Disclaimer, I am a grouchy old bastard.
DoD Bases are all over the place, but having taught at many there is always someone responsible that you can push to make labs work.
An airbase in Alabama had put us in a room with no service. The students had been provided with LTE dongles, but there was no signal. I had the responsible person find us a room in a building that had signal because labs/practice work.
I got fired by a training company that hired me to teach CEH, but when I sat a class taught by one of their trainers this person demoed nothing. I got to be a fly on the wall at break time and listened to students talking about how they had never even seen Linux let alone used it. CEH has almost 2000 slides in 5 days, but that is not an excuse to demo nothing. When I told the Training manager about the student comments, I didn't get invited back.
All of us trainer types have some background, some of our students have none. Although some students will be able to memorize what they need to pass the exam, others will benefit greatly from the practical experience of practice.
Teaching CCNA in St Louis our training manager had built a hands on 2 day lab, complete from VLSM to Access lists. The pass rate for CCNA increased by over 50% for students that completed the lab.
Greg, I'll bet you are like me. With 20years experience (real life, not labs) I passed the original beta Security+ with no objectives. The fact that I had several CNEs a couple MCSEs A= and Net+ and 20 years on the job made it easy even if it was a little grueling, 300 questions if I remember correctly.
I am a huge fan of experience, and always tell students to do the labs unless they already do it at work.
Sorry for the tirade.
The training program was located at this site for political and funding reasons. Typically, they would conduct this cohort in Arkansas at a base that has the correct setup and has done it for years. This particular year, it was relocated to Virginia Beach because some high-up muckety muck needed funding, and this was the easiest way for them to accomplish this. They relocated the training from its original base to a new one just for the funding dollars.
And then proceeded not to give a crap if they had the resources they needed.
I strongly agree that students learn better with hands-on experience. I assign the labs as evening homework. CompTIA has made the labs almost foolproof because they spoon-feed the students in the labs with detailed, step-by-step instructions. However, CompTIA certifications are, at their core, vendor-agnostic certifications. They're not being tested on the tools of the trade. Mostly, it's vocabulary, concepts, and procedures. I don't like it, but countless students exam cram on their own and manage to pass exams that should be well beyond their experience level.
I demo things as much as I can in the context of the lectures. I give them a tour of the CVE site, the Mitre ATT&CK framework, the CVSS calculator. I demo Wireshark, Nmap, and various other tools. I show them how to use command line in both Windows and Linux. I highly recommend that they sign up for TryHackMe and HackTheBox accounts or a free AWS or Azure account. I tell them to "be curious" and "break stuff."
Part of the reason I stopped doing actual labs during class has to do with the way CompTIA has changed the labs over the years. They used to require individual workstations to be set up with a specific lab configuration. Now, all the labs are using virtual machines, with step-by-step instructions. Students don't have to think anymore. They just follow the instructions. The labs are so easy that even people with zero experience can complete the labs without supervision. All of the training is prepackaged, with online courseware, virtual labs, and practice exams. Something easy to replicate for the masses. Eventually, they'll get rid of all of us technical trainers because they will view us as unnecessary costs. It's not about the student experience anymore. It's about maximizing revenue.
