Four Ways to Use Video to Improve Training Programs

Are you using video in your employee training and development programs? Many organizations make use of some kind of video presentation during in-person training sessions. For blended learning with digital and eLearning elements, your team may also make use of video to communicate. These are all fairly standard training methods. In fact, some of the most common uses of video in training include:

• Presentation videos shared from a central or corporate office, used to convey company culture and standard procedures
• Video conferencing used during live training sessions held for remote employees in hybrid workplaces with a blend of on and off-site work
• Shorter, pre-recorded videos used as part of digital learning for a variety of development purposes

Those are the general categories of video use for training. And they are the most common for a reason – use of video in this way can be incredibly effective. As a method for training, video is useful to capture employees’ attention, provide additional resources for in-person learning facilitators, and as a mode to break up the monotony of a day spent reviewing manuals.

However, there are four elements you can use to enhance your video offering to further improve your training. By working in the four areas outlined below, you will further engage your employees and provide personalization to customize training by role.

Video Training Enhancements to Improve Employee Training and Development

1. Use of interviews. Ideally, your videos should include pre-recorded messages from leadership when possible. These messages are valuable sources of coaching, mentorship, team building, and company culture. Some ways to do this include using the time to have leadership use the time to share messaging around the company mission and values. They might also share stories about personal learning experiences.
2. Dramatizations and re-creations. A great way to encourage participation and critical thinking is to ask your learners, “what would you do in this situation?” Video dramatizations of real-world experiences likely to be encountered on the job will provide great opportunities for reflection, discussion, and conversations. These scenarios provide teaching, team building, and confidence-building practice. They are valuable in training for all types of industries, including (but not limited to) customer service scenarios, safety compliance processes in manufacturing, medical and emergency first responder training.
3. Demonstrations and ‘How-To’ instructions. Videos that show processes in short step-by-step sequences are incredibly valuable for your learners because they can watch, and then re-watch, to pick up the skills needed. Instead of trying to follow a list of written steps or hearing it once in-person before being left to try a process on their own, your learners will have a resource – especially if the video is enhanced with stop and start navigational tools – that they can review as they practice.
4. Documentary-style storytelling. Nothing engages a learning audience like putting them into real-world, experience-based learning. When you use video to tell a story about something that has happened to employees on the job, you encourage your learners to identify with their role, their team, and the organization. As they get drawn into the story, learners make an emotional connection and start to understand how their actions on the job could have an impact in the real-world.

Use these four strategies to enhance your video training, and you will certainly improve the quality of your learning content. By doing so, you’ll improve the success rate of your training, as your learners will be more likely to remember what they learned, more motivated to perform, more confident, and better prepared to make good decisions.