Learning
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June 25, 2024

How to Create Effective Training Videos (+ Use Cases and Examples)

Discover how to create training videos that not only educate but also captivate your audience.
Neel Balar
Neel Balar
Co-founder & CBO
How to Create Effective Training Videos (+ Use Cases and Examples)

Businesses and enterprises usually train employees through presentations, live sessions, and training material, which typically include videos.

However, more often than not, these educational content pieces are lengthier than necessary, uninteresting, and fail to effectively guide the employees. This wastes the time and energy of everyone involved and hinders the learning process by confusing the trainees.

What ends up happening is team members having to figure things out on the fly or requesting a colleague to help them. This further exacerbates the problem, opening the door to avoidable mistakes and disrupting the normal flow of work.

You have likely faced this challenge yourself.

In this article, we will help you solve this problem. 

By the end of this article, you will be able to create training videos (for any use case) within minutes. And most importantly, those videos will get watched and empower your team to do their best work.

Why You Need Training Videos

As just mentioned, businesses and enterprises employ various methods to train their teams. These include live sessions, webinars, workshops, presentations, and procedure documentation.

If you are a somewhat established company, you probably already have one or more types of educational and instructional material listed above.

So, why invest in training videos?

Well, there are five compelling ‘whys’ that we have summarized below (for quick readers):

1. Efficient Training Process

Videos can be watched concurrently by as many employees as needed, at their convenience. New joiners can look forward to a smoother onboarding experience where they only go through the educational content they need whenever they need it.

This is not possible with live sessions, webinars, and workshops. Even though textual training material facilitates it, the pace will be slower. Either way, your team members will take longer to get ready to take up their responsibilities at work or do so effectively.

Training videos, being shorter with a narrower focus, are more efficient in getting your team members up to speed. They can quickly tell them about concepts, procedures, and workflows, allowing them to hit the ground running.

2. Improved Engagement and Retention

We all have attended educational seminars or sessions that were longer than necessary. 

The instructors, regardless of their expertise and experience, often fail to stop the attendants from checking their watches every few minutes.

Moreover, the lack of interactivity adds to the boredom. This can negatively affect knowledge retention, and ultimately learner action.

Training videos solve this by making the content about the learner and directly talking about the steps they need to take to reach the desired outcome. This, coupled with the visual aid, naturally enhances engagement leading to higher knowledge retention.

3. Cost-effectiveness

Suppose you want to hire an external trainer for one of your teams. If you create training videos, instead of conducting live sessions, your instructional program will cost much less. 

This is also true if you train your team internally. 

Hopping on a video call each time a new teammate has a doubt can be tedious. Apart from keeping your company-wide training inconsistent it also disrupts the normal flow of work.

4. Easily Scalable and Shareable

Compared to other kinds of instructional methods, training videos are much more easily accessible for team members. Businesses and enterprises can host them on their internal knowledge base, enabling their employees to learn at their own pace.

This also opens the door to different forms of training videos. For instance, you can create dedicated courses for various departments within your organization. New employees can ask further questions or provide feedback directly on the internal training platform, making the whole workflow streamlined.

5. Supports Remote Learning

Even if you are working from an office, you are working with someone located elsewhere. Whether it is a partner company or the field team, collaborating with stakeholders outside your city is becoming increasingly common.

Training videos simplify the process of sharing information, procedures, guidelines, and instructions. Moreover, it standardizes the learning process which helps measure the efficacy of the content. This can enable teams to update the training videos as needed on time.

How to Make Training Videos Effective

Here are five actionable tips you can incorporate into your video creation production workflow immediately to produce quality instructional content:

Keep in mind that while employing them in practice, every organization is different. This means the needs and preferences of your audience are one of a kind. As a result, the way you apply the above tips varies greatly.

For instance, what is deemed as ‘professional’ depends on the industry, the goals of the training program, and the preferences of the audience. If you consider software training in the SaaS or IT industry, a screen-recorded video with a concise and crisp voiceover narration is ‘professional’.

Moreover, the definition of ‘professional’ can also describe the quality of the video. A training video with background noise can distract the learner from the central message, which can earn it the label ‘unprofessional’. This often reduces the perceived credibility of the content and can decrease knowledge retention and recall.

The point is, that putting all the above five tips into practice requires you to dive deeper into their components. This will enable you to tangibly define variables like ‘professionalism’ and ‘actionability’ and create better training videos.

Let’s jump right in.

1. Keep the Content Actionable

Whenever someone watches a training video, they want to learn how to do something. This should reflect in all aspects of your content: from titles to the script itself.

The title should tell the viewer what it will help them achieve. Within the how-to video, demonstrate the steps and briefly tell them the importance of each of them. Explaining the importance of the action is essential for knowledge recall which is key for shaping trainee behavior and actions.

You can follow this pattern for almost any kind of training video, whether it is for corporate training or customer success.

2. Only Provide the Necessary Information

In other words, stay true to the title and respect your audience’s prerequisite knowledge. 

For instance, if you are creating a training video that explains to a new sales rep how to create a contact in a CRM, just stick to that. Refrain from talking about anything else, even though they might be relevant to the topic. 

Making the video longer by inserting topics like the importance of the CRM or how to access contact details can distract your team members. They might find themselves fast-forwarding through the content to find the parts that are related to the title and end up missing key points. 

This, ironically, defeats the purpose of creating training videos.

The broader point is if you can explain a process or a workflow in two minutes, do that. Don’t hesitate to cut out irrelevant portions of the content right from the outlining and scripting phase to streamline the overall process.

3. Ensure Professional Quality

A professional quality training video has the perfect visuals, the right amount of special effects, and crisp audio.

The visuals should aid the trainee in seeing and understanding the steps explained by the narrator. The special effects, such as zoom effects and transitions enhance learning by drawing the attention of the audience to specific parts. Crisp audio walks the learner through the steps and explains the nuances of the process.

After the raw footage is recorded, teams need to polish it before releasing the employee training videos.

However, editing videos is not a small task. Removing background noise, cutting out irrelevant portions (unrelated content, loading screens, retakes, etc.,), adding zoom-in effects, and inserting intro and outro can be tedious.

Furthermore, hiring a new team member just to polish training videos may become uneconomical for smaller teams or even businesses. This is because employee training videos need to be recreated once a few months, or even more.

Clueso does all that for you in minutes!

Record a screencast video where you explain a particular feature, process, workflow, or anything, and upload it to Clueso. The platform will polish your content by giving AI voiceover,  adding zoom effects, inserting an aesthetic background, and attaching a branded intro and outro.

4. Provide Further Assistance as Needed

As we mentioned at the beginning of the article, training videos are only a part of the employee education process. Regardless of how comprehensive, straightforward, and actionable your training courses are, your team members may still have questions.

Hence, develop a workflow that enables you to promptly answer their questions and refine the instructional content of your organization with time. Moreover, if a particular question is too common, consider creating a quick video tutorial on that as well.

Furthermore, reach out to your team members regularly to inquire about their pain points and encourage peer-to-peer learning.

5. Have a Dedicated Knowledge Base

A dedicated knowledge base gives your employees access to all the training videos on a single platform. This will make it easier for them to find answers to their questions or resolve doubts instantly, as they won’t have to spend time looking for the right instructional content.

Furthermore, you can complement the employee training video with a step-by-step guide article. This can be helpful for team members who are looking for a specific thing or step in a training video. Moreover, text content is more scannable, leading to higher efficiency.

Clueso, apart from polishing your videos in minutes, can write such how-to articles with perfectly cut GIFs instantly.

Use Cases and Examples

Let’s look at five areas where training videos are effective, and how Clueso facilitates the process of creating them.

Customer Education

Customer education involves creating content that helps customers understand how to use a product effectively. This type of training video can reduce customer support inquiries and increase user satisfaction.

These resources enable customers to solve issues independently, boosting product adoption and satisfaction.

Employee Training

Employee training videos are essential for onboarding new hires and ensuring continuous development. These training videos can cover various topics, such as company policies, software usage, and role-specific skills. 

This is especially useful for staff training videos and leadership training videos that require regular updates.

Product Marketing

These types of training videos are designed to highlight the features and benefits of a product, aiming to attract potential customers. They can demonstrate the product's functionality, showcase customer testimonials, and explain unique selling points.

As a result, they can drive sales and increase awareness.

Developer Onboarding

Developer onboarding videos are crucial for quickly integrating new developers into a team's workflow. These videos can cover the development environment setup, coding standards, and project-specific guidelines. 

Sales Enablement

Sales enablement videos provide teams with the knowledge and tools they need to sell more effectively. These videos can include product overviews, competitive analysis, and sales strategies.

These video tutorials help sales teams stay informed about the latest product updates and market trends, ensuring they can effectively address customer needs and close more deals.

Wrapping Up

Effective training videos are vital for improving employee skills, enhancing customer understanding, and boosting sales. High-quality videos ensure engagement and retention, making them an essential tool for any organization. 

Whether you need customer service training videos, corporate training videos, or sales training videos, producing engaging content is as crucial as it is time-consuming.

Clueso offers a comprehensive solution for creating impressive training videos efficiently. The platform can make professional-quality videos from raw footage in minutes. This allows teams to save hours or days in polishing content.

Ready to elevate your training? Book a demo now to see how Clueso can transform your training video production.

FAQs

How to create good training videos?

Create training videos that cater to your audience’s needs. The content should be short and to the point. Additionally, polish your videos with zoom effects, remove background noise, etc., to enhance learning.

How do you script a training video?

Outline key points, write a detailed script with clear instructions, and include visual cues. Use a storyboarding tool like Canva or Boords. Ensure the script is concise and engaging, using simple language and a logical flow.

What is the goal of a training video?

A training video efficiently educates the audience and drives their action. They provide actionable instructions that help the trainees complete specific tasks with certain tools and workflows.

Why is video training better?

Training videos educate the audience with the help of audio and visual cues. This can make complex processes easily understandable while keeping the learning process interesting. As a result, trainees can learn quickly and effectively.

How long should the training videos be?

Ideally, training videos should be 2-3 minutes long as they should talk about one action item at a time. For complex topics, you can aim up to 6 minutes. In extreme cases, you can extend them to 15 minutes. Anything more can tire out the audience.

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