Do you know which is the second largest search engine after Google in today’s times? You will be surprised to know. It is - YouTube.
Why is that? Videos connect to the human psyche like no other medium on the planet. The same psyche works with movies. And with the world going digital, online videos are naturally more popular than offline. YouTube receives more than 1.5 billion logged-in users per month, feeding over 1 billion hours of video to users each day (that’s right.. billion)!
The paradigm has shifted — from people merely consuming content to uploading their own content. From individuals to organizations, everyone wants to create their own video channel these days.
This is where separating quality video content from the mediocre ones available on the internet requires special attention. The competition is increasing each day, and to stand apart, you need to do things differently and smartly. Especially when it comes to the corporate training space. For the stakes are just too high, and more than a one-time ROI, videos have to score high on repeat value.
Corporate training video is a highly effective tool used by organizations to deliver training and development content. These videos provide employees with engaging, visually driven learning experiences that can cover a wide range of topics, from compliance and skill-building to leadership and sales training.
For L&D teams, corporate training video content offers flexibility, scalability, and the ability to address diverse learning needs. In 2024, as remote and hybrid work continues to rise, video-based learning has become a cornerstone for delivering impactful, accessible training to employees worldwide.
Training videos for employees are essential because they offer a consistent and engaging way to deliver information, ensuring all team members receive the same level of instruction. They are highly effective in demonstrating procedures, processes, and skills visually, making complex information easier to understand and retain.
Additionally, training videos for employees are accessible, allowing staff to learn at their own pace and revisit the content whenever needed, which is especially useful for remote or geographically dispersed teams. They also reduce the need for repetitive, in-person sessions, saving time and resources for the organization.
Furthermore, videos can be easily updated or customized to reflect changes in policies, procedures, or new skills, ensuring that training remains relevant and up-to-date. Ultimately, training videos for employees enhance learning experiences, increase retention rates, and provide a scalable solution for employee development.
Utilizing innovative training methods, such as screenshare tutorials and scenario-based videos, enhances employee engagement and skill development. These tools facilitate effective onboarding and improve knowledge retention in a fast-paced work environment.
Sharing new employee training videos before start dates fosters engagement and reduces first-day anxiety. Including a CEO message and company details such as history, culture, and values enhances retention. These videos showcase an inclusive and dynamic culture, attracting long-term commitment.
A crucial aspect of onboarding is providing new hires with a clear summary of company policies. New employee training videos present these guidelines in a simple, engaging manner, making complex information easier to grasp. Additionally, employees can view these videos at their convenience and revisit them whenever they need a reminder.
New employee training videos offering department overviews help familiarize new hires with team objectives and explain how each group contributes to the business. Highlighting the impact each department has on the organization’s overall achievements is an effective way to engage new employees and increase their commitment to their roles.
A software screencast captures a computer or mobile screen, making it ideal for instructing users on software applications, websites, or processes. Tools such as Loom enable managers and experts to record their screens along with audio, creating guided walkthroughs for onboarding, on-demand learning, or knowledge transfer.
This approach uses simulated situations to engage learners in role-playing, allowing employees to gain hands-on experience. A video training platform facilitates script writing and recording live performances, helping staff practice appropriate responses in challenging scenarios, which is especially beneficial for customer-facing teams such as sales and support.
Video content is a vital tool in modern corporate training. If you’re in L&D, creating effective videos requires careful planning. How do you make content that engages and retains attention?
Let’s explore four essential considerations:
Before creating your video, establish clear objectives. Are you aiming to improve sales, enhance leadership, or ensure compliance? Focus on practical, targeted videos with actionable insights that learners can immediately apply. Avoid abstract theories and aim for content that drives measurable results, like boosting sales or improving customer service.
Generic videos no longer work. In 2024, hyper-personalization is essential. Tailor your content to specific demographics, job roles, and pain points. For instance, if you’re training insurance sales professionals, consider their challenges, like overcoming objections. Empathize with their frustrations and craft your video as if you're speaking directly to them. This makes the content more relevant and impactful.
Learners today expect immersive and interactive video formats. While live-action and animation are still popular, adding quizzes, simulations, or branching scenarios boosts engagement. In 2024, explore fresh, interactive formats like augmented reality or microlearning videos. If possible, use live-action with real-world examples or animated case studies to simplify complex topics.
Brevity is key in 2024. The ideal video length is 5-8 minutes. Short, digestible videos allow employees to fit learning into their busy schedules. By breaking training into micro-learning segments, you make content easier to consume and apply. This modular approach also lets learners pick and choose the most relevant topics.
A good training video is more than just visuals and narration—it’s about delivering content that engages, educates, and drives results.
Here are 7 examples of well-crafted videos that effectively meet these goals and can inspire your next corporate training project.
The British Resuscitation Council (UK) made this intense scenario-based interactive training film that teaches people how to save lives. Using real-life situations and a specified response time, this video immerses the audience by dropping into the crisis and nudging them to make big decisions that may decide whether a person lives or dies. The aim is to teach people essential life-saving skills in the most compelling and memorable way possible.
Australia’s leading online mental health organization, ReachOut made this animated training video to help people understand what it is that constitutes workplace bullying. Often, it can be tricky to decipher whether the bullies are going too far or if you, as a victim are just being over-sensitive. This video outlines how to recognize and resolve workplace bullying.
Online basketball training platform Elite Guard Training (EGT) created this real-world video with help from coach KP Potts. These and other similar videos by EGT have helped young people be better basketballers by giving them access to real-life professional coaching.
With the motto of enabling leisure and hospitality staff with a clear checklist of customer service recovery tools and techniques, this video is a quick-ready reckoner. This is a preview of the full-length version, but we can still see how it uses real-life scenarios to train the staff.
Microsoft Office tutorials have always been quick guides for us to learn how to use the applications. Be it Excel, Word, or PowerPoint, the tutorials keep the audience engaged with the help of simple animations, cheat sheets, infographics, etc. The best part about these videos is their laser-sharp focus on the learning objective and simple straightforward rendering of the material.
Without any additional voiceovers or characters, this 3D animation by Turkish manufacturer EAE Elektrik teaches how to install cable trays by taking the enormous complex structures involved in the process and a step-by-step guide for the procedure.
This might not be considered as the traditional training video, but who said training videos can’t be game-based or interactive? As reported by The Age, Metro’s quirky Dumb Ways to Die campaign cut the number of “near-miss” accidents by more than 30 percent just within three months of its release. This means that this is one of the most successful videos, so would be worth the watch!
Here are 7 smart tips to help you create top-notch learning & training videos:
Before venturing out to create your training video (i.e. before you set up, shoot, dub, or edit), talk to as many stakeholders within your organizational setup about the video’s purpose. What are your expectations from the viewers after they watch your video?
Once the video creation process starts, you are all caught up in a whirlwind — shooting, re-shooting, re-framing, video editing — and if the final output is not aligned with your initial vision, you will only regret wasting a lot of money, and more importantly, your precious time.
Ensuring your stakeholders (from the internal/external subject matter expert to the learning & development head) are aligned on the same page is important because there are a lot of people who are involved at different stages in the video creation process.
How will you do that? Discussions after discussions may sometimes be distracting, therefore it’s best to create internal polls or questionnaires using Google Forms or SurveyMonkey.
Here are some key questions & parameters you may consider while drafting your questionnaire:
1. Who is your target audience? What kind of buyer persona you are hunting for?
2. What is your primary goal? Is it a selfless dispersion of knowledge or do you somewhere want to cross-sell?
Do you intend to attract new leads by pulling viewer interest in your training materials?
Are you trying to increase online sales by promoting your e-learning product?
Do you aim to share the success story of one of your customers who was helped with your learning modules?
Are you trying to drag the audience's attention to your product by sharing viral content or a motivational message?
3. Where do you intend to make the video live? Before repurposing on other channels, finalize on one target location. Are you placing the video on Facebook or on a landing page?
4. What is your publishing timeline? Of course, you will create videos differently when it’s due next week, over the others where you sufficiently have a few months to work on. More than budget, it’s the creative scope that varies based on your timeline.
5. What is your budget? You can offset the excessive costs incurred while creating videos only when you define a set budget beforehand. And a lot of research will be required to keep the budget in check.
6. What are your creative roadblocks? Do you want a live-action video or an animated microlearning module? Do you need a professional designer or graphics expert? Ignoring even small things like the lack of a makeup artist at the sets can sometimes spoil the whole video presentation.
7. What is the KPI you related to your video? What would be your definition of this video to get successful — both in terms of metric sheet numbers and the value add?
Choose between:
Animated videos
Professionally shot videos
Screengrab videos
Testimonials
Live stream videos
Vlogs
Company culture videos
FAQ videos
Personalized videos
Instructional designing videos
Microlearning videos
Don’t attempt to make your videos cater to everyone in the beginning. Target a specific audience with a specific objective.
We are living in the age of microlearning. People have short attention spans, and more importantly, extremely busy schedules. And then, people have a lot to do online these days and any long video for training will fail to get the attention.
In most cases, it’s advisable therefore to keep the video short. Experts say a video that doesn’t engage in the first 5-10 seconds will lose 1/5 of your viewers. According to Vidyard, videos that are less than 90 seconds in length see an average retention rate of 59%, while videos over 30 minutes retain only 14% of viewers.
But there is another side to it. If you are creating a video on how to build a website or discussing a code in detail, that cannot be wrapped up in a 3-minute session. So, whether to keep your video content short or long in length is a decision you must make while keeping your target customers in mind.
So, below is our recommendation:
If you are introducing a concept, keep it under 2 min.
If you intend to explain a concept, keep it under 3 min.
If you are giving a sample walkthrough of an already understood concept, keep it somewhere between 2.5 min.
If you are going for an in-depth explanation about a case study topic, instead of going for a 45-minute lecture session, break the video content into 9 or 10 different segments.
Have you noted the recent approach Facebook has taken with the news feed videos? You play a video and then keep scrolling the feed for other pieces of content — the video will still be available at one corner of the screen. Most of the people mute the video and then scroll down for more updates to manage their attention better.
If you are planning to share your video on social media, ensure that the video is somehow able to convey your message even while it’s muted. Viewers may not always have earphones ready by their side, and a vast majority of videos are watched without sound.
How do you even know if your training video is making sense? People can simply come to your video and then bounce off with a yawn, while you keep assuming the number of hits is increasing. No, you need to keep the audience engaged right till the end and even have a short summary or assessment at last for two reasons:
It will be a kind of recap so that your mind does not forget in the seventh minute what was discussed in the second minute (think millennials and reduced attention span)
When you have a short quiz or poll at the end of the video, you are bound to pay attention — that you are expected to answer a question will not let you yawn!
They say most of the viewers make their judgment about whether to continue watching a video or not within the first ten seconds. The first 5 to 10 seconds are therefore extremely crucial. It can make or break your brand as a training content provider.
Position yourself as an aspiring learner who has just typed a long tail keyword searching for a specific answer, and ask the question “Why should I watch this particular video in answer to my question?” as an audience. Should you watch it because it gives you the direct answer to your specific problem, or it merely promises to entertain you for the next 5 minutes, or for that matter, can be added under the watch later playlist. Match your answer with your friends and see if the aggregated answers align well to an extent.
Do not rely solely on view count. That will not show the correct picture. Analyzing and drawing insights from back-end metrics like conversion rates and engagement levels would be more helpful. Unless you keep measuring performance as to what is working and what is not, there is no point in going on investing all your time, effort and money (remember, creating video training content is expensive). Disprz has integrated three important analytics to track learner engagement:
This feature includes a drop-off chart that tells how many people watched which segments of the video. Say, if after 10 seconds, 1 user dropped off, the analytics graph will show the plot where exactly the disengagement happened. It also shows how many times a particular segment was viewed.
This analytics feature helps to check which questions on the video worked. Quizzes are inserted in between the videos and the graph tracks how many users attempted the questions and how many of them answered in the first attempt or repeated attempts thereafter. This is a unique way to assess what part of the video a learner was most engaged in.
This metric (and they are self-explanatory) shows real-world learner participation & engagement through features like watched duration, total views, last viewed, and number of likes & comments, thus reflecting on the actual involvement of a user. The more involved a learner is during a training video, the better they can grasp the learning module that is being explained.
Creating impactful corporate training videos requires smart strategies to engage and educate your audience. By following these tips, you can deliver high-quality, results-driven content. Ready to enhance your training programs with engaging videos? Contact Disprz today to explore innovative learning solutions that drive real learning outcomes.