
we’re trying to share where we’re learning. And we’re learning a lot. and transparently, I was at outreach and initially in customer success, reporting straight to the SVP of customer success and things were slightly different from now where we’ve reorged. And now I am reporting it through professional services.
And I can tell you even today, this is really weird. this is really weird to me in the same space. Paragraph Somebody is talking. I’ll hear one of my leaders say, I don’t know if I really care about the revenue coming out of this because of the education is so important to me. And that’s the SaaS customer success term tone, right?
It’s that adoption. But on the other hand, I’m also hearing, I have these two little voices in my ears and I’m in progressing. yeah, they walk in and, photo bomb the zooms all the time, but they say all the things
Adam Avramescu: [00:11:41] that we’re dealing with, that’s walking,
Dave Derington: [00:11:45] dADDIE, can you help me give me your password to the Xbox?
That’s more like what that is. no, in the services side of it, Adam is different from what I hear is yes, that’s nice, the product adoption stuff, but we got to get people onboarded and we also have to sell packages. Okay. Yeah, I, there it’s, I’m not going to steal thunder from what we’re going to talk about later, but this is a good dichotomy.
It’s really interesting.
Adam Avramescu: [00:12:08] there’s a certain, there’s a connect. I think overall between what a business will say as important. And I think this is Maria’s education paradox, like writ large. there’s a disconnect between what and a business will stay as important. So making customers successful customer success is important.
We can say it’s important. Educating our customers, education is important, right? We’ll say it’s important, but from a financial perspective, look, you’re working with your FP and a team. to continue making investments in these programs, if they’re considered a cost center, they still need to actually see that ROI.
So for our customer success team, again, there’s going to be an impact on product adoption. And that might be the most important thing, but really what a customer success team has to do is. Oh, and renewals and drive renewals or non-expansion drive expansion. if they’re just in waving around the idea that they drive product adoption, they’re not going to continue to get meaningful investment from the business.
In most cases, even though making customers successful is important. There’s a difference between saying somatically and then actually doing measurable things that drive that. And I think the same is true for customer education. And in the report, you can see the majority of education services team.
So like 60% of the respondents this year, they operate on a revenue or profit and money. so they’re actually not set up as a cost center. They’re not set up as cost recovery, and even as it starts to change the SaaS, and I think we’ll see more cost center, more cost recovery programs coming online, especially in some of these smaller programs, grow up the fundamental education services model.
Hasn’t. Really changed. So it’s going to be really interesting to see what the smaller programs that exist today as free programs who don’t necessarily have their own autonomous budget. what are they going to evolve into? Are they going to become bigger free programs? I know there’s a lot of inspiration now looking at programs like Salesforce, Trailhead, which is free and open, online, and becomes a big, marketing push for Salesforce.
it has a lot of network effects in the business, but it’s not necessarily. Drive and monitor revenue. It’s probably treated as a cost center for Salesforce, or are they going to slowly evolve or mutate into revenue properties?
Dave Derington: [00:14:24] This is interesting. And so I’m going to try to channel my inner Maria because I think we should all as customer education leaders do that because she’s
Adam Avramescu: [00:14:32] got that.
I have her on the show. Maria, if you’re listening, we would love to have you on the show.
Dave Derington: [00:14:35] Yeah, let’s set it up real. Let’s do this. I would say, she’d probably argue that these programs will develop fee to free spectrum meaning, and I’m seeing this, and I think you’ve seen this, I know you’ve seen this.
We’ve been in enough different environments to see that. And this is something that I really wanted for my career as a customer education leader, I’ve been in several different places and I’ve seen different things, but now I see how the arc. The what we’re here, what we’re called to do, Adam is really start off somewhere, get, start to get a scrappy program together, get this material together.
But at some inflection point, along that way, we literally shift gears and we start thinking, okay, now I have this free content and people are excited about it, but then like a freemium model or something where, you know, somebody Bates you into and I’m not talking bait switch.
somebody gets you excited. Oh, you have material now. The company invests. And now we have some fee-based programs that are a much higher quality with more rigorous outcomes and structure. So it’s an evolution like you were saying, will things slowly mutant to revenue programs. Some of them will, I think, but the way that happens in which ones are going to be unique to every company that you work for.
Adam Avramescu: [00:15:45] Is that fair? Yeah, that’s fair. And I think that, if you look at the difference trends as w what customers, you could, a customer education programs, you starting to encompass. If you look at things like knowledge bases, help centers in product education, things that are really supposed to directly drive product adoption of support ticket reduction.
Those which are really about removing friction from the customer experience are probably going to remain on the free side of the spectrum. Same for webinars or thought leadership or pieces like that, which in many cases are owned by marketing, by customer education. we’ll get involved there as well.
Yeah. Those are going stay free. It’s the more premium bespoke offerings that you still need to create some sort of a value driver with that because otherwise what’s the incentive. If we. If we build a team that customizes these beautiful bespoke trainings for every customer who asks for it and it’s free and we market it well very quickly, you’re going to be going back to the business and you’re going to be asking for, like 26 head and here to customize all that beautiful content.
So in a way there needs to be, a revenue incentive around that. And as Maria says, thinks she’s used the analogy before. Like you, you can’t just go back, with your hands cuffed and asked for. You’re a CRO to pull money out of his wallet. Yeah,
Dave Derington: [00:17:01] I think that happens a lot. And I think it’s just natural because of who we are and how we fall accidentally in large number of times into this role.
So those of you who are listening may have fallen into a customer education leadership role, and you’re like, okay, how does this all play down? It’s a it’s. You’ve got to think about the journey. Like where are you going, where you’re headed, and think about some stuff is free and it should be free and it should always be free.
There are things like a, let’s say you’re packaging up an onboarding program with demonstrable outcomes and a lot of support and time and invested in, and you can leverage that. Fee to make, build in the quality and staff it. So I, I think early on at M and a, and I’m running in maybe some things that you’re thinking about here, but to me, a, a green horn coming into the thing, I’m like, everything should be free.
It’s. We have a lot of tools in our toolkit and one of them being revenue and it’s not a bad thing. And it needs just to be, as it’d be deployed, like she said, fi two free. There’s a lot of use our tools and at our own discretion for the impact they need to have.
Adam Avramescu: [00:18:11] And again, it’s a journey that you’re on, right?
if you’re listening to this and you are leading a new customer education team at a startup and. Your startups, investors are trying to drive growth at all costs. Then you’re probably not having those conversations with your business because you’re trying to drive user growth, and doing anything that you can activate that even if you’re burning money to do it.
Yeah. Not necessarily thinking about revenue or profitability, but if you start to look across. The types of organizations who might be pulled by TSIA or Setema probably has a lot of the same types of organizations in there while all of a sudden revenue. And to some extent, profitability probably become more important in general.
I’m generalizing a little bit here. Yeah. Yeah. But, okay. So we talked a little bit about marketing these programs a moment ago, and I want to come back to that because the other interesting figure that TSIAmonitors is training penetration. So penetration, what does that mean? The report looks at install-based penetration rates, which means the percentage of accounts in your customer base that consumed training rates.
You’ve got like a hundred accounts. 30 of them consumed training. That’s a 30% install-based penetration rate. Then they look at account-based penetration rate, which is the average percentage of addressable learners within an individual account. They consume training.
Dave Derington: [00:19:32] okay. Let’s say like your whole market and then a client of mine and all the people that are within that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:19:37] Yeah, exactly. So client X has a hundred employees. 20 of those employees take the training. That’s 20% account-based ministration rate. So Dave, you quizzed me earlier. Now I’m going to quiz you a percentage of a company’s accounts. Do you think. Consume training. So what do you think the average install base?
Dave Derington: [00:20:00] Oh, everybody. Everybody does, Everybody in that company? no, I know that’s not true, but I’ll take
wishful thinking. you want to think that don’t you and I don’t mean to get off into the weeds, but when you spend a lot of time, Building content and making, all this great stuff and having a learning journey.
You want people to come and consume that? let me say it. Yeah. That’s
Adam Avramescu: [00:20:21] that’s like a product team, right? If a product team spends all this time creating a beautiful product and then they never actually market it, how will people find that product?
Dave Derington: [00:20:30] I’m going to do a wild guess 50%. Okay.
Adam Avramescu: [00:20:35] That’s a good guess. it’s pretty close, but it’s actually a little bit lower than that. It’s 37
Dave Derington: [00:20:40] 37. Okay. So that’s which metric here?
Adam Avramescu: [00:20:46] That’s install-based penetration.
Dave Derington: [00:20:47] So wait, so if I have a thousand people, a thousand users, then that’s 370 of these users actually did any kind of training.
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:00] Dave, I can’t follow that math, but I believe you.
So yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:21:04] come on,
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:05] right? Like it’s 31% of 37% of our total audience when you add it up because the account-based penetration rate is 31%. Yeah. So first of all, think about that 37% install-based penetration. That means there’s. Dave checked my bathroom, 63% of accounts that you need to go market your education to because they haven’t taken anything.
Dave Derington: [00:21:29] Yeah. if I recall looking through the report as well, even within those accounts who do the, consume the training, right? All the customers that penetration rate was still the TSIAre I report said 31%,
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:42] even lower. Yeah. So again, you’re the math guy. I’m not like if you take 31% of 37%, that means of all of the available users at all the companies that are in your install base.
That means like 11% of those users who are getting educated,
Dave Derington: [00:22:01] shaggy would say zoinks,
no, that’s Scooby.
Adam Avramescu: [00:22:10] No, I think it’s a, okay. I’m making a different reference, but as much as to say we have, we have a marketing problem in customer education and Dave, to your point, we often say, we’ve created this great education should speak for itself. We’ve sent emails out to our customers.
We’ve told our CSMs that this exists, but this training is not getting consumed. It’s not getting sold. But the problem there is we’re not doing anything to market it. And in many cases, the problem might also be that the training itself just. Isn’t relevant. Isn’t doing the job within our account things.
Dave Derington: [00:22:47] Oh, got it. Help us. I hope that’s not the case, but yeah, you’re right. It does, I wanted to chime in here real quick though. on this thread, I had the great fortune. To work at Azuqua in marketing, reported to gentlemen, Dan Cogan, who was their chief marketing officer, great guy. And he had a great program and we did things differently there.
This was like really? And it was an opportunity to test a hypothesis and I’ll keep it brief. Is that okay? When you’re in marketing, when you’re not in marketing, you don’t think like a marketer when you’re thinking of marketing, your everything’s important, but you have to be on brand and you have to be driving to an outcome.
What do I want to do? I’m trying to get people through that marketing funnel. And I had the good fortune to actually be able to make some content in a way that was more palatable to people to get excited about, bring the enthusiasm in a little LinkedIn video, small three-minute videos about a product.
It was more product marketing, but there was, it led into education. So I would have longer form material waiting for them. And that was super cool because I think we don’t think that way we don’t think I just made this and here it is, and everybody should use it. that’s why they built way you build.
If you build it, they don’t come because you’re not a marketer.
Adam Avramescu: [00:23:58] Yeah. I think someone who has always done this really well is Mark Kilens, who used to lead HubSpot Academy. And now he’s a draft. I think he does a really good job, not just building education programs, but really thinking about them like marketer as well.
Okay. So we won’t summarize the entire report. it’s at TSIA.com and you can navigate to education services to see the report and downloaded along with a bunch of really other good findings for Maria and team. But when you go there, you’ll see some other interesting topics, like how education services need to diversify, how they go to market.
I eat, not just being bundled in with the software sale, because we know that’s not always a great way to sell education services. it looks at how prompts to consume education actually increase uptake. So again, when we market education to people, they are more likely to consume it. And how companies drive learning through subscriptions, which is a hot topic for revenue driving programs, instead of just selling trainings, ad hoc, they do a learning subscription programs.
Dave Derington: [00:25:00] Yeah. All very extremely interesting stuff. The report had a lot of great stuff in there. I really liked, for example, they were starting to talk about through times right now with COVID going on, how we’ve radically shift to different modalities, to where virtual, courses and more on demand. And it’s great for those of us who actually have been positioned for that.
It’s like breathing more fresh air. It’s just wonderful.
Adam Avramescu: [00:25:27] so that’s one thing that was really interesting, right? Because this report that we’re analyzing right now, this actually came out again, literally like days before we all started going home. And when that report broke down, where all services revenue was coming from a shocking amount of, it was still coming from onsite training.
Dave? Oh
Dave Derington: [00:25:47] yeah. most of the line chair of our training was. On demand or I’m sorry, on site, we send people all over the world. And that was really important because I had been saying, as you would, we’ve got to shift gears and do less of the on-sites and it’s not that we don’t stop it. It’s more that we mix it up.
We have mixed mode training where we do some virtual, we do some onsite, but you use it as a tool when you need it. Most. but now we’ve had this, permission, I think, to really shift gears and go all on demand and all virtual, which allows us to do a lot more with a lot less. But I don’t know about you and we’re as busy if not busier than we were when we were traveling.
Adam Avramescu: [00:26:29] Yeah. it’s just the nature of what we do has shifted. And especially for businesses like ours, that really. Facilitate people doing things online that they might’ve used to do in person. But speaking of which, if you look at, if you look at onsite training, so the way they broke it down, 38% of all services revenue was coming from onsite training in a pre COVID world.
And an additional 26% was coming from public classroom training. So instead of doing onsite training, where we go to you, this is you come to us like, yeah, we’ll set up a room at the Hilton and you come to the course, What about the ILT and e-learning and custom content development, or were those in the next?
Dave Derington: [00:27:09] Yeah, they were, and I have to think of the numbers here. were some stats that we were talking about, some companies are offering a lot of public classroom training. Like you were just talking about, those. Those public trainings. let’s just use this status is interesting. in public classroom training, 65% of those students ended up re-enrolling in via LTS.
that’s pretty interesting. Although there was a number of people. Yeah. And COVID hit. And I saw this anyway because what I always like to offer an about you, but. Let’s say we send somebody out to do a training. I always like to not only record that account-based training for them and have that in the back pocket, but give access to all of the virtual and all the on-demand material.
And then you can easily see when a trainer goes in and says, our training consult says, Hey, and you know what? I’m not going to let you get out of here before until you. Look at the survey, but I want you to go to this material. They use it. This is the curriculum you have online. If something that I didn’t say, if I said, didn’t stick, then go here.
And we’ve seen a lot bigger updated on that. In fact, something that really shocked me, was that we released some new public classes, public virtual instructor lessons, scheduled that anybody can go to as long as they have a seat and without advertising, without promoting, without saying anything about them, I expect to have zero.
People on. And some of them, the classes were filling
Adam Avramescu: [00:28:28] because customers are looking for this stuff. They’re hungry. Some of it is just a new way of thinking. So these haven’t been strong revenue drivers in the past, doing VILT or e-learnings or custom content development. As a service, people were really used to generating revenue through onsite training Republic, classroom training, but all of this has started to flip.
Now the COVID has hit and TSIAactually released a follow-up report. This is where some of the stats we’re talking about now are coming from, and that follow-up report was called customer training in the time of coronavirus. So a little bit of a play there on, Love in the time of Colorado. So there, Maria track the actions and education services organizations, chop to respond quickly.
So some of them ended up canceling their scheduled training, some converted, those trainings to be ILT. some of them automatically we enrolled their students in the equivalent VILT of what they might’ve already enrolled in. And you mentioned that 65% of those students. Who were in, the public classroom trainings.
Yeah. They ended up re-enrolling in the equivalent VILT courses. But what else did we see in that report?
Dave Derington: [00:29:36] there were a 25% just wanted to wait until the next one, but that’s a pretty low number. So they’re like, eh, okay, I’ll go do the VILT. I think there’s a lot of people that wanted to have that little bit more of attention.
Adam Avramescu: [00:29:49] Yeah. Yeah. let’s say that was geographic was a geographic split too, right? so for customers who
Dave Derington: [00:29:55] had
Adam Avramescu: [00:29:57] private on-site training, like where we like we, the education team come to your office and train your people. In North America, 71% of the respondents, like they were perfectly fine transitioning
Dave Derington: [00:30:08] or used to it
Adam Avramescu: [00:30:09] perfectly fine was often reported that they were, maybe they were coaxed into it outside of North America.
And especially in Asia, Pacific 46% of customers chose to defer training. So like those numbers, the 65, 25 there, some of that is geographical where it’s if you’re in Asia Pacific, where some of the norms and mores are more around like training must be face-to-face. That’s where you’re more likely to see someone waiting until the instructor can come onsite.
Dave Derington: [00:30:33] Yeah, that is definitely true. And that’s okay. we are, we have, when you start thinking about international training and you might not be there yet, that probably also happens at some inflection point in your organization’s growth cycle. And we’ve seen a big uptake in that uptick in international stuff within the last year.
But prior to that, not so much. it’s interesting to think about, and we have had those asks like, Oh, I know I really want you to come to us. And we’re like, we can’t, we’re not going to nobody’s traveling. Sorry. and I’ve even seen those companies say, okay, we understand it’s a unique time. Let’s do it virtual.
So though that we’re making progress there too.
Adam Avramescu: [00:31:12] Yeah. One thing that I was having this conversation with my team because we’ve had similar conversations where maybe the customer was expecting us to come onsite. part of how we do training on Slack is we train in Slack. So there’s a combination of the, would say the ILT techniques and then using Slack as part of the training modality to promote interactivity.
It’s pretty cool. First of all, often customers need to see it to believe it. I’m thinking in some ways, some of the stories that we’re encountering now, like who might’ve been initially resistant to this modality, but then we were able to work with them because their hand was forced by us not being able to travel.
and then actually seeing the way that we were facilitating in Slack and opening your eyes to the possibilities. I imagine some of this may be case studies that we’ll use afterwards,
Dave Derington: [00:31:57] because, Oh
Adam Avramescu: [00:31:57] gosh, so much of this collaboration does not need to be happening in the classroom.
Dave Derington: [00:32:01] Can I tell you a quick story about that before we wrap up?
So we, we had a candidate yeah. For, for, in one of our interviews and we hired her. She’s great. She’s one of our best trainers and she came on board faster than anybody. But she did her demo. Her practical on Slack. Yeah. One of the things in practical. Yeah. You can say it sometime you can’t hire away.
but the coolest thing that she did was that she used Slack every step of the way and it, she was virtual, she was remote and we were all in the conference room and she said, okay, because some of you were there in the conference room pre COVID. I want a couple of you to step out of the room. Okay.
And then she said something to us, outside of Slack. And then we came back in and she said, what did you all think about this? And the people that went out of the room were like, ah, we’re out of we’re we don’t know what’s going on. And she said, that’s what I want you to feel when we’re moving to virtual.
We’re using tools like Slack to do certain, communicate in different ways. And she literally used this as a very impactful tool to show how virtual instructor led trainings can be enhanced. And I love that
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:14] prompts to her original.
Dave Derington: [00:33:16] It was very experiential and, but yeah. She did it effectively in a virtual context too.
And that was really neat.
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:22] That’s cool. I love that. That’s so uncomfortable. I love it. cool. So yeah, I’m saying that in a good way. It’s
Dave Derington: [00:33:29] so uncomfortable and I love it. Okay.
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:33] Sometimes discomfort drives more learning than if you’re perfectly comfortable the whole time. There’s science to support that as well.
But that’s not what we’re talking about in this episode. What we’re talking about here is TSIAreports. We’ll recap, a couple of other findings here. We don’t want to spoil the whole thing cause we want you to go to tsa.com and check these out. But, some of the other trends that they found in the post COVID time was, many organizations they’re relying more heavily on GLTs on virtual labs.
They’re really trying to keep trainings interactive and to your point experiential. And then we’re also seeing the role of certification change. So many education services orgs are offering. Grace periods, extensions or vouchers for certification, or they’re just giving back to their communities by offering their training or certifications for free mean university students or people affected by layoffs or even the general public.
So it’s really interesting to see how education teams are responding to some of the things that we can do uniquely during this
Dave Derington: [00:34:28] time. That’s really cool. It’s really cool to see.
Adam Avramescu: [00:34:31] Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:34:32] So shall we
Adam Avramescu: [00:34:33] record? Yeah. where can we find this information if we’re looking for more?
Dave Derington: [00:34:36] if you want to find out more, we always recommend visiting a TSIA.com.
they’re a great professional work for education services team. And I would say even, especially for those of you who are starting to come over the hump and you’re in a bigger organization when you’re faced with revenue generating decision-making and you want to understand more about how do you make a business.
Out of your education. TSIA is one of the best places to go. So go in and check them out.
Adam Avramescu: [00:35:03] And if you want to learn more, we have a podcast website@customer.education. You can put some agency pieces in there if you want. It’s fine. It’s all gravy there. You can find show notes and other information. I am on Twitter
Dave Derington: [00:35:18] and I’m @davederington.
Also on the Twitters
Adam Avramescu: [00:35:21] and special thanks to Alan Koda. Actually, I don’t know if that’s a sort of handle, but thank you, Alan Koda for his theme music.
Dave Derington: [00:35:28] And if this helped you out, you can help us out by subscribing in Apple podcast, overcast, Stitcher, Spotify, whatever your pod catcher of choice. It helps us a lot,
Adam Avramescu: [00:35:39] when you do so
Dave Derington: [00:35:40] also do this, please consider leaving us a positive review, especially on Apple podcasts.
We’re still hanging in on our five
Adam Avramescu: [00:35:47] star rating. We’re
Dave Derington: [00:35:48] really excited about that. You guys are great. it helps us so much. Those two things get our podcast exposed to the rest of the world, to other people and help us keep this going.
Adam Avramescu: [00:35:58] We know you’re not commuting right now. So what a perfect time to, Leave a review while you’re at your computer.
Dave Derington: [00:36:03] Indeed.
Adam Avramescu: [00:36:05] And so our audience, thanks for joining us. Go out and educate experiment and classic. Thanks everybody.