Online vs. In-Person Training

There were definitely pros and cons to both the online and in-person training, but overall I felt that the in-person training worked best for me. The advantages of online tutorials are that I have the flexibility to work at my own pace without the pressure of having to keep up with my classmates. I can also stop, pause, restart, fast forward, rewind, etc. in online training, which is a helpful way to go over material that I didn’t understand the first time. However, the biggest problem for me was that I lacked the advantage of asking questions about material that I couldn’t understand no matter how many times I re-watched the online tutorials.

The ability to ask questions and have things explained in multiple ways was what made the in-person training more effective for me and basically more enjoyable overall. It also helped that the class size was a bit smaller (I participated in the excel workshop), so that allowed us to have a bit more one on one access to the instructor. While that might not be the case in every in-person training session, I still think that being able to ask a real person questions is extremely helpful for me to retain new information on a subject I am rather unfamiliar with.

I would say that the biggest negative of in-person training is that there was a lot of information that needed to be crammed into a certain amount of time. That led to us having to speed through a few things that I still am not comfortable doing with excel. This would be a case where online training would be great to use as a supplement to the in-person training because if there are things that I didn’t have time to ask questions about, I can go to Lynda and find videos to help work through some of those questions.