Moderate size airline with its own sim centre and training facilities.
Our little group had some reservations with philosophy and derived a small satisfaction from seeing the general standards improvement as a consequence (in part) of our somewhat different approach to training philosophy.
The driver for specific skills development generally wasn't the cute stuff like being able to do a zero/zero landing - that's easy with a bit of practice - but, rather, the benefit accrued for basic raw data hand flown I/F skills.
Some of the low time pilots we were seeing were, without putting too fine a point on it, a bit average in the skill base. It became apparent, early on, that spending a bit of time on I/F skills early in the endorsement program paid handsome benefits later as the flight management workload increased.
Generally, to maximise utilisation and progress, we would use a vignette approach ie a few minutes interspersed here and there to push skills development. Once the old standards were OK (turning climb/descent with accel/decel against the clock) the best sources of short sharp high concentration work is final approach and takeoff. Hence the use of short exercises using high freeze/reposition rates - working up to zero/zero takeoff or landing with progressively higher concentration requirements.
It's interesting to see just how much progress one can get with 5 minutes inserted here and there between programmed exercises. The other fatigue management trick is to get both pilots to do one exercise each in turn from whichever seat so that each is kept as fresh as possible.
come to a crashing halt if they required
Two factors here -
(a) management desire - do we wish to extract the maximum value out of the sim's capability or just do the box ticking exercise ?
(b) instructor initiative - a bit of sensible enthusiasm in the back can increase the session productivity dramatically. Once the folk in front realise that there is no penalty involved if they don't do as well as they might wish, they can relax and run with the sim's capabilities for personal training. Obviously, the training and checking bits have to be put firmly into two quite separate paddocks if the thing is to have any chance of working. The integrity and personality of the instructor becomes fairly important.