What Makes a Good Training Video?

What Makes a Good Training Video? Training videos are an excellent addition to your employee training program. Complementing your written materials with visual content can significantly improve what your employees get from your workshops. Video is great for capturing attention, improving information retention, and is a more flexible medium than text on a screen. Moreover, including video is helpful for visual learners, without being detrimental to people who prefer other methods. Needless to say, video content is fantastic for employee training.

But what makes a good training video? More importantly, how can you create your own brilliant training videos that improve your training workshops? In this article, we will be focusing on these questions, discussing some of the best tips that can help you make the best training videos possible. Let’s get started.

What is a training video?

As the name suggests, a training video is a form of video content created with the intention of teaching someone how to perform a skill or an action. While it’s often used in the context of employee training, these videos can be used for customer service, or training people for general tasks. Provided the video adequately teaches a skill or action, it can be considered a training video.

Given the purpose of a training video, namely that it aims to teach something, it can be split into two components. First and foremost, the video must teach well, able to put forward information in a way that’s easily digestible and detailed. The second component is the technical aspect, the production value that captures and keeps attention. Great training videos are able to seamlessly merge these components together.

What makes an informative training video?

The first component, and the one you should have at the forefront of your mind, is teaching. Your aim is to train your audience, not to entertain them. While having entertainment value can enhance your training videos, neglecting the teaching aspect will leave your content lopsided. As a result, your viewers will gain as little as they would from a painstakingly boring, poorly produced training video. To pack an educational punch, consider these main points:

• Center your videos around your audience – The best way to teach people is by tackling a problem from their perspective, using elements they would understand. Saturating your video with jargon and references alien to your viewers will create unnecessary boundaries to learning. Stick to language, cultural references, music, and so on that your viewers would know. They will click with your viewers immediately, giving something they can associate your content with.

To the point

• Link your content to a concrete aim – To make a good training video, you need to focus on a particular objective. This could be learning a specific action, how to deal with a specific problem, or how to meet a specific level of quality. Whatever your aim, make it the center of your video. A training video with a single main point is much more effective than one with an overabundance of information and objectives.
• Keep within the boundaries – When creating a video, of any type, it can be tempting to push the boundaries and throw in a tangent or two. While this might benefit other types of video, it is often quite detrimental to training videos. Adding too much tangential information can muddy the main point of your video. As such, it’s best to stick to one objective and only include relevant information.
• Keep it simple and concise – The best training videos keep their content quick to watch and easy to understand. If your viewers are left confused, and struggling to find the meaning in your video, then it isn’t terribly effective as a training video. Similarly, if your video is long and meandering, it can be a challenge to follow the point of it, and it won’t persuade many to give it another watch. Instead, you should plainly detail the point of your video, then follow a clear, easy-to-follow progression to the end.

What makes a well-produced training video?

Training videos aren’t only about good information being discussed; it needs to be delivered in a way that keeps the viewers’ attention and avoids any confusion. Neglecting the production quality of your training videos can obscure the main points, diminishing the overall effectiveness of your content. To make sure your videos are the best they can be, consider these tips:

• Accompany your video with other elements – To make a good training video, you shouldn’t focus solely on the footage. Adding other elements is a surefire way to increase the quality of your videos, bolstering their effectiveness as a result. These elements include text, static images, music, and effects.

Keep it moving

• Keep the video moving – The key to keeping your viewers’ attention is shaking things up. You shouldn’t allow your video to dwell too long on a particular shot or scene, and you should ensure something is always going on. Rather than hanging on to a static image of a building, show people moving around it, or moving inside. Similarly, moving from scene to scene swiftly keeps up momentum, and can encourage viewers to pay closer attention to avoid missing anything.

• Only use good quality footage – A good quality training video needs good quality footage. To capture this, you should ensure you get the lighting right and keep the shots in focus. Too dark or too light can obscure what’s happening, lessening the effectiveness of your videos. Additionally, you should steer clear of shaky cam. It’s used to give footage an amateur and unprofessional look, a tactic usually reserved for found footage films.
• Balance your audio – Getting your audio right is another key aspect to increasing the quality of your videos. You should take care to balance your audio, avoiding any one audio source overpowering another. Additionally, you should avoid having any background noise or static. While this can be somewhat removed using editing software, it’s best not to have it in the first place.

Wrapping up

Keeping these tips in mind will help you make great training videos. Better yet, they’re easy to implement. Consider how best your viewers would learn and tailor the experience to them. Getting the technical parts right might take some time, but once you have what works for you, it will be easy to replicate across your other videos. By merging great quality teaching with professional production, you’ll be making excellent training videos in no time.