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5 Tips for Making Effective and Engaging Corporate Training Videos

Posted by Valerie Nolan on August 17, 2016

For many companies, video is the best alternative for employee training. Live training can be expensive, particularly if the workforce is spread out geographically. Training videos allow you enough takes to express concepts exactly how you want to, and today any type of corporate media can be delivered online to trainees anywhere, almost instantly.

The widespread availability of video equipment has also made it easier to create bad training videos by those who think owning a camera makes them a video producer. If your company’s training videos are ineffective, have no clear point, or have sub-par production values, it will overwhelm the content. Here are 5 tips for making training videos that are effective and engaging, so your trainees will learn and retain the information they need.

1. Find a Way to Make Mundane Information Engaging

Not every job is action-packed, but if your training videos show that you’re in on the humor, they can take mundane tasks and demonstrate them in exciting contexts so viewers won’t be bored or tune out. Tesco did a great job with one of its training videos by depicting the produce stocker as a comic book hero. The video not only gets across the point of what is expected of stockers, it reiterates an overarching theme of outstanding customer service.

Tesco Corporate Training Video from Alex Barnes on Vimeo.

2. Keep It Brief While Reinforcing Key Points

Brevity is important in corporate media. After all, everyone has things to do, and the sooner your personnel are trained, the sooner they’re productive. When training videos are brief, yet reinforce key points throughout, they make a lasting impression and give trainees a better understanding of corporate values. This “Respect in the Workplace” video from DuPont is only a minute and a half long, but it gets the point across clearly and reinforces it without being boring.

3. Use Both Close-Up Shots and Cut-Away Shots

When you’re teaching a skill, even a simple skill, showing it both up close and in a larger context helps trainees envision themselves performing the task. Putting the viewer at ease instills confidence, and describing a task with both close-up and cut-away shots lets them see the action up close and in a broader perspective. This video on how to use DocuSign features an upbeat presenter, and demonstrations of the action both up close and farther away while reiterating the exact steps.

4. Consider Adding Bonus Material

Corporate media can be enriched media, and online distribution lets you get the best return on your investment in your video producer. Some companies include PDFs of transcripts with training videos. Some collect multiple training videos into their own “channel” so employees can refer back to them easily. Links to other relevant training videos can also be helpful to your employees. If appropriate for your workplace and company culture, you could even include a video of “outtakes.”

5. Insist on Outstanding Production Quality

For training videos to be effective and for employees to take their employer seriously, excellent production quality is necessary. Equipment may cost far less than it used to, but being an outstanding video producer takes far more than equipment. For many companies, hiring a video team to help them create training videos is the best way to ensure high quality training videos along with the ease of distribution and cost savings that come with video training.

Conclusion

Effective and engaging training videos offer many advantages over live training. They cost less, are easy to distribute across a large geographic area, and can be referred to again and again if necessary. But not everyone is a video producer just because they own a camera. Your company and your employees deserve exceptional quality in training videos to maximize effectiveness and help your employees be the assets you need them to be.

Wherever you’re located, you can click here to fill out our form and get a free quote. We’ll ensure you have the crew that will exceed your expectations when you create training videos or any other type of corporate media.