I have been finding that in person training on some of the basic software programs has increased staff effectiveness. Online training is good, but what methods work best in your environment?

Instructor lead has some of the best 2nd order positive impact. For example the cross connections developed and shares at onsite help learning and also grow communities of interests. There is much research in this for schools post Covid.

But cost in flights or organization may exceed the benefits or just can’t be justified with more pressure placed on ROI for technical services.

Thus, we have mostly gone online/virtual and rely more on related local tech summits for the connections and communities of interests.

We deploy 2 Minute Videos (a few times a week) on seemingly normal issues but we have found that these are extremely popular and are a wonderful surrogate for longer trainings.

My staff and our internal customers we support tend to prefer online training for "refresher" courses for apps/systems they are somewhat familiar with, while in-person is generally preferred for more complex or entirely new apps or processes. My experience is that in-person also requires you to (usually) focus your attention directly on the training rather then juggle other distractions and interruptions. 

In our experience online training is great for gaining the basic knowledge in the subject of study but any advance training works the best if led by instructor.

I consider training modality on a case-by-case basis. Lots of variables to consider. For example, for a short, 30-min orientation, online makes sense. For a complex topic that requires intense engagement, in-person is best. Happy to chat more with you.