On the surface, the question of how your organization provides video training content seems like a simple one – do you buy off the shelf, create training videos yourself, or find some balance between the two?
Put simply, your organization should likely be doing both – creating some video training content, but buying a lot more. Here’s the best way to mix your video content and why.
Which Video Training Topics to Produce Yourself
Your organization possesses unique subject–matter expertise on some topic areas that include products or services sold, organizational culture, or processes and systems. Off-the-shelf video training providers don’t have this “native subject-matter expertise” readily available for purchase.
When you want to introduce your culture to new hires, using a generic introductory video is never the best practice. Creating your own videos about your company culture is a powerful way to demonstrate your values to new members of your organization.
Because each organization is unique, there is no off-the-shelf content in the world that will precisely capture what makes your culture special – in the same way, there is no off-the-shelf content that will explain the brilliance of your product to the employees in charge of selling it.
In instances like this, where content is exclusive to the organization’s nuances, the best way to deliver it is through instructor led–training or custom video content. You should look to create your own video training when the subject–matter expertise is unique to your organization, e.g. product training, internal processes or systems, and aspects of new employee orientation.
The reason to create this type of video training content, or any content for that matter, is to ensure that employee learning is directly linked to the specific needs and cultural anchors of the organization.
Understanding the Costs and Benefits of Video Training
While each organization is unique, many of the same skill gaps can be found in a variety of organizations, and these create challenges that slow the progress of business. Whether your employees need help with basic communication skills, problem-solving and decision-making skills, or leadership development, video training consistently ranks as an effective method for bridging those gaps.
There are several things to consider when building a video-based employee training strategy:
- Employees have different learning preferences, so providing multiple methods for the same skillset will increase mastery across the organization.
- Training can be used to solve a myriad of business challenges, and the more content you have, the more challenges you can solve.
- Compliance laws are ever–changing, which means that keeping custom compliance content up to date would take significant time each year. Some anti-harassment laws are so comprehensive that courses can be longer than two hours! It’s not realistic to create your own content for these courses every year.
- A large library means that each course is written by and taught by subject matter experts. We know that L&D professionals are smart people, but outsourcing knowledge to experts is a great way to ensure that the content you provide is as strong and factual as possible.
Consider how complex and expensive the task of creating customized training videos really is – serious time commitment is required to research a topic, put together an effective script, film the content, and then edit it into a cohesive and effective video.
This time commitment costs your organization in salary, but there are other significant costs to consider as well.
Creating your own video training requires:
- Access to resources – studios, video editing capability, and personnel
- Skills – instructional design, script writing and editing, directing, producing, videography, lighting, etc.
- Time – the time to develop, produce, edit, and publish videos
The total cost involved is staggering, which means it’s in your best interest to minimize the amount of video training your organization creates itself. There are plenty of providers that can help you out in that arena.
Don’t get seduced by the fact that your organization might have a training department or in-house instructional design expertise. Use off-the-shelf content collections to augment the custom content your in-house resources should create.
It’s a much wiser allocation of your organization’s time and money.
The Best Approach to Curating and Creating Video Training Content
Comprehensive, off-the-shelf video training collections are perfect for developing foundational skills and knowledge, but they can’t substitute for well-made content that builds on your organization’s culture or explains your product.
Therefore, a healthy mixture of off-the-shelf content and custom, self-created content is the best approach to a video-based training strategy. To illustrate how this strategy might be implemented, let’s use a customer service rep at your organization.
Broadly speaking, customer service professionals might need mastery of some core skills, such as communications (verbal, phone, email, listening skills), problem-solving, emotional intelligence, and business acumen. High-quality, curated, off-the-shelf content is the best way to train these types of skills.
Training can also be used to build relationships in your organization, and help employees understand how to behave within your culture. You can use custom content to reinforce these behaviors, by demonstrating your values and mission, while also teaching product nuances that will help them solve customer challenges faster and more effectively.
Providing training on core skills and company-specific topics will create a more effective and well–rounded workplace.
SURPRISE BONUS OPTION: Customizable Off-the-Shelf Video Content!
We’ve talked about the time and costs that come with creating your own training videos, and while there are benefits to that option, creating thousands of videos and keeping them relevant would take an entire production team – something most program managers don’t have.
But what if you could customize off-the-shelf video training to make it even more relevant to your specific needs?
BizLibrary’s Content Customization Tool gives you a high level of control over the messages your learners are receiving, without having to create training videos from scratch!
With an easy–to–use interface, you can customize over 1,500 BizLibrary Productions video lessons to fit them to your branding and training intentions. You’ll be able to edit the lesson titles and descriptions, the interactions that help learners retain information, quiz questions, caption files, and support materials.
This means you get many of the benefits of custom, self-created content while having the cost-saving and curation benefits that come with a full library of off-the-shelf video training content.
Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, doesn’t it? We’d love to talk with you about how our online content library and customization tool can help you build a stronger training program – click here to request a demo and talk with one of our training experts!
