How to make virtual training engaging

If you’re struggling with how to make virtual training engaging, you’re not alone. As remote learning becomes the norm, trainers and facilitators face the challenge of maintaining attention, interaction, and impact across screens.

In this post, we’ll explore some proven strategies to make virtual training engaging, from interactive tools and breakout room dynamics to soft skills and behavioural techniques. Whether you’re delivering corporate workshops, onboarding new hires, or running online courses, these tips will help you boost participation and retention.

The challenges with virtual training

Maintaining engagement in virtual training is challenging due to screen fatigue, limited non-verbal cues, and distractions in remote environments. You’ve probably experienced the same yourself, email pop-ups, app notifications, Teams messages etc.

Trainers must overcome reduced interaction, passive participation, and tech barriers. Without dynamic tools and intentional design, learners may disengage, leading to lower retention and diminished training impact.

The objective

The objective is clear, you want your participants to do just that, participate. But if they’re not engaged then that is unlikely to happen, so how to make virtual training engaging?

Content

Your content has to be relevant and interesting to your audience. Which means you have to be ruthless and strip out parts which are not relevant. You also need to consider what your audience wants to hear. That means looking at your content with fresh eyes even if your message is regulated by compliance issues. If your contentdoes not resonate you will lose them.

Tailored content

Tailoring your content to your audience is very important to help them feel the training is designed for them and relevant to their world. This means both the words and how they look, as in the design, as well as images and models used. Your audience needs to think, this is for me.

Content engagement

Once you know what you’re going to include in your training or webinar, the next step is to look at how you are going to present this content. Bearing in mind the challenges in the virtual world, this needs a lot of thought. It also means you’re going to have to work harder than when working in-person. Why? Because it is so much easier to do anything else in a virtual session. You need to map out how to engage your audience at every step of the session.

Using the technology

Platforms like Teams and Zoom have tools that you can use to engage your audience, like break-out rooms and white boards. Planning how best to use these to get engagement is crucial.

Soft skills to engage your audience

How you talk to your audience and work with them is critical. The vibe in your virtual space is set by you. Get it right and your audience will be with you, get it wrong and you’ll lose them. Working out how to keep them engaged with your soft skills is a key part of how to make virtual training engaging.

Activities

Looking at your content you will need to plan what activities you will give your participants. What are you going to ask them to do. Will you ask them to work in pairs or small groups? How will you organise these groups? How long will you give them? What context and instructions will they need? What will you do whilst they’re in these groups? What will you do immediately after this task? There’s a lot of planning to do. Giving them activities is a great answer for how to make virtual training engaging, but you will need to work very hard to get it right.

Questions

How you deal with questions is also crucial. You want people to ask questions, either verbally or through the chat. Creating content that encourages questions is part of it, as is making them feel comfortable in asking questions. Questions mean they are engaged, so if you’re presenting at them, it probably won’t work, whereas if your talking with them it might well work. You’ll get more questions which also helps to keep others engaged.

Summary

If you’re wondering how to make virtual training engaging, one thing is for sure, you’re going to have to work hard, much harder than an in-person session. You’ll need to plan every second, challenge your own content, be ruthless and then work on your soft skills.

What's next

You could call us in for training 🙂 We train trainers on how to make virtual training engaging, including coaching. This involves you delivering your virtual content with suggestions and feedback.