Preparing to Create an Effective Training Video

But did you know it’s actually a pretty straightforward process to create your own video material for the job?

In our previous blog post, we showed you the benefits of using video for training purposes, and today we’re going to shed a little more light on how you can create your own resources for your teams’ professional development.

The trick to creating engaging video content is to make sure that it is useful and relevant. If what you’re providing doesn’t speak to the needs of the viewer, you’re going to have a hard time keeping their attention for very long at all.

The best advice we can give you here is to try and stick with tightly focused areas – don’t branch off onto too many tangents at once. Keep the content in logical chunks, and you will make it far easier to keep up with as well giving your audience more chance to digest the information provided.

Before you set your heart on anything particular, it’s worth considering what your limiting factors are. For example, what resources do you have to hand? What’s your timeframe for putting these videos together? What are the expectations of yourself and the people you are making these videos for? These will ultimately all play a hand in your final decision, so think about that first before you make any other moves.

Assuming you’ve done all of that housekeeping and have found yourself confined by absolutely no limitations, then these are your options:

If you’ve got software that you need to demonstrate, or a computer system that people need a virtual tour of, then this is a great option for you, and is probably the most accessible option available to everyone.

Perhaps you’ve an entire programme of learning in mind? Or just really like a human touch to your videos? Either way, presenter-led videos are a great option for education and training, and work really well if you have a series of videos to deliver as a narrative of the progress made by your viewer can be built into their script prior to recording.

We’re a big fan of animation in any context, but when it comes to training videos, it is an especially useful content type. The beauty of animation is it can be used to illustrate high-concept ideas that otherwise may not be possible if you were instead using live video. They can also be bright and colourful, which instantly makes them more attractive to the eye, and you can reinforce important points visually through text and graphics.

Don’t feel like you have to nail yourself down to just one of these options however! There are plenty of training programmes within an organisation that may require multiple formats to really send the message home to viewers, so play around with a few different ideas until you settle on a plan of action that feels right for you.

Once you’ve got your topics and the formats that you’re going to use all in place, it’s worth taking the time to figure out precisely what you’re content is going to be and how exactly you’ll deliver it.

Start by writing your script. The best way we can describe this process to you is to treat it like a recipe – make sure you cover all the points you need to in as much detail as you need to so as not to leave your viewer lost when they’re finally watching the video. Once you have your script, it is then time to plan out the sequence of visuals that will make up your video in a storyboard. This is a great way of making sure that you leave no stone unturned anywhere, and that what you’re actually saying in your video follows the processes you’d want your employees to carry out themselves when doing the work.

Once you have all that in place, it’s just a case of recording and editing the videos so that they can then be rolled out to your team. Who’d have thought it would all be as simple as that?