Since the world turned upside down with the coronavirus and lockdowns, is live training dying out?

It's a fair question. In many cases, people cannot travel, or don't want to, so it's safe to say that live training isn't happening under lockdowns.

Also, with the advent of YouTube videos where you can learn useful things from 9-year olds, as well as all the free PDFs, tutorials and other resources the web has to offer, it's reasonable to assume that live training is dead. But you'd be very wrong. 

Live training isn't going away anytime soon, for the following reasons:

• It's hard to learn from static resources like PDFs, books, online tutorials, articles, and even videos. You don't get a chance to ask questions, and the material is "lifeless." It doesn't respond to you as a student. Many times when I've learned things from tutorials, it's been a frustrating game of going back and forth between the material, and my program, to try to replicate what they are teaching. Not easy.
• You don't have access to the files from the online resources (in most cases). This means you have to recreate what they are teaching you. This requires a lot of effort, and it's not always practical to do. Strike two, if you're counting.
• Your learning, at best, will be incomplete. We tend to only look up what we think we need. While that can work in the short term, quite often there are important details, as well as background info, that we just don't get when we learn "on the fly" in order to answer a pressing question or solve a problem. This means our learning will be chock full of Swiss-cheese sized holes, sure to slow us down at best, or at worst, cause further problems down the line.
• Finally, it's simply easier to interface with a human instructor. You can ask questions, ask for the instructor to help you with your exact problem at your computer, ask for the instructor to show you a different way to go, learn the background needed to be successful, and find out useful tips and tricks to speed things up. As they say, "a few minutes with an expert is worth hours in a book."

But what if travel really isn't possible?

There is a viable alternative: Live Online Webinars. You get the best of all possible worlds:

• No travel required
• A real, live instructor, where you can ask questions and get immediate answers
• Complete convenience - learn from the comfort of your home or office!

Now, obviously, I'm biased. I run a training company. So don't listen to me. Please, go out and try to learn something important just using the internet alone. You'll find, as I did, that it ain't easy to learn things when you don't have a live person to teach you in a gentle and caring way. (Which we do, by the way ;)