I’ve been a duck for 10 years now and certainly a lot has changed. We’ve moved offices, added new ducks in the mix—even two ducklings of my own! It’s been exciting to see the work we do evolve from screencasts, to explainer videos, to countless other video production types. But something that really caught my attention over the last decade is the growth of training videos, both in value and also as a creative art form.
Training videos used to often have a bleak, stale “pop-in-this-VHS-in-the-break-room” vibe to them, but no more. They now present an opportunity to make lessons memorable, revisitable, and dare we say, entertaining. If you’re considering creating video content as a training tool to customers, employees, you name it, it’s never been a better time. Here’s some reasons why.
Perfect for a Distributed Workforce
Now, more than ever, your target audiences might be located in different locations all over the globe. E-Commerce fulfillment networks have let retailers of all sizes connect with customers anywhere. Workplaces are adding remote workers who are a great talent and culture fit. Students are taking advantage of the flexibility of remote learning.
It’s an exciting time, but knowledge still needs to be transferred.
For example, new hires still need onboarding, training and upskill lessons to be done. Paying for travel for in-person training can get expensive, and might not even be feasible for small businesses and start-ups. Producing video content is a perfect way to bring the lessons to where your audience is located. You can even produce localized content—literally speaking the language and tapping into the culture to make content as accessible with viewers as possible.
Facebook Internal Design Training Series
The Awesomeness of On Demand
Your audience is already busy balancing their personal and professional lives. From meetings filling up our calendars to cars filling up the pickup lanes at your child’s school, we are busy, busy, busy. You try writing new business proposals while your daughter runs a sidewalk lemonade stand and really wants you to try her new recipe. Video training content helps make important lessons accessible on-demand, at times that work best for your customers or staff. Oh, and they can be revisited as many times as possible, helping with knowledge retention.
Also, remember that your company’s staff—who are often in charge of knowledge transfer—are super busy too. Onboarding new employees, or hosting an in-person product demonstration, truly takes time. And if business is booming, those training responsibilities can honestly keep them from working on other projects and honing their own skill sets. Your employees can still bring value to the training process (more on that in a second) but producing video allows them to add more value than repeating monotonous meetings.
Liberty Latin America - "Speak Up" Hotline Animation
Opportunity to Elevate and Empower Your People
Your employees are already one of your best resources when it comes to educating their peers, or getting customers acclimated to a new product or service. Whether that’s hard skills, a friendly tutorial, technical knowledge, software, DEI initiatives or HR guidance, they have expertise to pair with their unique personality and warmth. An educational video production creates a way to utilize your team members, putting a friendly face to your organization and what it has to offer.
As I mentioned earlier, perhaps some of these staff members are already being utilized to host in-person training sessions. Not only can they serve as stars for the videos, but they can even help craft the content itself. Looping in your staff for video training efforts can also help with internal excitement and buy-in on new products or initiatives as well.
Also, we’re all human. If multiple people are leading multiple training sessions in multiple departments in multiple locations, important messages might be delivered differently every time. Video production allows you to streamline your message and make sure lessons stay consistent—no matter when or where they’re being watched.
Heggerty Client Training Video Series
Custom Videos for Custom Learning Goals
Something I often hear from prospective clients is that they’re feeling overwhelmed about what they want to accomplish with their training video and don’t know where to start. After all, there can be so much to cover across departments, topics, new products…all targeted at audiences with different knowledge levels, learning styles, languages and more. The nice thing about video is that it can accomplish different tasks using different formats, and a versatile video partner (hint, hint) can help you with that. You can use demo video productions to demonstrate software and processes, or have staff members host videos about company culture or showcase hands-on training. You can even use animation to bring to life concepts in a memorable visual way, or show processes that might be hard to demonstrate with live action video (like a complex dental procedure using 3D modeling and motion of the human mouth).
At Demo Duck, we’ll also create a custom engagement with your organization that considers your unique needs, budgets and timing. Oftentimes for multi-video partnerships (which training videos often are) we “batch” deliverables to help with pricing and production.
Grubhub Customer Tutorial Video
Let's Roll
There’s never been a better time to utilize video as part of a training or educational content initiative. From remote workplaces to remote learning, on-demand training content is perfect for the ever-distributed world we live in. Interested in learning more about training video production for your organization? Let’s get in touch! You might say I’m a little bit of an expert on it…