Validated Skills Development

Build an effective skilling program that grows your users into masters.

The problem with "Listen & Watch" training.

All too often, training teams fall into the trap of quantity over quality, creating lots and lots of self-paced video courses and instructor-led classes that use dynamic personalities, simple multiple-choice questions and the traditional attendance completion certificate.

The drawback to this approach is that simply watching someone else does not give you actual skills. To master a skill requires substantial hands-on practice and a validated assessment.

At Skillable, we know that skilling is the future of training, and that validated hands-on experiences and challenge-centric learning are transforming the way enterprises upskill their customers, partners and employees.

This is no idle boast.

We have spent the last dozen plus years constantly honing and improving our solution in partnership with the world’s largest software companies, who are rigorous and demanding when it comes to effective skilling solutions.

are you training or skilling?

Skillable knows that the most effective way to skill people is through “learning while doing.” Adult learners need the opportunity to tackle relevant scenarios in real-world environments so they can explore and figure things out through hands-on scored labs.

For organizations looking to accelerate their audiences to achieve skill mastery, validation and confidence in their software, little compares to the value of hands-on learning.

The Skillable approach to skills development and validation.

Skillable enables you to build and reuse sophisticated lab environments combined with scored real-world scenarios. Our self-service solution is packed with best practices, templates and sample labs, combined with an easy-to-use interface that allows training teams to quickly add hands-on learning to their programs.

Your virtual labs can then be shared with tens of thousands of learners on demand, with no software or on-premise infrastructure needed outside of an internet connection and a modern web browser; providing your learners the opportunity to experience real-world scenarios using your software in a safe, controlled and pre-configured environment.

Underneath the technical logistics of creating and deploying labs is the instructional design methodology. Are you building old school, traditional step-by-step labs or are you building sophisticated labs that actually develop and validate the skills needed for your software?

Based on years of research, Skillable recommends the challenge-centric instructional design model as real learning starts with real-world scenarios for your learners to solve. It is literally the opposite of traditional step-by-step training and thus, much more effective.

Challenge-centric instructional design presents learners with a scenario where they need to complete real-world challenges. Regardless of whether your software runs on servers or through cloud environments like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services, you can build scored hands-on labs where your software is pre-configured to enable your learners to solve relevant challenges as they develop and validate the skills needed to use your software.

Jump in. Jump out.

Another problem faced by training teams is that your software is constantly improving. Long gone are annual releases of a new software version. Now software is continuously updated, whether it is monthly, weekly or even daily.

This creates a problem of how to keep your users up to date. Here again, self-paced videos and instructor-led PowerPoints are hard to maintain when the underlying software is continuously changing.

One of the benefits of challenge-centric lab development is that learners using live software inside your lab and the related scenarios are written so that changes become part of the challenge. There are no step-by-step tasks that need to reviewed and maintained because the scenarios don’t dictate what to do, but instead focus on the outcome required. This flexibility for the learner also translates into a much lower cost of maintaining your labs.

Put your learners on the challenge-centric path with Challenge Labs.

Skillable has created a catalog of scored hands-on learning experiences that drive learners to figure out how to arrive at a specific outcome.

These Challenge Labs are a perfect extension of hands-on labs or can be used on their own to help learners build competency and skills mastery across multiple platforms and technologies.

Achieve skills development and validation by partnering with Skillable.

The complete checklist is on our Solutions page, but here are some specific things to consider when you are looking for a partner to help you implement the right skilling strategy to deliver effective hands-on learning experiences at scale:

	Management and reporting	Building and delivering	Scaling and flexibility
Capabilities	What kind of usage data can they produce – and is it accessible via API for use with business intelligence and analytics software?	Is there support for all the environments you need (cloud environments, virtual machines, containers, coding, data science, etc.)? Do they have expertise in instructional design and specifically, challenge-centric learning?	Do they have off-the-shelf labs you can license to accelerate and complement your efforts? Can they ensure a consistent user experience for all learners?
Services	Do they have proven expertise implementing and maintaining LTI integrations?	Do they have custom content teams staffed by instructional designers and lab developers who can help build content if you need it?	Do they have the engineering expertise to build out highly secure, highly custom and highly available environments?

"Hands-on learning is definitely more effective than videos/slides. The automated checks are great as well to prove mastery of a subject for certification tests."

Andrew Lubchansky Training Advisor

Skilling is the
future of training.

The talented team at Skillable can help you create a skills development solution that will bring not only competency but skills mastery to your learners.