Citation
Bixhorn, A. (2018), "Five ways to ensure your video content meets your training requirements", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 53-54. https://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-10-2017-0071
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited
Approximately 30 min after an employee finishes a training session, they will remember only 58 per cent of the material covered, according to WR Hambrecht + Co.
Just seven days later they will remember only 35 per cent
In a world where emails are frequent, projects and tasks abound and another dozen distractions are just around the corner, employees at most companies simply have too many interests competing for their attention. Which means training professionals need to find new ways to share information – not just to break through the clutter but to be ready anytime, anywhere an employee may need access to training materials.
Fortunately, the challenges faced by today’s Learning and Development departments do not require trainers to change the ways they teach – just how they share.
A corporate video library (sometimes called a video content management system, video CMS or “corporate YouTube”) can help you give your employees anytime access to job-specific training – leveraging the power of video to provide learning materials that are more compelling than a handbook and more cost-effective than on-location events and seminars.
But pressing “record” is just the beginning. Below are some best practices for maximizing the return on your video investment and for making video more useful for your employees.
Use analytics to optimize course investments
Many training programs are still optimized for employees to follow a predetermined, sequential learning path. But in an era of on-demand, just-in-time learning, employees are increasingly consuming learning content in small, disconnected segments.
In this environment, video analytics are critical. With the right reports, you can see which videos are most popular and identify which segments within each video get the most airtime. This helps identify important trends and gaps in your training initiatives.
Make interactivity a core part of your learning videos
When combined with analytics, interactive video quizzing provides you with a complementary view of your training initiatives’ strengths and future needs. If your analytics indicate that certain content is more sought after, quizzing can give you deeper insights on what your learners need to know.
Interactive quizzing has become an increasingly common capability in video training platforms. In addition to the insights, they provide training teams, quizzes also help reinforce key concepts by enabling people to immediately apply the concepts after they have been learned.
Use inside-video search to improve learning efficiency
Any time you are sharing valuable information, the ability to quickly search it is critical to employee productivity.
This has been the biggest traditional shortcoming of video. Searching video content has typically required third-party captioning services to manually generate transcripts and then synchronize them with the videos. At scale, this approach is cost-prohibitive.
As the need for video search has increased, most video training platforms have implemented automated speech and text recognition. These capabilities enable employees to find any word spoken or shown in every video added to your video library.
Make the most of mobile for watching and creating videos
With the rise in flexible schedules, global workforces and “bring your own device” policies, you cannot assume that employees will consume instructional content only during work hours and from their corporate laptops.
Instead, learning videos need to be compatible with a range of smartphones and tablets. This is especially true for companies with large sales forces, as well as those in retail, manufacturing and other on location industries.
Mobile devices are also essential for creating instructional content at scale. While a camcorder on a tripod is the standard for capturing instructor-led training, it restricts the type of information that your team can efficiently capture. By contrast, a “mobile recording rig” consisting of a smartphone and Bluetooth mic enables your team to record in any location, from offices and meeting rooms to retail stores, plant floors and anywhere in the field.
Scale your training content with social learning
Every one of your employees is an expert in something. Imagine if each of them had an easy way to share that knowledge.
Traditional approaches to social learning focus on documentation through the use of wikis, FAQs, and text-based portals. They fall flat because writing well is hard and extremely time-consuming.
Video is different. With nothing more than a smartphone or webcam, your subject matter experts can capture their knowledge in a fraction of time it would take to write and visually illustrate the information in a way that is not possible with text or static images.
The benefit to your experts is an increase in productivity – instead of repeating the same information over and over, they can instead simply share the video. The benefit to your organization is a dramatic increase in the quantity and depth of learning resources at no incremental cost.
Video technology is not changing the fundamentals of corporate learning. Instead, it’s simply providing Learning and Development teams with a solution for scaling their training initiatives and improving employee learning efficiency – all while significantly lowering program costs.
Corresponding author
About the author
Ari Bixhorn is Vice President of Marketing at Panopto, Seattle, Washington, US.