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You already know dental team training matters. What you don’t always have is time for it. Between patients, the schedule, and the dozen other things pulling at your day, training is usually the first thing that gets pushed to “later.” We get it, we’ve talked to enough dental practices to know that’s just how the days go.
Gallup found that organizations could see an 18% increase in profit and a 14% increase in productivity by doubling the share of employees who feel they have real opportunities to learn and grow at work. That’s a strong argument for building training in, even on the days that are already full.
A short-staffed team has even less room for any of this. If coverage gaps are part of what’s eating into your day, we also recommend reading about how temps can help you fill them so training can actually happen.
⏱️ In a hurry? Here’s the short answer.
Cloud Coaching is Cloud Dentistry’s on-demand platform for dental team training and professional development. It gives practices one place to train their entire team, new hires, and experienced employees alike, on topics ranging from dental fundamentals and onboarding to communication, operations, leadership, HR, compliance, and professional development.
Practices can use it when someone joins the team, when a workflow changes, when an employee takes on new responsibilities, or when the team needs to build new skills.
Cloud Coaching costs $49 per month or $490 per year, with unlimited users included at either price. Select courses also offer CE credit for no extra cost.
Key takeaways
- Dental team training benefits from more than a single onboarding period. Employees continue to encounter new responsibilities, workflows, technology, and development needs throughout their time at a practice.
- Cloud Coaching covers dental fundamentals, onboarding, communication, operations, scheduling, HR, leadership, compliance, CE, and professional development.
- Practices can assign courses based on an employee’s role, experience, and development needs rather than giving everyone the same training.
- Shared training gives employees a consistent foundation, while managers and coworkers add practice-specific instruction and hands-on guidance.
- The subscription includes unlimited users, allowing practices to train the entire team without adding a per-employee fee.
- Four courses are available at no additional cost with a Cloud Dentistry account.
Table of Contents
What is Cloud Coaching?
Cloud Coaching is an on-demand training and professional development platform built specifically for dental practices and their teams.
It goes beyond compliance training and CE. The goal is to give practices an ongoing training resource they can return to as their teams and practices change.
A new employee has to learn how a particular practice operates. An experienced employee may take on new responsibilities or want to develop skills in communication, leadership, patient experience, or another area. Technology, processes, and expectations can change, too — each one a reason to come back to training well past someone’s first week.
Cloud Coaching gives practices a structured resource for those different training needs.
Managers can teach practice-specific systems, coworkers can provide hands-on guidance, and employees can learn through real-world experience. Cloud Coaching adds a shared training resource that fits into that mix.
What can dental practices use Cloud Coaching for?
The right training depends on what’s happening in the practice.
A new dental assistant may need foundational knowledge. A front office team member may need help with scheduling. An experienced employee may be developing leadership skills. If the entire team is struggling with communication, a practice may want everyone working from the same training resource.
Cloud Coaching can support those needs through:
Onboarding new hires
Give new team members a consistent starting point with training on foundational dental knowledge and other skills relevant to their roles.
Previous education and experience provide an important foundation, but they don’t necessarily teach someone how your practice schedules appointments, uses its software, manages workflows, or communicates across the team.
One RDH we spoke with remembered the jump from school to real appointments: fitting everything into a 45–60 minute visit after being used to 3–4 hours in school, including small tricks like rotating radiographs and perio charting so she wasn’t doing both in the same appointment, and learning when to grab the doctor for an exam so she wasn’t stuck waiting.
Another described the software learning curve more bluntly: “It was pretty embarrassing that I couldn’t do simple tasks,” until she’d figured the system out on her own.
Every practice runs a little differently, and that’s exactly the gap this kind of training closes.
Creating consistent training and expectations
When different people train employees differently, small variations can become operational problems.
One RDH described working in an office where hygienists handled radiographs and perio charting differently. If she picked up a coworker’s patient whose radiographs and perio charting hadn’t been rotated on schedule, she’d end up completing both in one visit and falling behind for the rest of the day.
Another pointed to a messier example: sterilization. Different team members handled it different ways (some correctly, some not), and pointing it out didn’t always land. As she put it, one coworker’s response was simply, “well it’s how we have always done it, so it’s fine.”
A shared training resource gives everyone the same starting point, built around your practice’s own standards.
Support compliance and required education
Cloud Coaching includes courses covering topics such as HIPAA, OSHA, and infection control. Select courses are eligible for CE credit.
CE eligibility varies by course, and completing a course should not be assumed to satisfy every state, licensing, or employer-specific requirement.
Build communication and team culture
Clinical knowledge is only part of working successfully in a dental practice.
The RDHs we spoke with pointed to communication, chairside manner, patient relationships, treatment conversations, teamwork, and conflict resolution as areas where experienced professionals can continue to develop.
Those skills usually take deliberate practice, feedback, and real conversations to build. That’s well beyond what clinical school covered.
Strengthen office operations
Training can address the operational side of running a practice, including scheduling and appointment optimization.
For a new hygienist, learning the clinical work is only part of getting comfortable in a real practice. Managing the appointment schedule, learning software, coordinating different tasks, and understanding the practice’s workflow all take time.
One RDH described enrolling in a practice consulting class, where a consultant came in monthly to review the numbers and coach the team on how to talk with patients about treatment and new-patient acceptance. Having real numbers in front of the team, she said, made the coaching land in a way general advice never did.
Introduce new processes or workflows
When a practice changes how something is done, the team needs more than an instruction buried in a message or a quick explanation between patients.
Relevant training can give employees a structured starting point. Managers can then explain how the practice wants that information applied in their own environment.
Upskill and cross-train existing employees
Training keeps mattering long after someone’s first few weeks in the practice, or in dentistry altogether.
An employee may be ready to take on additional responsibilities, learn another area of the practice, or prepare for a future leadership role. Training can give them a place to build those skills.
One RDH pointed to something school never fully prepares you for: reading x-rays with real clinical judgment. In school, a cavity is a cavity: black and white. In practice, deciding whether to recommend a referral, watch and wait, or trust a patient’s home care takes years of working alongside doctors and reviewing images together.
Develop managers and future leaders
Leadership development can start well before someone officially becomes a manager.
Communication, performance management, collaboration, and workplace skills can all become part of an employee’s development as they take on more responsibility.
Support temporary team members
Cloud Coaching includes training focused on systems and workflows that support temporary team members.
The goal is to help the practice establish processes its team understands, so temporary professionals can step into an environment with clearer expectations.
Provide ongoing professional development
Experienced employees still have training needs, just different ones than a new hire.
One Cloud Coaching expert pointed to communication, leadership, patient experience, efficiency, and cross-training as areas where even strong, experienced employees can continue to grow.
That makes ongoing training different from a one-time onboarding checklist.
💡☁️ Cloud Tip: An experienced hire brings real clinical skill to the role. What they haven’t seen yet is how your office runs: your software, your scheduling expectations, your workflows, your team’s way of communicating. That part takes time, no matter how many years someone has in the field. Practice-specific training matters because every dental office runs a little differently.
Who is Cloud Coaching for?
Cloud Coaching is designed for the entire dental practice.
That includes:
- Dental hygienists
- Dental assistants
- Dentists
- Front office team members
- Office managers
- New hires
- Experienced team members
- Managers and future leaders
Training needs shift by role and experience level.
A brand-new dental assistant may benefit from foundational dental education. An experienced hygienist may get more value from communication, leadership, or another area of professional development. Some courses may make sense for everyone on the team, while others are better suited to specific roles.
Practices can choose and assign courses based on an employee’s role, experience, and development needs.
How does Cloud Coaching work?
Cloud Coaching is designed to fit into the way dental practices actually operate.
Choose the training your team needs
Practices can select courses based on what their employees and practice need, whether that’s onboarding, dental fundamentals, communication, operations, leadership, HR, compliance education, or professional development.
One Cloud Coaching expert put it simply: pick training based on what’s actually happening in the practice. If communication is slipping, assign a communication course. If scheduling is becoming an issue, use that training. If someone is stepping into more of a leadership role, give them leadership development. For team-wide topics, assign one course to everyone and talk through it together at a team meeting.
Assign relevant courses
Office managers can assign training through their Cloud Dentistry dashboard. Different team members can receive different courses based on their roles or development needs.
Let employees train around their day
Team members can complete courses without everyone stepping away from patient care at once.
That flexibility is especially useful on busy days, letting each person train in whatever gap they actually have.
💡☁️ Cloud Tip: Whatever training resource you use, make sure your team is being paid for the time they spend on it. One RDH put it bluntly: being asked to sit for mandatory training off the clock “just made us resent it.” A self-paced platform makes it easy to build training time into paid hours instead of asking employees to find it on their own.
Reinforce what employees learn
Courses can include knowledge checks and downloadable resources to reinforce the material. Courses may also provide certificates of completion where applicable.
For skills that require hands-on practice, discussion, or practice-specific instruction, those activities can happen alongside the course.
Return to training as needs change
Practices can return to the course library whenever employees take on new responsibilities, workflows change, or new development needs come up.
What courses are available in Cloud Coaching?
Cloud Coaching includes training across dental knowledge, practice operations, communication, HR, leadership, staffing, compliance, and professional development.
The library is continuing to grow, with content from dental educators, industry experts, and partners.
Courses available to offices with a Cloud Dentistry account at no additional cost
Four courses can be accessed without a paid Cloud Coaching subscription:
- Building Team Culture & Communication
- Dental Foundations for New Hires
- Scheduling Mastery & Appointment Optimization
- Success with Temps: Office Systems That Support Short-Term Team Members
These courses give offices a way to experience the training before deciding whether a paid Cloud Coaching subscription makes sense for their practice.
HR training
Cloud Coaching also includes HR training from Humani HR, bringing subject-matter expertise from an outside HR partner into the training library.
Current HR courses include:
- Fostering a healthy and respectful workplace
- New hire onboarding fundamentals
- Performance management conversations
- Everyday communication & collaboration skills
The broader library also includes content from dental educators, industry experts, and partners.
CE-eligible courses
Select Cloud Coaching courses offer CE credit, including:
- HIPAA
- OSHA & Infection Control
- Social Media for Dental Hygienists
CE availability applies only to eligible courses. A course completion certificate and CE credit are not interchangeable, so practices should check the individual course for applicable CE information.
The course library will continue to expand as additional training is developed and added.
💡☁️ Cloud Tip: One subscription can help with a lot of different problems at once. That’s easy to miss just from scanning a course list. As one Cloud Dentistry training expert described it: “It can support someone brand new to dentistry, help an existing employee build a new skill, give a manager something to use for team development, help with communication or scheduling issues, support leadership development.” Because the subscription covers unlimited users, practices can make training part of how they develop the whole team, regardless of role.
Why consistent training matters for dental teams
Consistency is one of the hardest parts of practice training to maintain.
Internal training often happens while the office is busy. Someone shows a new employee how to do something between patients. Another employee explains the same process differently. A manager answers a question, then has to answer it again a few weeks later.
It’s simply what training looks like when it happens in the middle of everything else the practice has to do.
And small differences can matter.
One RDH shared an example of different hygienists using different approaches to radiographs and perio charting. When those workflows weren’t consistent, the next hygienist working with the patient could end up having to complete additional tasks and fall behind schedule.
Another RDH pointed to a different pattern: seasoned hygienists were often the ones most likely to brush off training, since they didn’t feel the need to relearn something they already knew — even when they didn’t actually know how the practice wanted it done. Performing a task well and performing it your practice’s specific way turned out to be two different things.
A shared training resource gives a practice a common foundation and the same place to start. Clinical judgment and practice-specific instruction still shape how each employee actually applies it day to day.
💡☁️ Cloud Tip: Use shared training for shared expectations. If every employee is expected to follow the same process, build that expectation into a shared resource rather than relying on whoever happens to be training that day. Use a common resource to establish the foundation, then use team discussion and hands-on instruction to adapt it to the way your practice operates.
What makes dental team training actually useful?
Completing a course is one step. Actually applying what it taught is a separate one.
The RDHs we spoke with repeatedly emphasized the importance of applying training in real-world situations. One described hands-on experience and repetition as the biggest factors in building confidence. Another found that having someone available to answer questions while navigating a new process helped the information stick.
Communication and leadership were different. One RDH said that clinical skills developed through repetition, but communication and engagement skills required specific tools and guidance.
That distinction matters when building a training program.
1. Give employees a consistent foundation
Shared training can establish common information and expectations before employees apply them to the practice.
2. Make room for hands-on practice
Some skills can’t be learned effectively by watching or reading alone. Employees may need opportunities to practice, ask questions, and repeat a task before they become comfortable with it.
One RDH described a practice that closed for an entire day every quarter, dedicated entirely to professional development and team building. She said the team worked more seamlessly together as a result. It’s a reminder that hands-on practice sometimes needs real, protected time carved out of the schedule.
3. Connect training to the actual practice
Employees still need to understand how the training applies to your software, workflows, patient population, responsibilities, and standards.
4. Keep training going
Professional development has no real expiration date. Years into someone’s time at the practice, there’s still more to build. Communication, leadership, patient experience, new technology, and other skills can continue to evolve.
💡☁️ Cloud Tip: Training means more than watching a course. Cloud Coaching can provide the structured education, but some learning still needs to happen with your team. Use courses to establish knowledge and expectations, then use hands-on practice, coaching, discussion, and repetition to help employees actually apply them.
Traditional training vs. Cloud Coaching
There isn’t one right way to train a dental team.
Hands-on instruction, shadowing, mentorship, team meetings, outside education, and practice-specific training all have a place. The challenge is making training consistent and manageable when everyone is also trying to care for patients and keep the practice running.
Cloud Coaching provides another resource practices can use alongside those methods.
Cloud Coaching gives practices a structured, reusable resource they can add into the training they already provide.
How much does Cloud Coaching cost?
Cloud Coaching costs $49 per month or $490 per year. The annual plan saves 17% compared with paying monthly.
The subscription includes unlimited users, so practices don’t pay another per-person fee when a new employee joins the team or another team member needs access to training.
That means the same subscription can support a changing team without requiring practices to decide which employees should have access based on headcount.
It also means practices can use Cloud Coaching beyond onboarding. New hires, experienced employees, managers, and team members developing new skills can all have access at the same time.
One RDH put the trade-off simply: training can be expensive, “but what’s way more expensive than that investment is chronic turnover.”
Frequently asked questions
What is Cloud Coaching?
Cloud Coaching is Cloud Dentistry’s on-demand training and professional development platform for dental practices. It provides courses covering dental fundamentals, onboarding, communication, operations, leadership, HR, compliance education, and professional development. Rather than treating training as something that happens once during onboarding, Cloud Coaching gives practices a resource to return to as employees take on new responsibilities, workflows change, or the team needs to build new skills, with courses assignable by role and completed on each employee’s own schedule.
Who can use Cloud Coaching?
Cloud Coaching is designed for the entire dental practice, including dentists, dental hygienists, dental assistants, front office team members, office managers, new hires, experienced employees, and future leaders. A brand-new dental assistant might start with foundational dental education, while an experienced hygienist gets more value from communication or leadership training. Practices can choose and assign courses based on each employee’s role, experience, and development needs, rather than putting the entire team through identical content.
How does Cloud Coaching work?
Practices access Cloud Coaching through their Cloud Dentistry account, select relevant courses, and assign training based on team members’ roles or development needs. Employees fit courses into their day rather than pausing patient care for a group session, and courses may include knowledge checks, downloadable resources, and, where applicable, certificates of completion. Practices can return to the course library any time (not just right after someone is hired) as responsibilities and workflows change.
How much does Cloud Coaching cost?
Cloud Coaching costs $49 per month or $490 per year, with the annual plan saving 17% compared to paying monthly. Both plans include unlimited users, so practices don’t decide who gets access based on headcount or budget: a new hire, an experienced employee building new skills, or a manager developing leadership abilities can all use the same subscription without an added per-person fee.
Does Cloud Coaching offer CE?
Yes. Select Cloud Coaching courses offer CE credit, including HIPAA (1.5 CE), OSHA & Infection Control (2.0 CE), and Social Media for Dental Hygienists (0.5 CE). CE eligibility varies by course and isn’t automatic across the entire library, so practices should check the individual course for applicable CE information before assuming a course satisfies a specific requirement.
For billing changes, multi-location setup, or admin permissions, see the full Cloud Coaching FAQ in our Help Center.
The final bite
A dental team keeps changing long after any single onboarding period wraps up.
A new employee still has to learn how your practice works. Experienced employees take on new responsibilities. Workflows and technology change. And even strong team members can continue developing skills in communication, leadership, patient experience, and other areas.
The best training approach adds the right resource at the right time—structured courses, hands-on practice, mentorship, and team discussion all have a role to play.
Cloud Coaching provides one of those resources: dental-specific training that practices can use across the entire team, from new hires learning the fundamentals to experienced employees building their next set of skills.
Getting through another course is a fine milestone. What actually matters is whether a team continues to receive support long after onboarding wraps up.
Explore Cloud Coaching in your dashboard to see what ongoing training could look like for your team. New to Cloud Dentistry? Create a free account!
Continue learning
Training is one part of building and maintaining a strong dental workforce. If you’re working on the broader people and staffing side of your practice, these resources are a natural next step:
How to Build a Stronger Dental Workforce: Proven Strategies for Retention, Productivity, and Practice Growth
Explore the broader strategies practices can use to strengthen hiring, retention, productivity, flexibility, and growth.
Temporary Dental Staffing: Benefits, Best Practices, and How to Keep Your Practice Fully Staffed
Learn how temporary staffing can help practices handle coverage needs while building a more flexible staffing strategy.
Temp-to-Perm Hiring: Why More Practices Are Making Permanent Hires from Temps
Explore how practices can use temporary staffing as part of their permanent hiring strategy.
Get a practical framework for handling unexpected staffing gaps while protecting the schedule and patient care.
How to Find and Hire Dental Professionals With Cloud Dentistry
You’ve seen how Cloud Coaching helps you train your team once they’re hired. Here’s how to find and hire that team in the first place, from creating your free profile to booking your first shift.
