The Return of In-Person Private Training

The Return of In-Person Private Training The return of AgileDad's private in-person training reflects a growing realization that while virtual learning is excellent for knowledge transfer, face-to-face experiences remain one of the most effective ways to build trust, strengthen collaboration, and create lasting organizational change. - [website] ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

• 0:15Speaker 00

  For years, organizations believed virtual training was the wave of the future, and it was the thing to do. It was faster, it was cheaper, it was more convenient, there was no travel expense involved, no conference rooms, no logistics. And then something very unexpected happened. Organizations discovered that while virtual training was excellent at transferring information, it wasn't always as effective at actually changing the behavior. You can do an information exchange on a Zoom call, but trying to change the way that people behave is a totally different story. For example, if you're teaching an AI class, it's easy to try to check everybody's work and see what their prompts look like, but it's just very hard to engage with them,

• 0:56Speaker 00

  execute the prompts, and see things firsthand so that you can give on-the-spot advice. So, behavior change is where real transformation lives. Today, after years of virtual first learning, many organizations are bringing back something they thought they'd far left behind, and that's in-person private training. Now, I don't want to sound like a shameless plug for myself, but it's something that I've seen. So, let's call out what we saw. So, the great virtual experiment. During the pandemic, organizations had no choice. Training moved online overnight. It was something that happened very quickly, and to be fair, many good things happened. Global accessibility improved, travel costs disappeared, scheduling became easier, teams could learn more from anywhere.

• 1:40Speaker 00

  I'm making it sound pretty good. At Agile Dad, we delivered hundreds of virtual courses and helped thousands of professionals earn certifications from Scrum Alliance remotely. Virtual learning proved it could work. But it also revealed something important. Learning and transformation are not always the same thing. So, one of the other things I noticed is sometimes we would have organizations that would request that we do a hybrid where we did something in person on site with a handful of people and the rest of the team would join remotely via link. And that was an even bigger disaster. We'll talk about that in a few minutes. Across industries, leaders are reporting similar challenges. They feel like since they're all remote, the teams are more disconnected.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  Collaboration feels transactional. Trust develops more slowly. Meetings are less engaging. Cross-functional relationships are far weaker. And many organizations aren't looking for more information. They're looking to improve the quality of their teams. They're looking for stronger teams. And that's where in-person experiences shine. So, the science behind in-person, the psychology behind it is very clear. People learn through observation, discussion, practice, feedback, and social interaction. I gave this example in one of my classes recently. I had a CEO of a company who was insistent that he wanted to do all future training virtual. And I turned around and said, you know, while that sounds like a really good idea to you. I said, do you remember when your child was born?

• 3:09Speaker 00

  And I knew he had a relatively young child. And he said, yeah, yeah, I remember. I said, do you remember when I gave you the, uh, the instruction manual? That had all the instructions for how to teach them to talk, how to teach them to walk, how to teach. And he laughed and he goes, you know, kids don't come with an instruction manual. I was like, exactly. And it didn't hit for a few minutes, but if you're trying to teach a child to talk, they're going to learn from observation, practice, feedback, and interaction. The same way as we learn ourselves all throughout our adult life. This isn't just about reading a book and learning. In fact, if reading a book was all we needed to do, I think the majority of us would be sheer geniuses because we could all read a book. But the, the thing is, if everyone read the same book, and I had this happen in high school settings,

• 3:52Speaker 00

  uh, and other settings where everyone reads the same book, but people get, different people get different things out of the book. Right? And that's the important piece. Even though we all read the same exact book, we all get something completely different from it. And that is where the difference lies. It's in that natural collaboration. In a physical classroom, participants experience things that are difficult to replicate virtually, like natural collaboration, where people solve problems together, not through screens, not through chat windows, they actually have to work hands on together. Real time energy, ideas that build on ideas, conversations happen organically. Participants become contributors rather than just spectators on the sidelines. You get immediate feedback because an instructor can read the room, they can pivot, they can adjust,

• 4:37Speaker 00

  they can challenge assumptions, they can spot confusion before it becomes a misunderstanding. It allows you to form stronger memory contacts. People remember experiences more effectively than they do a presentation. The interaction becomes a bigger part of the learning. And let me tell you why private training is leading the comeback. Not all in-person training is created equal. I'm gonna say it again, not all in-person training is created equal. Public classes are valuable, I love them, but organizations are increasingly investing in private workshops. I'm starting to see this shift, Mike Cohen was starting to see this shift. Everybody is seeing organizations reinvest in private training. Why?

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Because private training allows learning to be customized to their reality. Instead of discussing hypothetical examples, teams discuss their products, their customers, their challenges, their constraints. Learning becomes immediately applicable and application is where the ROI begins and it doesn't take a long time to get that application of what you're trying to do. I think the other interesting caveat here is that when you do this type of scenario, where you have everyone in a room talking about their product and what they're working on and what's going on in their constraints, the level of customization becomes so high that it almost says the practicality of the training outweighs the certification of the training, which is really, really interesting. And that's why we've decided to do something differently.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  I'll tell you right now, if any of you have looked at Agile Dad's pricing, we're not necessarily the least expensive, and that's by design. We want you to get value for what you pay for, but at the same time, we don't want to create an environment where we become the commodity that everyone just says, "We're just trying to push as many people through this as possible." The return on investment of in-person learning isn't simply about putting people in a room, it's about creating experiences that drive a lasting change. At Agile Dad, our private training is designed around three core principles. Let's go through those real quick. Number one, relevance over theory. Participants just don't need another textbook, it's a fact. They need practical tools that they can use today, tomorrow.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Every discussion is connected to something that happens in a real workplace situation. So you're not just giving phony examples, or what if, or something that's totally not relevant. Number two, interaction over presentation. By show of hands, how many of you remember slide number 47?

• 7:07Speaker 00

  I do use slides, confession. The only reason I do is to help keep me on track, because my brain will drift elsewhere if I don't. But the slides aren't there for the class. They're there to help enforce where we are in the material, so that people can have the experiences. Remember the exercises, remember the simulations? Oftentimes, I don't even touch every slide inside of my materials. I'll drift, I'll deviate just a little bit, because I like to zoom in and focus in on the things that I feel are most relevant for those groups. In fact, some of the best trainings I've ever done are leadership workshops, or sessions where there's team immersion, where there's no slides at all, and we select a handful of topics, and then I use some type of framework to set up examples that can display on the screen,

• 7:49Speaker 00

  and we talk through those examples, work through those examples, and do interactive exercises to help everyone improve. That's the part to remember. Our classes are designed to maximize engagement, rather than just that passive consumption. And let's go with number three, because I think this is probably the most important one.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  For most training companies, the classroom is where things start and where it ends. And that's it. It's up to you to apply what you learned, not with us. With Agile Dad, the classroom is only the beginning, not the end. Participants receive access to thousands of post-class resources, including videos, podcasts, templates, and guides to help reinforce learning long after their session concludes. So what are we seeing across industries? Organizations are increasingly requesting private onsite experiences for scrum teams, agile teams, product teams, project teams, leadership groups, PMOs, technology organizations, business operation teams, and get this, train-to-trainer models. Now, this is one that a lot of other organizations are afraid to touch, but I'm not.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  If you want me to come in and train some of the trainers in your very large organization on how to really teach something that works, I can do that. Now, I can't guarantee the results that you get from those trainers doing the exact same training, but what I can tell you is in many organizations, the train-to-trainer model has worked for us. It's been nice, and it's worked out for those organizations as well. So it's all about capability building. The common theme isn't necessarily certification. We want to build capability, and leaders want teams that learn how to collaborate better, adapt faster, make decisions more easily, and deliver more effectively. I want to make sure I said that word right. We are focused on outcome, not output. It's not about efficiency, it's about effectiveness, right? Okay, and let's talk for a moment just about the real ROI.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  So many organizations try to calculate training ROI incorrectly. They tend to focus on things like the airfare for the trainer, the airfare for the students, the hotels, the classroom costs. Those expenses are the visible expenses. But the hidden costs are often much higher than the visible expenses. The hidden costs could include misalignment of teams, rework of a lot of the materials in hidden factory, communication breakdowns, slow decision-making, team dysfunction. One breakthrough conversation in a classroom often eliminates months of friction of trying to figure out things on your own, and that's where the real return lies. So the future, in my opinion, isn't necessarily just virtual or just in person.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  The future is choosing the right tool to achieve the right outcome. Virtual learning remains powerful for individuals who want to be certified, for really heavily distributed teams across a worldwide audience, ongoing reinforcement of principles that have already been learned, or just in time, learning to get a certification or get a credential, so you can pass a different certification or credential. In-person learning sells when organizations are looking for true team alignment, real culture shifts, real behavioral change, strategic collaboration, accelerated transformation, and business change management. The strongest organizations are leveraging a little of one and a lot of both, is what it boils down to. So for years, organizations optimized learning for their convenience.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  Today, most are optimizing learning for impact. And that's why we're seeing the return of private in-person training, not because virtual learning failed, it didn't fail, but because organizations have rediscovered something important, that people learn information individually. Teams learn information together. And when the goal is lasting change, there's still something powerful about putting great people in the room together and helping them solve real-world problems side by side. That's why I'm proud to announce the return of AgileDad's private in-person training, where it reflects a growing realization that while virtual learning is excellent for knowledge transfer, face-to-face experiences remain one of the most effective ways to build trust,

• 11:49Speaker 00

  strengthen collaboration, and create lasting organizational change. So one of the things that we've done on our website right now, if you go to the first page and you say, "Learn about private training, learn about private engagements," there's a simple form you can fill out. It's just a few questions and it will get you in touch with someone from our training group that can walk you through, give you pricing. We're transparent about all of our pricing. We're transparent about all of our offerings. That's one thing about us that will never change. Like I said, we always try to provide you with the best service possible, but we also want to provide you with the best experience possible. So that's going to do it for this episode. I hope that you enjoyed it. You have a topic you want us to discuss, learn more at agiledad.com. We would love to hear from you. And as always, we encourage you to stay healthy, stay well, and stay agile, my friends. Until next time, do take care. Bye now.