Why do employees dislike corporate training videos? We’ve all seen great videos that keep us engaged thanks to compelling visuals and relevance, indicating that corporate training videos may not be engaging or helpful enough. As it turns out, employees actually want more training. One study of more than 4,000 workers found that almost three quarters feel restricted from fulfilling their full potential due to a lack of professional development. Couple that with our psychological preference for moving pictures and graphics when consuming content, and the need for effective corporate training videos becomes evident. Effective, of course, is the key phrase in that last sentence. How can you make sure that the content you produce to educate your employees is actually beneficial and successful?

Start by following these three steps to learn how to make an impactful corporate training video.

1. Make a Strategic Plan

Even though training videos can vary widely due to your industry and audience, they tend to follow a number of universal best practices. Incorporate these characteristics, and the effectiveness of your content will skyrocket. 

1. Know Your Objectives: When creating a corporate training video, it is important to figure out what you want to accomplish. Set a central goal that your audience should understand by the time they are finished watching.
2. Establish a Clear Message Thread: After your goal is set, establish a narrative based on that central objective. The video should flow as a cohesive unit with the central objective highlighted throughout the presentation.
3. Understand the Medium. Where will your employees watch the video? Will they engage with the video online or as part of an in-person training session? Are they likely to watch the video on their work computer, or on a mobile device? Each answer to these questions should guide exactly how your training video is set up to ensure maximum engagement.
4. Keep Your Videos Short. The human attention span continues to get shorter; consequently, long videos will lose your audience’s attention. Studies have shown that engagement begins to drop significantly after two minutes. While the exact length should depend on your goal and audience, keeping it short is vital to continued engagement.
5. Ensure a Conversational Tone. Chances are your employees are not ready to listen to a monotone monologue about a generic training topic. Instead, keep your audio as conversational as possible within the context. You can even experiment with multiple narrators to increase the perception of collaboration and maintain audience curiosity.
6. Focus on Effective Visuals. Don’t think of your training videos as moving, digital PowerPoint presentations. Instead, look to maximize the capabilities of the medium. Use animated graphics and supporting visuals to increase variability.
7. Ensure High Video and Audio Quality. Ultimately, the technical quality of your video will make a significant difference in its success. The audio should be clear, and the volume should be consistent. Meanwhile, the video resolution matters just as much in making sure that your intended training message gets across clearly.

2. Understand Your Production Options

Given the above best practices, one thing is clear: to create an effective corporate training video, you cannot simply use unedited footage. An effective corporate training video requires careful planning, shooting, and editing in order to ensure that your audience is engaged and comes away with new knowledge and skills for their job. To get to that point, you have a number of options in order to secure successful corporate training video production. Here are the three most common ways organizations produce videos: 

1. In-house professional production If your organization has an internal videography professional or department, this could be your most natural fit. Professional production that is completed entirely in-house will require significant shooting and editing expertise. But if that expertise is available, it is likely to result in a high-quality corporate training video.
2. Hiring external videography help When the professional expertise is not available in-house, it might make sense to outsource the work, especially if your training videos are complex. Using animations and other visuals that need to be completed in post-production will require a professional. Outsourcing your training video production can be expensive, but will ensure quality.
3. Direct production using a personal recording device Finally, you might be able to use your own software and technology to record a corporate training video. This option makes the most sense either for small businesses who might not have the resources for external production, or for simple videos that only require capturing software to get the message across. However, a lack of quality could potentially compromise the success of this option.

3. Ensure SCORM Compliance

Finally, you have to make sure that any corporate training video you produce works with the software you use to distribute to employees. In most cases, that will be your Learning Management System software, which means that your videos have to be SCORM-compliant. To convert your content into SCORM compliant material, check out our eLearning tool that does just that - Scormify! SCORM, short for Sharable Content Object Reference Model, is a set of standards that guides e-learning content. It is part of the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative, a US government program designed to help organizations improve their training opportunities and methodologies.

Start Making Stellar Corporate Training Videos Today!

Ultimately, the best corporate training videos allow you to convey the core piece of information you need to get across in an engaging, visual way. They offer the basis for a better way to train your employees, improving their skills in a way they actually enjoy. And once you have built your videos, why not find an LMS that can help you distribute them? Knowledge Anywhere provides the perfect solution for incorporating videos into your corporate training strategy, enabling your workers to become better employees through better professional development. 

Schedule a Demo to learn more about our LMS.