The Challenge for Itential – Costly In-Person Training
The Itential Academy, Itential’s dedicated customer and partner training team, is tasked with enabling users to utilize and build applications on the Itential platform. For years, the team trained users via in-person Instructor-Led Training (ILT), but this came with its own set of challenges.
Itential’s customers needed to travel onsite for training. Due to reduced or eliminated budgets, some customers could not attend training and were unable to fully leverage Itential’s solution. Meanwhile, others could not receive timely training or refreshers when needed.
Also, static lab guides were not effective and were “a persistent source of problems during classes,” said Andrew Austin, Director of Itential Academy. “Customers became frustrated when they made mistakes that can be mitigated with dynamic course material.”
This classroom-based approach limited scalability. Because Itential’s only instructor was constantly delivering training courses, he was unable to spend more time developing new course material. As Itential’s user base rapidly grew, so did the team’s need for a scalable training platform.
The Solution – Individual Virtual Lab Environments
Itential needed a learning management system with individual lab environments, and they turned to Appsembler’s experiential learning platform including Virtual Labs and Tahoe, a learning management system. “At its core, Itential is a software company and not a training practice,” said Austin.
With Virtual Labs, Itential was able to deliver dynamic HTML lab guides and provide each learner with a personal lab environment to run the Itential platform. These hands-on labs allowed learners to easily access the container’s command line (through GoTTY) over an HTTP protocol to upgrade, stop, reconfigure and start the Itential platform. Learners can also interact with a development environment over an HTTP protocol (through Orion) for building new applications. Meanwhile, all of Itential’s course lectures are hosted seamlessly on Tahoe, bringing the learner experience full circle.
The Results – Over 100% Growth in Training Attendance
By adopting Appsembler’s experiential learning platform to provide individual lab environments, “Itential is able to deliver more training than previously possible,” said Austin. “Estimated projections indicate over 100% growth in training attendance.”
With self-paced, cloud-based virtual training labs, Itential’s partners and customers are no longer limited by time constraints or budget restrictions – they can receive training anytime they want, as often as they want.
Additionally, the Itential Academy is able to focus on providing the range of courses that customers need. Austin said,
“Itential recovered 80% of the training team’s time, which is now used to develop and improve new course material for customers.”
With Virtual Labs, “Customers gain a better understanding of our solution and how to best leverage it for their use cases because they are able to repeat training when needed,” said Austin.